About Us

BoxBoxBox is a site that helps product experts (curators) curate reputable sources, lead discussions, and answer questions about their niche. Think of it like Stack Overflow, but for consumer goods.

Why do we need a site like this...and why now?

I think the ever-improving abilities for folks to mass produce slick videos, audios, images and text, all of which may have no basis in reality, will break down the current way of getting product recommendations. Before, if some content was "well made", then there was an implicit promise - a promise that someone, somewhere, put in some effort. A well written, thoughtful discussion on frying pans implied that the author had done some testing of frying pans. A wellness journey video meant that said wellness journey actually happened. As this implicit promise breaks down, so too will the era of "crowd sourced" recommendations come to an end.

We won't be able to look up the most upvoted frying pan on Reddit without suspecting vote manipulation. We won't be able to view a person's reel without questioning if that person even exists! - Sure, close inspection may allow us to differentiate, but at a glance, AI slop will look no different than high effort, high signal content. And that's a big problem - As Incredibles villain Syndrome said, "when everyone is super, no one is!"

So what does BoxBoxBox do differently? I think BoxBoxBox will address some weaknesses in the current landscape. As far as I can see, there is no Q and A site that someone to share their product knowledge at scale that isn't also overrun by spammers. StackOverflow is great for evergreen content, but not so much for specific product recommendations that change over time. Reddit is great for small sized subreddits, but bigger subreddits suffer from echo chambers and pandering to the lowest common denominator. For the record, I think both StackOverflow and Reddit are great, and BoxBoxBox is no replacement, just a small little thing that fits into an underserved niche.

Why should you trust me?

Honestly, no super strong reason. I mean, I do want to make money from this site, sure. But, there are some things that I think I got going for me that will give me a bit of credibility that I won't sell you down the river:

• I am not funded by venture capital, and I'm kind of ideologically opposed to taking venture capital for this project. Too many times I have seen "enshittification" take place, and I place the root cause as "needing to make a boatload of money". This is a personal project that I work on in my spare time. I do not need to make a boatload of money. Just enough to buy some coffee on the weekend (Actually, I would love to be able to earn enough to work on this full time... but that's a far away dream...sigh).
• I do not subscribe to the time honored strategy of "grab as many eyeballs as possible and figure out monetization later". I do have a specific monetization strategy in mind that is not just "sell everyone's personal data" or "plaster the website with ads", or "trick people into thinking a recommendation is from the community when it's actually from a company" or even "sell access to the data to LLMs". Yes, the eventual monetization will be based on advertising, but I think I have a good way to go about it. It's still baking in the oven, but it is NOT one of the above mentioned monetization strategies

Principles of BoxBoxBox

Content is owned by the Curators, not the general community

BoxBoxBox is a site where experts can become curators of their niche, leading discussions and answering questions. The questions asked by the community are owned by the curators, the discussions that happen within the community are, for the most part, designed to be led by the curators, and will be owned (aka they can edit it) by the curators. You will own nothing and be happy! More seriously, why this philosophy? Because... I have been deeply influenced by the design of StackOverflow and the writings of Clay Shirky. If this site is ever successful, its greatest challenges will be to provide value to the average user... while simultaneously preventing the average user from turning it into a milquetoast banal echo chamber. By having the curators/experts own the questions and discussions, they have de facto power to shape the questions and discussions into ones that benefit the broader community

Individuals with a direct financial interest in a niche cannot be a curator

A major challenge with a "product oriented Question and Answer site" is the huge incentive of contributors to shill for a product for which they are incentivized to push. If there was ever a whiff of a curator being a shill, then trust would drop to zero and this site would be dead. So even if a Chanel sales rep knows a lot about make up, they cannot be a curator for make up due to the unavoidable conflict of interest. Okay, cool story bro - how exactly are you planning to ensure shilling does not happen? Well, I intend to make it so that the monetization through any ads is mostly controlled by myself, and I intend to distribute a majority of the profits to the curators. I want to give back so much of the revenue of this site to the curators, that the money, which will be based on the number of users finding informational value, dwarfs whatever money they could possibly receive by shilling for a product. That and closely vetting new curators and making it against the terms of service to have a conflict of interest.