Hi! I have a question on Tweakers, which many of you probably know about or use. I’ve been using it for years, including the pricewatch/wishlist functionality, but I’ve never found a way to contribute to its pricewatch functionality. Is anyone here doing that?
Specifically:
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I’d like to be able to add or remove a tweakers<->external website association. Such as this: https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1635184/varta-lcd-multi-charger+.html#section-prices The association with the amazon product is wrong here, but there’s nothing I can do to fix that.
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I’d like to be able to link already existing tweakers pages to new external shop pages.
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Ideally also be able to add new items, etc.
It’s probably possible, because if tweakers already has integration with a website for some product, then probably the same “price watch” functionality can be applied to other products within the same shop as well - assuming somebody links the correct products of course.
Thoughts?
This is the page you’ll need to achieve these things: https://tweakers.net/info/werken-bij/
It’s set up like a for-profit organisation, not like Lemmy. They accept contributions in small quantities, within what the forms accept, but not things like linking a new webshop. The webshop needs to sign a contract and pay Tweakers c.q. DPG Media whenever someone clicks on their shop link within the Pricewatch!
You’ll have seen the general feedback form and it does work. One or two working days later you’ll get a confirmation that it has been processed IF you didn’t submit too many at once. It’s a boring job for them to manually check and correct these things; a lot of work isn’t necessarily appreciated.
Or when it’s not a standard change, like for a mobile phone (I can look up the model) the Geekbench 5 scores were swapped: the multicore results were in the singlecore field and vice versa. Puzzled me for a bit (how could single core be faster than multi? Surely the phone was busy doing something else during one of those tests?) until the penny dropped and then it seemed really obvious and that also matched the Geekbench 6 results for the same model where it hadn’t been swapped around. So I report this with all the evidence and “I’ve forwarded it to the testlab team” is all I ever heard. Few months later the mistake was still there. It’s not their job to think and the testlab is a more trusted data source than me so I guess they’re not going to take my word for it and the test people don’t feel responsible for updating the pricewatch
so yeah I’ve got mixed feelings. The pricewatch is internationally unparallelled for drilling down to the product you’re looking for; it’s an amazing resource and the profit model makes enough sense to me. I just wish it was more open, maybe like stackoverflow review queues where two people who gained enough site karma can accept a proposed edit, for example
Fwiw, I believe they recently actually had a job ad for this exact position (pricewatch manager, or at least that was part of the tasks), maybe a few weeks ago. They don’t have as much churn as the typical tech organisation, or so they said at an abonneedag = subscribers’ (open) day
Very interesting, thanks for all the info! I’m slowly reading it and processing.
One remark so far is that Tweakers is actually a for-profit organisation, from what I understand. On their website they say:
My current understanding is that they are for-profit, but claim to be (and I believe them) to be independent. E.g. the reviews are unbiased. I need to read more. So far I’ve only been using their pricewatch functionality and product search, and for tests I’ve deferred to my paid subscription for German Stiftungwarentest (test.de). Maybe I’ll take a good look at tweakers for electronics testing, too.
Independence and integrity doesn’t mean it can’t be for-profit. Factorio is indie but they’re not giving their games away for free. Newspaper journalists (redactie? Redaktion… what’s the English word) are supposed to be independent of e.g. the ads that are posted on the same page, and Tweakers at some point decided they want to act like this as well. Not that they have a rectification process or whatever, but besides (what I believe to be) honest mistakes they make a good attempt at journalistic integrity imo
I’d say the reviews are also worth taking a look at, but then I’ve never looked at anything else so I wouldn’t know if Stiftung Warentest is maybe much better :D. If you ever take a look at Tweakers’ reviews, let me know how it compares to them. I live in Germany so that description could be useful for me as well ^^