What is the crowd's opinion of lib.reviews?

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Fantastic! I'm really excited to read about this, because it's something I've thought about for years (unfortunately without the skills to do anything about it):

It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of the reviews on Amazon for their ability to keep their hegemony over online retail year after year. The same could be said about a lot of other online services: IMDb is not really a very good site/service, but they have all of the reviews and so it's almost impossible to compete.

This becomes dangerous when services like Yelp changes what reviews they show based on how much ad money the reviewed businesses spend.

Monopoly over the reviews makes competition extremely hard, and so just like we need federated social networks – so that you don't have to use Facebook or Twitter to be able to keep in touch with friends and family – we also need open access repositories of comments for people to be able to buy stuff from other stores than Amazon, check out films on other sites than IMDb, etc, without loosing out on one of the most important parts of the experience: The reviews.

I'm really glad that these people are not only making this tool to download your comments, but also an open comments repository like this. Here's hoping it works out, and helps competition flourish again, before the monopolies becomes impossible to shake up.

Se iu volas provi lib.reviews, mi havas unu invitligilon (sed nur unu, ĉar la retejo donas ilin nur al tiuj, kiuj skribas recenzojn). Mi sendos ĝin per privata mesaĝo al la unua, kiu petos.

This can complement the proprietary alternativeto.net website (which is my first choice when searching for alternatives). too bad it does not have user reviews and average ratings like IMDB or google play, maybe integration with lib.reviews could be helpful.

lib.reviews itself is CC-BY-SA (reviews) + CC-0 (metadata). Items that pull from OSM now include a small attribution notice with link to the license as well (even though the data use is currently minimal, but it will hopefully grow with time). Example item (note "source data licensing" block):

https://lib.reviews/hareburger

Hi there! :) My own dev priorities for the near future are to integrate with Wikidata/OpenStreetMap, and to support the F-Droid integration as long as they continue to be interested. Features will driven by those priorities, but will likely include a set of moderation features so we can open up registration without fear of being spammed to death.

It's an open project though -- happy to help anyone set up a local dev environment!

Regarding 4), for now, we have the notion of "teams" which you can join to follow reviews by people you trust of subjects that interest you, e.g., https://lib.reviews/team/edu-by-video for video education reviews. I personally would like to see how far we can get with a team-based trust model, but if someone wants to take a crack at individual reputation/trust features, let's talk about how that could work.

Sorry, it's all still pretty basic - we're still in early dev, hence the invite codes and such. But yeah, the plan is to offer appropriate organization by content type.

For now, everything that is reviewed has a dedicated page. Here's an example of a page about a book:

https://lib.reviews/thing/c29fe9c4-87db-4c24-bef6-a35836a138fa

That page is where we'll add metadata, which will depend on the "type", e.g., book, movie, software, etc. We'll use that for search and organization, but given the need to support many "types" well, it's going to take a while. My initial focus will be on items that are hard to review elsewhere, like open source software packages and software libraries.

If you don't mind the clutter, for now you can add book reviews by adding a URL to your review, like an Amazon or Wikipedia page.