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Goodhart's Law in action. Any "product quality" metric will be gamed to the point of uselessness as soon as it gains traction. In other words, services like this one can only work as long as nobody knows about them.

The only stable solution is for each person to curate and maintain their own set of sources, so that there are no high-value metrics for marketers to target. Exactly the opposite of what this service is trying to do.

Looks interesting; thanks for writing this!

Does it support nested structs? Sometimes that's more natural than a flat struct.

I was intrigued, but after visiting your website I'm ambivalent. The only way to truly combat shilling is to fully embrace a model where each person sees reviews only from their own personal network of sources— this drastically reduces the "eyeball multiplier" that makes mass media so attractive to marketers.

But seeing things like "Top 3 Recommended" on your website makes me believe you're falling into the same trap everyone else is, at least partially. I don't care how sophisticated your detection of paid content is; you simply can't win a direct war against these pathogens (marketers). The only way to win is not to play, i.e. don't provide a platform for mass reach in the first place. Mass media is really a type of monoculture, with all the same weaknesses.

Unrelated: how do you plan to solve the problem of identifying and classifying essentially every product in existence? Resolving duplicates, slight variants, etc. is a very hard problem, as is categorization.

No metric can escape gaming when you apply it to rational actors (Campbell's Law / Goodhart's Law). Blind devotion to metrics is just as bad as no metrics at all.

Have you evaluated compression algorithms that support custom dictionaries, like zstd? You could generate a compression dictionary for each domain, or just for those above a certain size.

Why not increase the minimum font size instead?

Reviews on sites like Amazon or Yelp are a monoculture: everyone sees the same set of reviews and the same ratings. This creates leverage that makes it worthwhile for shills to spend large amounts of effort "infecting" those sites with bad information, since once they find effective ways of doing so it affects everyone.

So the solution must be a review system that works like Twitter, where each user has a unique "view" composed of sources they've selected, directly or indirectly. This diversity would make infection much more difficult and less rewarding for shills and other attackers.

I'm still trying to figure out the best design for such a system. The requirements and usage patterns would be quite different from Twitter's, and I'm not aware of any existing attempts that I can learn from.

Fake reviews can be seen as an instance of Goodhart's law, where the metric is the rating or score of the business. Initially those ratings may have high correlation with something real, let's say the "quality" of the business. But the more people rely on those scores and the reviews underlying them, the more incentive businesses have to game the system— which destroys the original correlation between ratings and quality.

A big part of the problem with review systems is the one-to-many nature of nearly all of them: when a person posts a review, that review and its score can be seen by everyone. This leverage makes it very efficient for businesses to game the system, as a small amount of fake information can "infect" the purchasing decisions of a large number of users.

So, one alternative might be a many-to-many review system where you only see reviews and ratings from your network of friends/follows (and maybe friends-of-friends, to increase coverage). So essentially Twitter, but with tools and UI that focus on reviews and ratings. That way, fake reviews could only affect a limited number of people, making the cost/benefit calculus much less attractive for would-be astroturfers and shills.

> IIRC this project Gets to 120 when you drag your mouse

What causes that kind of thing? I've noticed stuff like that while playing video in mpv sometimes (despite my Mac being easily fast enough to play the video) and it just baffles me.

Do you encrypt your keys before exporting? How do you ensure you'll remember the passphrase, if so?

I'd love to see a kind of reverse-DNS-style tagging system, so that when my browser comes across a dat:// link it can automatically show me that this content is commonly tagged as "book, Fahrenheit 451" or such.

The problem is that none of that is apparent to an outsider. You can tell developers that filing radars is important until you're blue in the face, but as long as dealing with Radar from the outside is functionally identical to talking to a wall, you shouldn't be surprised when you get pushback like the parent's.

If you find that "insulting", consider how it feels to be told to go through the work of filing dozens of most-likely-duplicate reports simply because Apple won't deign to allow searching existing reports. Regardless of whatever excuses they give for that, it sends a very clear signal about how Apple values the time of third-party developers.