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Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsA 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!
Apropos: the way they ended the REI Adventures program is behavior consistent with a normal big-box chain. That is, announce the end simultaneously to their customers and REI's partner adventure companies, provide refunds to customers, but don't forward the relevant same customer info to the partners for rebooking because that's REI's proprietary data.
If that's also behavior consistent with a worker-owned coop, I have to ask: what is the social benefit of worker-owned over a normal corporate structure? And if it's not, why point the user to REI for a pair of hiking shorts?
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.
In Switzerland we have the concept of a "Genossenschaft"[1] which is a legal form for a company entered in the official company register like every other company for co-ops. You need to be at least 7 people to start one.
The largest two food super markets are both co-ops (Migros and Coop) and also the largest car sharing company Mobility is a co-op.
[1] https://www.kmu.admin.ch/kmu/en/home/concrete-know-how/setti...
Seems some of the results are outdated. For example Ubuntu Coffee Collective in Emeryville is permanently closed.
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).
One link correction: 1620 worker is https://www.1620usa.com/ not 1620workwear.com
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
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!