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Comment by Albright | Hacker News Reader

…And on ones that do. Looks very useful for weeding out actual quality from the muddle. Would love to see someone doing this kind of work with other types of cables, too.

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Reading the headline, it sounded like astroturfing. Instead, he's being helpful and providing some very useful information from his experience as an engineer from google itself. What a thoughful fellow!

From a engineering point-of-view, he's saving himself a lot of product support headaches down the road when people try using bogus cables and then contacting Google when they fail to operate (or, worse, destroy the hardware under warranty)

In one comment thread he does suggest that buying cables from the Play store would be safer.

It's probably true, since the Play store only sells one variety of cable, and Google has probably actually vetted it. In which case I can only see that suggestion as a helpful bit of advice for avoiding problems.

Yeah, no pitchfork in hand here, but I also wouldn't be surprised if Amazon didn't appreciate that sort of activity.

For sure. I'd hope they'll be self-aware enough to realize that it would be crappy to yank the reviews or punish the reviewer for recommending another store where the products aren't broken when Amazon is full of broken products. But I wouldn't be very confident of that.

I don't think Amazon worries about bad reviews, as long as they don't see only bad reviews. Bad reviews create trust in the reviews: Seeing bad reviews makes me reasonably certain that products with problems will get called out most of the time.

And often I end up buying products with bad reviews in preference to those with perfect reviews because bad reviews gives me faith a product has been reviewed "enough" by real people, and often the issues brought up are not important to me.

I'd say that for Amazon, these reviews are fantastic: Next time I want a type C cable, I'll check his reviews and buy one of the ones he gives good reviews - probably at Amazon. This is like popping into that store where you trust the staff because they talk shit about "their" own products when they're no good even if it means steering you to less profitable products.

I heard from an Amazon manager, during a hiring event, that Amazon never deletes reviews. The context was a specific negative review on the Kindle.

For sure! This review[0] was particularly interesting. The vendor wrote back a nasty response about how their cables are tested at, and capable of delivering, 5A of juice--which is the point. The USB A device on the other end could get smoked.

Mr. Leung responds by painstakingly pointing out everything they have to do to fix their cables.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/review/R2DQ7OH7PQG24F/ref=cm_aya_cmt?i...

Clearly shows the need for a reputation system, not locked into 1 company. Reviews need sharing.

Reviews also need massive amounts of human and computer moderation, and that's not cheap.

Sounds like a Y-Combinator startup waiting to happen.

I could see this as a browser plugin - professional reviews of popular products where there are many, many brands of wildly differing quality such as cables and chargers. The problem is it seems that it'd need to be a browser extension, and most shopping-related browser extensions are pretty shady, so reputation would be an issue.

I suppose another option would be to just set up a site with reviews and make money with Amazon referral links.

I end up buying cables on Monoprice when I can just because the stuff they sell is usually good quality.

How will any company, especially a VC funded company, avoid problems and dilemmas seen by other online-submitted-reviews companies like Yelp that basically turn the company into either a fake review haven or a protection racket?

By focusing on what makes this reviewer notable: he's a verified buyer, systematically reviewing products, and with a resume to show he's worth listening to. We don't want reviews from any & all yahoos who sign up, we want reviews from vetted people who have a professional interest in checking numerous products with appropriate knowledge, and can write meaningful descriptions suitable for general audiences.

Personally, I'd very much like to see such a thing applied particularly to high-knockoff topics like USB cables (see lead post), camera batteries, printer ink, and other items where a lot of companies are providing a lot of low-price alternatives (some quality, some dangerously bad) to high-dollar brand-name accessories & consumables. For some there's WAY too many options, with HUGE variation of price & quality, to do anything other than either "buy cheap & popular and hope" or "pay thru the nose but it will work".

FWIW: if you sign up as an advertising associate https://affiliate-program.amazon.com with Amazon you can get up to 10% from every link you provide that turns into an actual sale. Build a website featuring appropriately curated reviews linking to Amazon and you could make a good buck - IF you can get enough readers. Over the years I've made a couple hundred dollars doing so, just by posting links when relevant to blog comments. Focused as a business? I'd expect good returns if done right, plenty to hire good unbiased reviewers.

I'm still not sure this would be a company suited for YC-expected massive growth, but thank you and respect for expanding on the idea.

Sounds like a dozen already failed start ups.

A central review clearinghouse will never happen with cheap accessories like this. If model "1234-X" gets bad reviews, the same product will just be renumbered to model "9863-V2" and even the company name may change. So there's no way to keep reviews associated with the same product -- it's the same reason why there are no good review sites for mattresses across all retailers -- the manufacturers use a variety of names and product numbers for mattresses sold to different retailers, specifically to obfuscate them.

What's worse in the cheap accessories market is it is highly likely that groups of companies are buying and repackaging the exact same cables from the same manufacturer and slapping their own names and part numbers on them. So even if two companies are legitimately different, the product may not be.

companies doding bad reviews means that companies with good reviews will stand out, making selection easier.

as a consumer, i don't care about crappy products unless i end up purchasing them. i can avoid crappy products by only going for products with explicit positive reviews that i can trust. sure a grey area will continue to exist, but whitelisting is still effective for reviews, even if we can't blacklist.

Yeah, you'd need to cooperate with the manufacturer to "certify" only one exact product, and make sure that the certification is revoked when anything is changed.

The mattress issue actually sounds like a solvable problem, if you're willing to put in the effort. It's just not really worth it when you can also buy mattresses from IKEA or various online retailers which don't engage in those tactics.

> It's just not really worth it when you can also buy mattresses from IKEA or various online retailers which don't engage in those tactics.

IKEA manufactures wherever possible for the lowest price. The difference is that IKEA employs quality control measures.

That can be part of the reviews. "This product may look good, but Company X which makes it has a history of ninja-changes to their products."

A central (well, really federated would be better) is one of the most needed tech innovations today, because it will make the market for so many other products function more efficiently.

This is a really big thing. If you look at, say, a 10-port USB3 hub on Amazon, you will see the exact same thing, down to the boards (to say nothing of the casing), being sold under three or four different brands.

The thing is for a lot of low level electronics, you can buy "identical" products from a range of manufacturers, so while I know what you're describing happens too, it's tricky because there are also plenty of designs that "make the rounds" (e.g. lots of products are just tiny variations over reference designs from a chipset designer - you see this a lot with low end Chinese tablets, which are often almost-but-not-quite identical variations over what appears to be AllWinner and MTK reference designs).

Definitely. In this case, these are literally identical boxes I'm talking about (I have three from the same manufacturer, they put the same company name on the inside of the case).

Reevoo is quite good IMO.

Example USB-2 cable: http://reevoo.com/p/startech-com-usb-2-0-active-extension-ca....

I've used ebuyer (UK computer retailer) quite a bit and they moved away from their own review system to use Reevoo (the ebuyer one was better IMO however). Still Reevoo seems to have useful reviews in the computer/tech space.

Here's a similar analysis for phone chargers:

http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-ap...

You don't have that issue with cables usually because they don't need to contain active components

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