More fundamentally opensource software essentially demolishes capturable value on the OS/stack/browser layers and prevents new challengers to the space from challenging the incumbents, who rose to the top in the age of proprietary software.
On the flip side the basic software stack is now absurdly cheap and available for startups to play ontop of. This is where the feeling of "looting" came from, the capturable value is not in the OSS layer, but on the addons.
A similar dynamic is happening now on the AI side with LLMs.
One thing that can be improved is how the knives are displayed.
The white aliased border around the thumbnails looks really really bad, and really turns me off from staying on the site.
One major reason why people like knives is that they look beautiful. The image thumbnail does the complete opposite.
Please use 24bit PNG with proper alpha, on a lighter background, so blade shape and colors can be more beautifully represented.
Adding to this: Getting people to write reviews on your own platform will be hard, but there are a ton of knife enthusiasts on Reddit and we've aggregated their opinions on Looria. Happy to give you access to this data if you're interested :)
Wow, very cool site. Searching for some highly gamed products like graphics cards brings up ratings from multiple sites, not just reddit, and gives realistic results. It seems like it's human-curated for now though, searching for "tap" or "tap set" doesn't bring up anything at all, although the search for "tap" brings up tape measures.
Plus, this comment is how you do marketing well, not pushing your own site at all but adding something helpful to the discussion. I'm definitely impressed with my initial look at the site.
Back on topic, I really like all the different search parameters, but especially for knives you should probably have a price min/max slider. When I was last looking for a knife, it was a PITA since many of the enthusiast recommendations were focused on $200+ and hand-forged one-off knives. I know price is way harder to filter by, but that would be a genuinely useful addition since when I was shopping I knew that I wasn't going to spend over 150 but I also wasn't interested in anything under 30 since it was almost certainly junk.
The knife geek site is super impressive though, I really like how fast and responsive the UI is, especially if this is a weekend project.
> The white aliased border around the thumbnails looks really really bad, and really turns me off from staying on the site.
That is completely fair, looking into ways to improve the images now. Agreed that blades are quite beautiful and the website should do em more justice. Thanks a ton for the input!
This made me laugh quite a bit, took over an hour to do that hover thing and i felt fancy for it too. I just removed it as i agree it looks a little shoddy
It's better, but I think maybe your browser isn't rendering things the same way mine is, so I took a screenshot for you. There's transparency issues with the knife images, which I bet is part of why the hover looked so bad for me, and why you're getting complaints about the visuals. I'm guessing it doesn't look the same for you.
yeah essentially i was trying to remove backgrounds on the scraped jpegs by just swapping pixel colors which worked horribly, decided to just keep it as a plain white background till i setup some fancier solution to remove backgrounds
Some observations:
- Don't use infinite scrolling, it's an outdated UI practice that leads to bad user experience. It also makes the footer entirely unviewable.
- Clicking on a product card image does not reliably open up the product. I have to randomly click on it a few times (Chrome, Brave)
- Clicking on product card image and title leads to different actions, this is a bit unexpected, should show some hint of the difference.
- The product page pop up will reset the search list when closed, this messes up my search navigation, breaks the flow of browsing.