Maybe focus the site on capturing ratings to start instead of sharing ratings for products that don't have many ratings (visual studio appears to be highest rated product with 2 ratings).

If you just showed me two related products and had me click on my favorite, I'd probably do that 10 times for no good reason.

Best business model for you is "managed content", allow companies to disguise their own ads as ads for your site. I.E. car company pays you to generate a "which is better" between two of their car models and embed it into an ad.

Peaked my interest. And bam. Gone again.

tapping on the muesli vs corn flakes comparison gave me no visual feedback to indicate it was ever going to do anything.

then it died.

when it came back I tried tapping on Visual Studio Code, expecting a page to come up but nothing happened. after enough time to flip back to hn and tap that sentence out (on my phone) and there was a page load happening. another 5s after that, a page with a lot of things on it but very little content appeared.

so a couple thoughts:

if you're going to manage page loads and nav with javascript, visual feedback is not optional. (better yet, don't do it with js at all. you don't have to go full SSR, just let your web server handle more of the effort)

every example you have there is going to boil down to personal preference or context dependence. like corn flakes vs museli, no one is going to make buying decisions based on that. there is no "better" only in that comparison, only "better for my situation". same goes for local businesses, IDEs, and whatever else. these scores don't tell me if it will work for me, only that it's popular. this is why the best review sites these days compare and present the results as "if you prefer X, then consider A. if you're on a budget but want Y, then B is a good choice." people want to know what's best for them. if you've got the data then frame a new users experience around "what are you looking for and what do you care about" rather than this zillionth hot-or-not-with-a-twist clone.

Perhaps you should look at how similar projects do it. Platforms like Hupu and Coolapk have public rating features, and users find them easier to understand and use, rather than staring at the current UI unsure how to rate.

One 5 star rating is worse than 1000 4.5 average ratings. There's a few ways to deal with this, Bayesian average is one.

I think for most aggregate ratings, thumbs up/down is all the useful signal you can get. If you're reading a review, it can be useful to see someone say "I gave this 3.5 stars instead of 4 because the last time I went there the fries were cold." However, on aggregate, that distinction becomes almost entirely lost given 1) peoples varying rating schemes (my 4 could be your 3 stars) and 2) often lovers/haters will just give 5/0 stars, drowning out any nuance. That's why Steam and Netflix switched to thumbs up/down.

The categories are wonky--under TV shows I found Netflix, a video game franchise, running shoes (!)... Maybe have user generated tags?