Blazebuddy

How we rank brands

Sources

We collect public posts and comments from Canadian cannabis subreddits: r/theocs, r/thebccs, r/sqdc, r/canadients, r/ontariocannabis, r/albertacannabis, r/canadiancannabis, r/craftcanadacannabis, r/mbcannabis, r/recpics, r/canadianmoms, r/quebeccannabis. Bot and moderator comments, deleted comments, and comments under three words are removed.

Finding reviews

An AI model reads each comment, along with its thread title for context, and records every brand the commenter gives an opinion on. For each one it records the product category, a sentiment score from 1 (strongly negative) to 5 (favourite), whether it is a recommendation, and an exact quote. A mention is kept only if its quote appears word for word in the original comment. Spelling variants of the same brand are merged. Brands that aren't sold through licensed Canadian retailers are left out of the rankings.

What people liked and disliked

Each mention is also tagged with the attributes the commenter discussed: potency, flavour, burn (smoothness and how evenly it burns), freshness, value and consistency. A brand is listed as "praised for" an attribute when at least 2 reviews mention it and at least 70% of those are positive. It's listed under "complaints" when at least 2 reviews are negative and they make up at least 50% of mentions.

Upvotes as agreement

A comment other Redditors upvoted counts for more: its weight is 1 + ln(1 + upvotes), so +1 counts about 1.7×, +13 about 3.6× and +100 about 5.6×. Comments voted below zero count half.

The ranking formula

A brand's score is a weighted average of its sentiment scores, blended with the category average as if it had 10 extra average reviews. That stops a brand with one glowing comment from outranking one with dozens of strong reviews. Brands need at least 5 reviews to be ranked. The review count shown is the number of actual mentions.

Refresh history

Data releases

Each line records one launch or data refresh. The newest goes first. The methodology page shows this list.