Reddit really is great for recommendations: is less impacted by SEO and marketing that most of the internet, upvoting captures the wisdom of the crowd, and comments usually provide context for their recommendation.
HN is similar actually, though much smaller.
On both looria and redditreads I find it interesting how the products recommended reflect the culture of each subreddit.
Just curious - how long have you been running the site and how sustainable of a model you feel it is? Sustainable in the sense that the affiliate or ad revenue it brings in is consistent enough to justify continued maintenance, improvement, etc.
I'm also interested in starting up something similar for a particular niche, and would like to hear first hand accounts of the return on investment for aggregators such as these.
I've been running it about 4 years now? It's very low maintenance (run process_new_comments.py every month and re-deploy). It also doesn't bring in much money: it's definitely a hobby rather than a business.
I don't do any marketing, most traffic comes from people mentioning it on reddit or from being included in "cool internet stuff" newsletters. I have some ideas for marketing, but I also hate marketing and do enough of it for my day job SaaS.
So I just run it because I really enjoy it! I used to have a newsletter but stopped that as it was too stressful having a regular deadline and dealing with email spam filters. Everything else about the site I enjoy: writing occasional blog posts, looking at culture through the lens of books, finding new books. I really like books: I used to own and run a bookstore, and a book price comparison website in the past.
Yeah I've found a few great authors over the last two years due to reddit that I would have never read on my own. Pretty much because they are small or independent and their cover art is bad/not impressive. Crazy how much those things impact buying habits.
The two that come to mind at Blindsight by Peter Watts and Wherever Seeds May Fall/any of the other, 20!!!, First Contact books by Peter Crawdron.
Reddit really is great for recommendations: is less impacted by SEO and marketing that most of the internet, upvoting captures the wisdom of the crowd, and comments usually provide context for their recommendation.
HN is similar actually, though much smaller.
On both looria and redditreads I find it interesting how the products recommended reflect the culture of each subreddit.