Amazon provides the affiliate revenue, so Amazon products are what gets linked. I'm not opposed to the business model, I use affiliate links to monetize my site, too. But it does seem silly to shy away from admitting that this is trying to make some money from the links.
I don't think they are shying away from it - it's pretty clear in the about page. Seems like a totally reasonable way to get some revenue for the site.
I'd be curious to see the success of this with Amazon Affiliates, since it is nearly a direct copy of a site I made 2 months ago (that Amazon shut down due to lack of original content). The site is https://fastandes.com (currently at limited functionality).
> that Amazon shut down due to lack of original content.
Not clear from your wording so asking.
Did you Amazon shut down your website, or did they close your affiliate account? What do you mean by 'lack of original content' ? Was the site an almost replica copy of the amazon page product details? or was it a copy of some other affiliate site?
Their wording is "lack of original content." Affiliates is geared towards bloggers who write posts (such as reviews) about linked products. Mine was nowhere close to that. Some sites skate by with alternatives, but I can see how I need to revise in order to comply with the program.
Edit: for example, http://hackernewsbooks.com/ is a site that has been successful with Affiliates. Amazon tends to be a bit moody with that program.
Thanks. You are right. The only difference I see between your site and the hackernewsbooks.com site is that the latter also links to a source, like the comment on HN thread that the book reference was scraped from...
That was on my to-do list for future features. I shipped it very early, and Amazon demonetized me pretty soon after that, so lots of things I wanted to do became useless.
I'd looked into it as an expansion in the future. Currently my data set was built strictly on Amazon links, so expansion would mean a rebuild/reindex of all reddit posts.
The skimlinks JS code automatically rewrites any links within their affiliate system, including amazon. I only suggested it because you'd only need to copy/paste a few lines of code to rewrite everything.
This is not nearly a direct copy of your product. This one features a well designed UX that immediately engages and encourages further exploration. Yours made me bounce in 2 seconds.
A product can still be copied in functionality without being copied in design. The general premise (product recommendations from Reddit) is the same. I also agree my UX is bad. I have been meaning to pivot with all the data I already have but haven't gotten there yet.
Not complaining, competition is good. Just giving warning and bringing up discussion.
I think I've mostly decided that with ThingsOnReddit's new found success, and my loss of interest in my project, I may throw in the towel on it. We'll see if I still feel the same in a few weeks to revamp it in a different manner.
I don't fully understand the psychology behind this. Would someone be more likely to buy an item just because is it mentioned in a forum. There are similar sites that mine HN for the books that are mentioned here. Can some ELI5 to me?
It also links to the posts, so this seems like it be nice for hobby related subreddits to see what the usuals recommend. Think calligraphy or cooking. Or even scholarly subreddit a like math and see some interesting books that people have brought up.
Reddit has narrow, highly specialized communities where product mentions, while not necessarily recommendations, are very useful for researching, shopping, and understanding a niche consumer market.
This would be interesting if it wasn't just live. Eg, if I could select a time period to show the most popular stuff from. Also a better way of discovering subs to browse, rather than having to know exactly what you're looking for. Perhaps an r/all equiv, but products ?
Those just sound like feature requests to me, rather than criticisms. I think the idea and execution are clean and effective. Not that you're wrong. Those are good ideas.
Great job! If you put a Massdrop-style portal here I think it could become an amazing way to find crowdsourced products and displace e.g. Google Shopping.
So here’s what you should do next:
1. Crawl every subreddit that can be mapped to a hobby and then crawl all product recommendations.
2. Use NLP and sentiment analysis to map recommendations to coherent products.
3. Rank products according to the sentiment across the subreddit and aggregate the feedback into a few key pros/cons.
4. Sort by ranking and return the products to the user.
If you nail this I would use it for everything. I constantly search reddit for product recommendations on places like /r/coffee. You can capture entire communities like /r/mechanicalkeyboards to appeal to those who trust real user reviews online instead of places like Amazon.
Here’s an example flow for this functionality: you arrive on the site and the interface prompts you to select interests. You do so and you’re then presented with products matched to that interest derived from crawling the relevant subreddit(s). You can see the most commonly expressed pros and cons for each product (for less functional products like watches: what users most commonly liked and most commonly disliked).
Based on my own personal experiences shopping like this I am convinced there is a startup here for the right execution. There are a huge number of people who use social media like reddit, Twitter, etc to do their shopping and this could become their shopping homepage.
Thanks! I'm looking forward to iterating. The suggestions you lay out are great. I'll hopefully be adding features / changes as time goes on. This was an initial MVP in order to get feedback quickly, and it worked! Appreciate the thoughtful response.
While the commenter above me has much more insight, I second.
This is really well done! I personally hadn't thought of this. I collect resources from HN all of the time and pile them up in an Instapaper account, but I organize haphazardly and poorly.
That said I'd add that if you can offer for registered users or anybody a regular caching or hard-copy option. To double up on that, offer pipelining of a cached data dump to a file on Google drive or Dropbox or any other redundancy endpoint. You could grow from there in usability. Or somebody could write a middleman service for that... fun's fun.
Thanks, this project uses Ruby on Rails 5 with Webpacker (React). I've found making websites quickly with Rails is very effective. The data can be found on Google BigQuery and I then used Scrapy to scrape Amazon pages for further product info. It's deployed to a DigitalOcean node and connects to an Amazon RDS Postgres instance.
The conception of the idea was Tuesday. The next thing I knew it was Saturday, and I felt ready enough to post.
Great idea and execution. You're probably building a nice passive income product.
The user experience on mobile is a bit clumsy. I would recommend putting some work into that. For example it's difficult to switch to a subreddit beyond the default five displayed at the top (without an overflow: property).
The first link I clicked on was from a comment where the author was giving an example of what _not_ to buy because it's wildly overpriced for what it does. Hopefully that's not representative.
great idea, while we were doing toptalkedbooks.com, my partner and I were thinking about doing the exact same thing for our next project. Nice UI, good execution, good luck!
just one friendly note: our site was rejected by amazon a couple time,(due to content issue), I hope your path is smoother.
Something to fix - sub names are case-insensitive. Also, reddit automatically redirects to the correctly capitalized version, so it's easy to learn what it is.
That is, /r/Books and /r/books should be treated as synonims.
Reddit Search can do a similar trick: "subreddit:gadgets site:amazon.com", sorted by "top"[1]
It finds only posts, not comments. That's a good thing. Comment karma accounts for a comment's entire content. What if the comment gets upvotes for something other than an Amazon link inside it? Post karma is a bit better in this respect.
Reddit Search supports any domain. So you can search any shop. Like vat19.com and etsy.com.
> Comment karma accounts for a comment's entire content. What if the comment gets upvotes for something other than an Amazon link inside it?
Case in point: I was just looking at /r/malefashionadvice on the submitted site and found a lot of comments that were upvoted for mocking other users with joke products.
70 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadhttps://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Bitcoin?order_by=score
Not clear from your wording so asking.
Did you Amazon shut down your website, or did they close your affiliate account? What do you mean by 'lack of original content' ? Was the site an almost replica copy of the amazon page product details? or was it a copy of some other affiliate site?
Thank you!
Edit: for example, http://hackernewsbooks.com/ is a site that has been successful with Affiliates. Amazon tends to be a bit moody with that program.
I'm using skimlinks with my project and it seems to work pretty well, though it does take a while to get paid.
Not complaining, competition is good. Just giving warning and bringing up discussion.
so don't give up, just keep trying
I can't help but laugh at London's best, though: https://i.imgur.com/HWgujDq.png
Great job! If you put a Massdrop-style portal here I think it could become an amazing way to find crowdsourced products and displace e.g. Google Shopping.
So here’s what you should do next:
1. Crawl every subreddit that can be mapped to a hobby and then crawl all product recommendations.
2. Use NLP and sentiment analysis to map recommendations to coherent products.
3. Rank products according to the sentiment across the subreddit and aggregate the feedback into a few key pros/cons.
4. Sort by ranking and return the products to the user.
If you nail this I would use it for everything. I constantly search reddit for product recommendations on places like /r/coffee. You can capture entire communities like /r/mechanicalkeyboards to appeal to those who trust real user reviews online instead of places like Amazon.
Here’s an example flow for this functionality: you arrive on the site and the interface prompts you to select interests. You do so and you’re then presented with products matched to that interest derived from crawling the relevant subreddit(s). You can see the most commonly expressed pros and cons for each product (for less functional products like watches: what users most commonly liked and most commonly disliked).
Based on my own personal experiences shopping like this I am convinced there is a startup here for the right execution. There are a huge number of people who use social media like reddit, Twitter, etc to do their shopping and this could become their shopping homepage.
This is really well done! I personally hadn't thought of this. I collect resources from HN all of the time and pile them up in an Instapaper account, but I organize haphazardly and poorly.
That said I'd add that if you can offer for registered users or anybody a regular caching or hard-copy option. To double up on that, offer pipelining of a cached data dump to a file on Google drive or Dropbox or any other redundancy endpoint. You could grow from there in usability. Or somebody could write a middleman service for that... fun's fun.
Great work, anyway.
What's your tech stack?
How long did it take you to build this,starting from the idea to build and launch i.e. deploying code to thingsonreddit.com ?
The conception of the idea was Tuesday. The next thing I knew it was Saturday, and I felt ready enough to post.
> The conception of the idea was Tuesday. The next thing I knew it was Saturday.
That's amazing! You turned your idea into an MVP in 5 days. Very impressive.
The user experience on mobile is a bit clumsy. I would recommend putting some work into that. For example it's difficult to switch to a subreddit beyond the default five displayed at the top (without an overflow: property).
[1] https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Cooking?page=1&order_by=...
books- https://takcek.com
laptops- http://www.laptophits.com
(Not affiliated, just where I took some pointers from)
just one friendly note: our site was rejected by amazon a couple time,(due to content issue), I hope your path is smoother.
Yup, pretty much what I expected.
That is, /r/Books and /r/books should be treated as synonims.
It finds only posts, not comments. That's a good thing. Comment karma accounts for a comment's entire content. What if the comment gets upvotes for something other than an Amazon link inside it? Post karma is a bit better in this respect.
Reddit Search supports any domain. So you can search any shop. Like vat19.com and etsy.com.
Reddit allows browsing by domain. Like https://www.reddit.com/domain/amazon.com/top/
Secondly, some subreddits are specifically devoted to product recommendations:
* https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/IdBuyThat/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated/
And Reddit has a JSON output: https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.json?sort=top&...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Agadgets+site%3Aa...
I did not know that. Very cool. I tried this for AmazonTopRated => https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated.json?sort=top&t=all and got a forbidden / 403 error. Turns out that subreddit is "Private" / Invite-only.
However, google cache still has links. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.red...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.rss?sort=top&t...
AmazonTopRated is invite-only. Hence, no 403.
Case in point: I was just looking at /r/malefashionadvice on the submitted site and found a lot of comments that were upvoted for mocking other users with joke products.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/search
Btw, how do you get the main product image url to display on your site? Is there an api for that?