
Show HN: ThingsOnReddit – Products linked to on Reddit - brudolph
https://thingsonreddit.com/
======
dsacco
Hey, this is awesome! You literally built a product I specifically asked for
here in a thread here recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002985)
(it’s idea #2).

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.

~~~
52-6F-62
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.

Great work, anyway.

------
anton_tarasenko
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.

Reddit allows browsing by domain. Like
[https://www.reddit.com/domain/amazon.com/top/](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/shutupandtakemymoney/)

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/IdBuyThat/](https://www.reddit.com/r/IdBuyThat/)

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated/)

And Reddit has a JSON output:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.json?sort=top&...](https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.json?sort=top&t=all)

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Agadgets+site%3Aa...](https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Agadgets+site%3Aamazon.com&restrict_sr=&sort=top&t=all)

~~~
justboxing
> And Reddit has a JSON output.

I did not know that. Very cool. I tried this for AmazonTopRated =>
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated.json?sort=top&t=all](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.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FAmazonTopRated)

~~~
anton_tarasenko
Reddit can also send RSS:

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.rss?sort=top&t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.rss?sort=top&t=all)

AmazonTopRated is invite-only. Hence, no 403.

------
KhalPanda
[https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/wallstreetbets?order_by=...](https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/wallstreetbets?order_by=score)

Yup, pretty much what I expected.

~~~
skinnymuch
I'd probably get downvoted for the comment I wanted to write. But nice to see
WSBers on HN. The product list is exactly as expected.

------
kfriede
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](https://fastandes.com) (currently at limited
functionality).

~~~
johnwheeler
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.

~~~
kfriede
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.

~~~
Moter8
I searched for laptop (as suggested) and got webcams and other stuff, doesn't
really seem curated at all?

~~~
kfriede
The keyword searching was really bad, agreed. Akin to trying to search on
Craigslist with ads having a giant list of keywords in them.

------
sajthom
Smart way of making money through referral links. I'm not even mad, that's
amazing!

~~~
QAPereo
It really is, especially for books and music, wow. Out of curiosity is
searched /r/bitcoin...

[https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Bitcoin?order_by=score](https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Bitcoin?order_by=score)

------
yitchelle
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?

~~~
jonesetc
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.

------
kilroy123
As someone who frequents /r/watches, I appreciate this. But it would be great
to see prices more easily highlighted.

~~~
eps
There is a roll of ducktape in 5th place by karma :)

------
awb
Social Media product links are the new ToDo App:

[http://hackernewsbooks.com/](http://hackernewsbooks.com/)

[http://www.dev-books.com/](http://www.dev-books.com/)

[http://toptalkedbooks.com/](http://toptalkedbooks.com/)

[http://reddittopbooks.com/tech/](http://reddittopbooks.com/tech/)

~~~
Pyrodogg
Huh, looks like it is time to install NoCoin.

[http://www.dev-books.com/](http://www.dev-books.com/)

Includes a coin-hive mining script.

------
BugsJustFindMe
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.

------
peteretep
[https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/AmazonWTF/](https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/AmazonWTF/)

------
terrble
This is stinkin' amazing. Great idea and nice implementation.

------
waiseristy
Multiple products in a post should be grouped. There's a few pages where all
the products are from a single highly upvoted post

------
madradavid
Congrats to OP for shipping. I tried to do something not so similar to this
and failed miserably :-( [https://hnpicks.com](https://hnpicks.com) . I guess
I just got busy and stopped half way at implementing the NLP and sentiment
analysis. It was an interesting weekend :-)

------
chatmasta
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).

------
chillydawg
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 ?

~~~
52-6F-62
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.

------
eps
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.

------
msnangersme
Some other similar sites with niches:

books- [https://takcek.com](https://takcek.com)

laptops- [http://www.laptophits.com](http://www.laptophits.com)

~~~
kfriede
Another for books: [http://hackernewsbooks.com/](http://hackernewsbooks.com/)

(Not affiliated, just where I took some pointers from)

------
arjie
This is a clever site. Nicely done!

I can't help but laugh at London's best, though:
[https://i.imgur.com/HWgujDq.png](https://i.imgur.com/HWgujDq.png)

------
bastijn
Clicked link. Second item was a sex toy. Was not disappointed. Hit the link
10x more, always sex toys on first page. Yup, it is unfiltered!

------
ben_jones
In the age of product placement I'd be extremely worried about redditors
gaming the site to promote their products. Cool site though.

------
techaddict009
Does this link are of amazon products only?

~~~
codingdave
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.

~~~
dack
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.

~~~
codingdave
I was referring more to OPs answer in this thread.

------
kidproquo
Very nice idea and execution.

Btw, how do you get the main product image url to display on your site? Is
there an api for that?

------
guohuang
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.

------
kruipen
The top product on cooking page [1] shows the folly of using reddit for
product recommendations...

[1]
[https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Cooking?page=1&order_by=...](https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Cooking?page=1&order_by=score)

~~~
rhizome
You may not have a need for a duck press now, but that looks like a good one
if you did.

------
LeoPanthera
This is pretty much tailor made for the subreddit /r/INEEEEDIT

------
Giorgi
Your pagination has stopped working

------
justboxing
Very cool! Congrats on shipping!

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 ?

~~~
brudolph
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.

~~~
justboxing
Thanks for the details.

> 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.

~~~
czue
Agreed this is amazing and inspiring. Well done!

