<story><title>Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products</title><url>https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>driverdan</author><text>I like the concept but since it&amp;#x27;s open to the public it will suffer from ignorance.&lt;p&gt;For example, take the Salomon Quest boots that are listed. I own a pair of them. While they&amp;#x27;re good boots for the price they do not deserve an A- score. They are not BIFL. The soles are glued making them not resoleable. The sole on one of mine has started coming unglued too.&lt;p&gt;The same can be said for the Victorinox Fibrox knife that has an A+ rating. I also have one of those. It&amp;#x27;s a great knife for its low price but it does not deserve an A+ since it isn&amp;#x27;t full tang and is very thin and easy to damage.&lt;p&gt;This is a common issue with &amp;quot;BIFL&amp;quot; discussions. People overrate something because they don&amp;#x27;t understand that parts will wear out from use, something isn&amp;#x27;t repairable, or they don&amp;#x27;t have experience with a higher quality item.&lt;p&gt;Do you have any thoughts for dealing with this issue?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>floatrock</author><text>Op can&amp;#x27;t avoid this problem if following the reviews-masquerading-as-affiliate-marketing pattern.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s needed is to turn it all upside down: rather than reviewing new products, review &lt;i&gt;broken&lt;/i&gt; products.&lt;p&gt;Make a site about how things break -- review broken and worn-out products to teach how to identify cheap products (where are the stress points, what manufacturing techniques exist to alleviate those). Then compare those with used products well past their warranty period that &lt;i&gt;haven&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; broken, and look at why they haven&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Repairability also comes to mind. Everything breaks eventually -- can&amp;#x27;t cheat entropy -- but when it does, can you easily repair it? Right-to-repair movement would get in on the action.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products</title><url>https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>driverdan</author><text>I like the concept but since it&amp;#x27;s open to the public it will suffer from ignorance.&lt;p&gt;For example, take the Salomon Quest boots that are listed. I own a pair of them. While they&amp;#x27;re good boots for the price they do not deserve an A- score. They are not BIFL. The soles are glued making them not resoleable. The sole on one of mine has started coming unglued too.&lt;p&gt;The same can be said for the Victorinox Fibrox knife that has an A+ rating. I also have one of those. It&amp;#x27;s a great knife for its low price but it does not deserve an A+ since it isn&amp;#x27;t full tang and is very thin and easy to damage.&lt;p&gt;This is a common issue with &amp;quot;BIFL&amp;quot; discussions. People overrate something because they don&amp;#x27;t understand that parts will wear out from use, something isn&amp;#x27;t repairable, or they don&amp;#x27;t have experience with a higher quality item.&lt;p&gt;Do you have any thoughts for dealing with this issue?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SoSoRoCoCo</author><text>Funny you call out the Fibrox. I don&amp;#x27;t think full-tang is a prerequisite for BIFL. Why? Because I have my grandmother&amp;#x27;s kitchen knife from Ireland from the 1910&amp;#x27;s and it isn&amp;#x27;t full tang and is still a workhorse despite having the handle replaced sometime in the 70&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;So what is a rating system to do when people have very different ideas on BIFL?&lt;p&gt;For this existential dilemma, it would be helpful if the top DIMENSIONS of quality were explored. In this case with a knife: tang, bolster, handle material, riveting, metal type, hardness, grind angle, etc are all variables that have either a PREFERENCE scale or a DURABILITY scale. I don&amp;#x27;t think a simple NoSQL-comment-style database is sufficient to define what elements need to be considered to rank a product as high quality vs. low quality.&lt;p&gt;You must know about AvE&amp;#x27;s YouTube channel, yes? He&amp;#x27;s an engineer who deeply understands metallurgy and machining and industrial design, so he can explore these vectors of quality for power tools:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;channel&amp;#x2F;UChWv6Pn_zP0rI6lgGt3MyfA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;channel&amp;#x2F;UChWv6Pn_zP0rI6lgGt3MyfA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;This kind of professional analysis is needed FIRST, to determine what the key metrics are. Then the rating system should grade based on this, rather than 5-stars.&lt;p&gt;Five star reviews are dead. Long live multiple variables!</text></comment>