Ask HN: Why isn't there a Rotten Tomatoes for consumer electronics?

consumer reports?

RTINGS comes to mind

Well, consumer reports is still kicking. I don't think an aggregate review service does much good though.

Reviews for physical items are super inaccurate. The average consumer doesn't have the money to buy 10 laptops and compare them, so they buy one and hold a biased opinion about it. In 5 years when shitty battery and defective hinge become apparent, the laptop is already off the market and the user isn't interested in reviewing it.

Besides, a ton of reviews are fake these days. You just can't trust them anymore. And for many products, the manufacturer cheapens them oven time without telling the public. So a review from 2 years ago may not reflect the quality of today.

It's easy to review entities that all exist in a single database.

Consumer electronics products are far harder to find categorized in a single place.

You also have to contend with the fact that movies are essentially immutable - if you watch the same edition as someone else you are seeing an identical product. Consumer products might be damaged, might be counterfeit, or might be incorrectly classified. All of these makes it really hard to build a single source of truth for reviews.

The bigger issue though, IMO, is the duration of the experience. A movie lasts for 1-3 hours. That's the extent of the experience, and thus all reviews are fairly constrained. Consumer electronics can last for decades, so it's very hard to know when a review should be left, how long a person needs with a product to feel ready to leave a review, whether it should be a "long term" review, etc.

Unlike video games and movies, there's just not much overlap to aggregate for any given consumer product because there are just so many devices in every category.

The best case scenario seems like it would be PC gaming gear, for example, since there's so much coverage. But consider "best gaming mouse": the first handful of google links all cover different mice. I'm not sure what that UI would look like if you tried aggregating this. And I think your aggregator would feel like a shallow passthrough rather than anything independently useful like those low-effort made-for-adsense spam sites.

If you're fishing for ideas, I think first-party curation is far more useful and in line with what people want. Consider how https://www.logicalincrements.com/ works for PC parts, something I use every time I want to buy something PC related.

I don't want to compare a bunch of options. I want someone to filter down the selection for me.

be the change you want to see

The Wirecutter served this purpose for me for a long time. But I also check the Amazon reviews.

With any kind of purchase, I do the same thing as I do with news - I survey all of the sources and look for the outliers and also the common threads. Then I form my own opinion.

Because you can't release the same movie under a different title at each theater to avoid comparison shopping. This is exactly what happens with consumer electronics and mattresses.

in the uk there is a organisation called "which" (which.co.uk) who run a battery of tests on all sorts of things from phones, cars, insurance, ovens and chairs. They then give ratings.

You haave to pay a subscription, but that in theory keeps them on the straight an narrow, and at least avoids them being a advertising system for amazon or some other large conglomerate

Because there's more money interested in subverting or eliminating such efforts than there is in seeing them run well.

Ideology won't even save you there: it doesn't matter if you want to run such a site with editorial integrity and all the trimmings. The folks who want you silenced outnumber you and have more resources than you do.

Rotten Tomatoes worked because there was a major regionalized media industry (newspapers, magazines, and TV stations) that sponsored film critics, which created a rather large pool of dedicated expert film reviewers, a significant fraction of whom were sort of inherently credible.

Are there enough dedicated consumer electronic reviewers to bootstrap the same kind of thing in that space?

And of course, another problem you have is that with the collapse of the local news industry, Rotten Tomatoes has lost enormous amounts of credibility.

The variety of products is enormous, and is deliberately made complicated by the vendors - is SHP65CM5N different from SHP78CM5N? Do reviews of one apply to another? When a new model code pops up every year - does it invalidate the old reviews? If you watch "Oppenheimer", and your pal watches it - you can be sure you watched the same movie, and can compare the notes, and tell your other pal who didn't watch it yet whether you liked it or not, and it'd be useful. But with every store having their own model code set and those rotating all the time and having a thousand options, your experience may not be comparable to somebody else's. There are review sites and recommendation sites, like Consumer Reports, which kinda approach it, but there's no way to make it as systematic as for movies or video games, because there's too much variety.

I suspect part of it is because movies and other forms of media are more likely to be 'shared' experiences than consumer electronics are. Like okay, some systems are probably popular enough with the population that this sort of review setup could work well (iPhones/iPads/Apple devices, video game consoles*, high end Android devices, maybe certain leaders in their market niches), but a lot of the time the market would be spread too thin to provide a reliable set of reviews for every product. Like, how many toasters exist on Amazon right now? Apparently about 740 from a quick check.

Add that to however many other brands and models aren't listed there, and I'm not sure you'd find enough reviews to make such a site worth it. Especially not professional ones, since even the likes of Which don't review every single device ever released.

It might also be surprisingly hard to find said products in such a database if it existed too, since often only the model number is slightly different, with the core name being identical across variations. So I suspect it'd be significantly more challenging for users to use than Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, where looking up something like 'James Bond' or 'Star Wars' or 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' will get a bunch of easy to understand results.

Consumer Reports, wirecutter, and TheVerge each do a decent job of this service. IDK if an aggregator adds much value unless there are more critics/reviews to aggregate.

It's because online reviews are a done deal. A reviews site is one of the easiest thing a novice programmer can build. However, there's little money in the endeavor unless it's rigged in one way or another. The profit is in taking money from companies begging you to ban "trolls", outright manipulating aggregate ratings and how reviews are sorted, or waiting for some relevant company with a conflict of interest to buy you out (Rotten Tomatoes itself being an example of this). There is of course the issue of deterring bots.

That's just Amazon

Perhaps rephrase the Q: Why isn't there an independent Rotten Tomatoes for x ...

Rotten Tomatoes is owned by:

Warner Bros. (25%) NBCUniversal (75%)

If there was a Rotten Tomatoes for consumer electronics, I would suspect that it would be owned by Apple, Samsung, or Sony ...

rotten tomatoes is the absolute worst of all worlds when it comes to film review so praise be there isn't a parallel for consumer electronics

It's a lot easier to review Movies then it is Products. A movie is a finite experience, and you have a large frame of reference for comparisons.

At what point do you review the product? You're relationship with the product will change over time, and probably will skew negative as it gets older.

There's also the relative exposure issue. I've seen probably a ~thousand movies in my life but have had like 3 Air Conditioners. I'm barely equipped to say what I thought about LadyBird.

Because the same movie doesn't flood the market with hundreds of different names. Similarly, the content of a movie doesn't change from year-to-year while the name stays the same.

Considering how gamed RT has become, what would be the point even if there was one?

Too many brands and products. Movies are a relatively rare product, compared to consumer electronics, as a whole, that rarely distinguish themselves, except on price, For the exceptional few that actually have superior components, there are already sites that review them.

Because consumer electronics manufacturers have long, long understood the need to (mostly) obfuscate pricing and (as a bonus) make comparisons/reviews impossible.

The thing you bought at big-box retailer A sporting brand B and carrying model number C? The exact same thing is sold by retailer D under brand E and as model F.

There are categorical differences between movies and appliances.

For example, movies last about two hours while even a terrible appliance is likely to last about two years and when a movie is over ths watcher doesn’t suddenly have a significant problem in their life. When an appliance fails people usually do. So the incentives to write a review are different.

Or to put it differently, nobody buys fifty microwaves a year while many many people watch fifty movies a year.

Good luck.

I've tried to build this in the past with Looria.com, where we aggreagted and summarized reviews from the most trusted sources, e.g. Reddit: https://www.looria.com/reddit

Couple of challenges:

- Astroturfing is everywhere

- The data sources, especially social media, become more protective with their data

- Monetizing this is super hard. As an aggregator, you're always just the intermediate.

Vetted.ai is working on something similar and they raised $14M in 2022. They are likely faceing similar challenges.