Neat project and I love the motivations behind it.
A few friendly recommendations:
• The images on the results pages are in desperate need of optimization. Plenty of 500KB+ thumbnails and even a couple 2MB+ thumbnails I saw in there. Could easily be optimized 90%+ with no loss of quality
• The instant live search can be a little distracting, particularly paired with the heavy loading of the thumbnails
• I know you don't want to create your own full ecomm site, but even just a hover PDP without having to click off could be nice, if you could pull in the key product details. I know the goal is to support the destination sites but it was a lot of back and forth to me
• Any ability to validate that a product is available vs sold out (and note that on the results pages) would be appreciated. Probably 75% of the items I checked on ttgaming.quest were sold out. A banner across items not in stock would be helpful. Or a filter on the search results page.
Nice site! Maybe add link correction? Sometimes I found myself going to sites and though target landing page was wrong or out-of-date, surfing the site a bit, found similar or same product still offered. Would have to have some way of trusting / verifying the corrections but some people would find it satisfying to offer fix the bad links I bet.
Very nice and appreciate the effort you put into making this.
Some Improvements that could help:
the location search could be an actual map with pins which would be easier to use
some kind of tags for the different appareal items would help clarify which one, currently i have to click and search each vendor for things im looking for. Specifically autistic friendly / sensory clothing items.
Seconding location based lookups. I might not be looking for something specific, but if I know of businesses nearby worth patronizing, when I need that good/service, I'll visit them then.
It will be intresing an automation that check online for word like “worker cooperative”, “worker-owned” to find new candidate that fit.
Ofc the hard part is confirming if it's genuinely worker-owned, so keeping that step human makes sense. But the discovery/shortlisting could be largely automated crawl the web, score candidates by how many co-op signals they hit, and present the top ones for you to vet.
Would be happy to help prototype something like this if you're interested (i really like your idea).
Really nice project. I wonder if discovery could be partly automated by crawling for worker owned or co op signals, then leaving the final verification to humans.
I never thought I'd see anything like that easily accessible on hacker news. (Edit: I say that because this is a project by independent artists that has no real hope for commercial exit -- monetize free jazz, I dare you. Edit: actually don't, please.)
The search field loses keypresses on mobile. I haven’t looked at the code, but I’m assuming it uses a React-style value binding but has some synchronous processing before it propagates the new field value back into the state variable. That is a really terrible pattern.
> There is nothing inherently ethical about co-op owned organizations nor anything inherently unethical about privately owned organizations.
I disagree. Co-ops are inherently democratic. Privately owned business is inherently anti-democratic. The difference only becomes starker as the scale increases. That alone makes it seem more ethical to me, before you even get to examining the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power than rule by one, as well as other effects.
Why does it seem more ethical for the organization that makes your daily bread to be democratic?
I have no doubt that there are people who wish to attend meetings to vote and argue about minutia involves in the running of bakeries and other organizations. But just because people exist does not mean that the most ethical organization is one that gives them the most opportunity to exercise their particular interest in attending meetings.
The vast majority of people do not want every organization their lives to run like a mini democracy. Not only is this not necessarily more ethical than other alternatives, but it is definitely less efficient and that matters when it comes to the supply of material goods. I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
totally. we can badger people to buy from better companies but that seems so tough. better to just make it easier for people to buy from better companies :)
I wanted to buy from worker-owned cooperatives but there was no single place to see what they actually sell. So I scraped the product catalogs from ~60 worker-owned co-op stores and made them searchable.
22,000+ products: coffee, chocolate, clothing, books, home goods, etc. You search, find something, and click through to buy directly from the co-op's store. Nothing goes through me.
There's also a section for finding worker-owned coffee shops, restaurants, and bars by city (110+ listings, mostly US).
Static Next.js site, JSON-backed search. No accounts, no tracking, no ads.
Happy to answer questions about the data or how I identified which businesses are actually worker-owned. Please reach out if you want to add your co-op!
A few friendly recommendations:
• The images on the results pages are in desperate need of optimization. Plenty of 500KB+ thumbnails and even a couple 2MB+ thumbnails I saw in there. Could easily be optimized 90%+ with no loss of quality
• The instant live search can be a little distracting, particularly paired with the heavy loading of the thumbnails
• I know you don't want to create your own full ecomm site, but even just a hover PDP without having to click off could be nice, if you could pull in the key product details. I know the goal is to support the destination sites but it was a lot of back and forth to me
• Any ability to validate that a product is available vs sold out (and note that on the results pages) would be appreciated. Probably 75% of the items I checked on ttgaming.quest were sold out. A banner across items not in stock would be helpful. Or a filter on the search results page.
Keep up the good work!
Some Improvements that could help: the location search could be an actual map with pins which would be easier to use some kind of tags for the different appareal items would help clarify which one, currently i have to click and search each vendor for things im looking for. Specifically autistic friendly / sensory clothing items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compani...
I am enjoying being a part of an employee-owned company so far.
It will be intresing an automation that check online for word like “worker cooperative”, “worker-owned” to find new candidate that fit.
Ofc the hard part is confirming if it's genuinely worker-owned, so keeping that step human makes sense. But the discovery/shortlisting could be largely automated crawl the web, score candidates by how many co-op signals they hit, and present the top ones for you to vet.
Would be happy to help prototype something like this if you're interested (i really like your idea).
Seems some of the results are outdated. For example Ubuntu Coffee Collective in Emeryville is permanently closed.
https://catalyticsound.com/artists/
I never thought I'd see anything like that easily accessible on hacker news. (Edit: I say that because this is a project by independent artists that has no real hope for commercial exit -- monetize free jazz, I dare you. Edit: actually don't, please.)
Ethical consumption in a capitalist economy is unachievable...but we can optimise
The party vanguard of the worker co-op is exactly as capable of selfish or abusive behaviour as the private owner.
I disagree. Co-ops are inherently democratic. Privately owned business is inherently anti-democratic. The difference only becomes starker as the scale increases. That alone makes it seem more ethical to me, before you even get to examining the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power than rule by one, as well as other effects.
I have no doubt that there are people who wish to attend meetings to vote and argue about minutia involves in the running of bakeries and other organizations. But just because people exist does not mean that the most ethical organization is one that gives them the most opportunity to exercise their particular interest in attending meetings.
The vast majority of people do not want every organization their lives to run like a mini democracy. Not only is this not necessarily more ethical than other alternatives, but it is definitely less efficient and that matters when it comes to the supply of material goods. I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
22,000+ products: coffee, chocolate, clothing, books, home goods, etc. You search, find something, and click through to buy directly from the co-op's store. Nothing goes through me.
There's also a section for finding worker-owned coffee shops, restaurants, and bars by city (110+ listings, mostly US).
Static Next.js site, JSON-backed search. No accounts, no tracking, no ads.
Happy to answer questions about the data or how I identified which businesses are actually worker-owned. Please reach out if you want to add your co-op!
One thought, it might be good to list all of the products together,rather than only being able to view them by each business. Nice job :)