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Ask HN: Please review my new website

onesentencereview.com

41 pointskjf42 comments

I like the concept, but the site design is really over the top for something that should ideally be very minimal. An entire screen of real estate barely holds 3 "one sentence reviews".

Additionally the reviews underneath the movies further down the page are light grey and non-obvious.

That would strike me as something to make obvious - over the film blurb.

Thanks, this will definitely be on my list of things to fix. When you've been working on something for so long the non-obvious stuff tends blur as you know the site like the back of your hand. Getting a fresh pair of eyes on it really makes a difference.

I actually really like the design. Sometimes too minimal can be... too minimal when you are talking about very small pieces of content like a once sentence description and a one sentence review.

As far as one screen barely holding 3 reviews, I don't want to see much more. I don't want 10 reviews stuck into a small space. The layout with a good sized picture and an acceptable amount of space around everything is really nice.

Great idea, this is typically how people review films and albums to their friends - a short sentence. It will be interesting to see how it develops with more content.

The short sentence format sounds compatible with some sort of Twitter interaction. Have you considered allowing users to tweet their review and use a hash tag to reference your site and the film in question? Or have it the other way round - they can sign in with their Twitter account (or use OAuth) and their review gets tweeted. Those are just quick ideas - there must be something that can be done in this space.

I really like this idea. You can allow A LOT more people to sign in and interact (without directly signing up with you) if you let them use the site with their Twitter.

Definitely. It's already possible to tweet a review by hovering over it. This should display a few different ways of sharing it. If you select twitter then it will shorten the permalink to the review, add a #onesentencereview hashtag and populate the status with as much of the review comment as can fit in the remaining space.

I have certainly thought of reversing this this by checking for the #onesentencereview hashtag and populating the review that way. Might be a cool weekend project for me to do while watching the Oscars.

My wife "reviews" movies in a different fashion, and as a loving husband, I've learned to adjust. Me: What's the movie about? Her: It's starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. Me: Oh, who's in it? Her: It's about them having to crack the code to some....

Anyways. I've learned to ask "Who's in it?" first. And it works like a charm.

This site reminds of MG Siegler's (the TC writer) site Reviews in Haiku: http://reviewinhaiku.com/

While I like the idea of your site, I think the minimalist approach of Reviews in Haiku is ideal for micro-reviews. I was a little distracted by everything on your site.

Good luck!

:) That's fantastic. I haven't seen that site before.

If your goal for now is to let us give you feedback, you should put in some reviews for movies that everyone has seen.

I haven't seen those three movies, which makes it harder for me to gauge whether the reviews are any good.

On the other hand, some of the music reviews are transparently bad.

I'm not sure if the ratings apply to the movies, or to the reviews. And since the people doing the rating are probably also not sure, that makes the ratings less useful.

Will you have the ability for multiple users to compete to provide different reviews, which then are ranked as they (the reviews, not the items being reviewed) get rated by the community?

I could see this evolving into a cool resource, but it's hard to tell from what you've got so far.

Thanks for the feedback. The goal is definitely to cover a wider range of movies, not just new releases but new releases seemed like a logical place to start as these would be fresh in peoples minds.

The ratings apply to the movies/music and not the actual reviews themselves so maybe that's something I need to make clearer.

Voting on reviews is something I definitely want to incorporate so that might get pushed up further in the list.

Great looking site.. And that's a really good idea to contain it to a single sentence.

What does this do that Rotten Tomatoes doesn't do better?

A few years ago, when Rotten Tomatoes began, it was beautiful in its simplicity. Now it's a bloated slow-loading mess. Just a few days ago, I was looking for a simple b.s. free site like this--and here it is!

Agree about how Rotten Tomatoes lost its way. But Metacritic does a very good, clean quick aggregation of movie, TV, and game reviews:

http://www.metacritic.com

Heh, it's a decent concept, but this site, however, is essentially MetaCritic with less staff.

I actually have a regular feature on my blog (http://shortformblog.com/) that's got some stuff in common with this. I call it "One-Word Album Reviews."

Here are a few samples:

http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-we-for...

http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-now-we...

http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-no-vam...

While we may draw some similarities to metacritic we also have the social aspect that they don't. Namely, you can follow other users on the site and see their reviews in your dashboard. You can filter based on people you follow so you only get the reviews from people who's opinions you care about etc...

If that's the case, it'd be nice to see a look that was a bit less like theirs. To me, the site feels a little close to its inspiration.

Way too complex landing page.

It's like shopping in a grocery store. If you present them with 25 different types of strawberry jam, they become less likely to buy any at all. Because the mental cost of weighing options to make a decision outweighs the expected value.

Same goes for employee savings plans. Employees given too many options for saving plans become less likely to choose a plan at all.

View your user interface as a decision tree. At each level, don't make me decide between more than 5 elements at a time.

Using this logic, I would chunk your Recent Movie Reviews and Recent Music Reviews into one Recent Reviews element to reduce complexity, to move decisions to a lower tree.

But make sure they don't keep deciding between Music\Movies in a bunch of child nodes, they should only make that decision once: Do-No-Repeat yourself philosophy.

Hi, great advice. I'll be reviewing the current design and will certainly take this into account.

I'd drop the description on the Music/Movies overview page and add a recent/popular review. get the content of the site one step closer. when the user drills in then give them the description/synopsis.

Have faith in your content! Thats why you want people to visit.

Thanks, that's some good advice. I might experiment around with that. "Have faith in your content!", I like it :)

Some of the reviews of movies were two sentences, unlike this review of your website.

Yeah, it used to be that it would check for a period in the users review and prevent them from entering any more text once that was encountered but people started getting around it by-writing-their-reviews-like-this or using commas everywhere a full stop should have been, in the end I just went with the 140 character rule ala twitter. This made more sense since we would be heavily integrating with twitter.

onefortyreview.com ?

Those feature sentences are so complex that I would have less trouble scanning the information out of a paragraph of easy english.

I love the idea though!

"If it fits in a tweet, I don't want to see it anyway."

You should tweet that, people would like to see it.

Great idea.

But: what I see there are not reviews, they're summaries. One-sentence reviews would be great, but a review should help me decide if I should see the movie, not summarize the plot. "Intertwining couples and singles in Los Angeles break-up and make-up based on the pressures and expectations of Valentine's Day." is not useful to me at all.

Ah hang on.

I see now that you do have reviews. The reviews should be front-and-center on the homepage (and make it simpler), NOT the summaries. I wouldn't even show the summaries, they just get in the way.

Overall, the design is slick but there's too much going on, conflicting with your goal of simplicity in 1-sentence reviews.

Thanks for this. I can't see the woods for the trees having worked on the site morning, noon and night so it's easy for me to miss these kinds of things. To me they seem obvious, but then they would since I implemented it. I'll be changing this very soon.

Very slick. I only ever read one sentence (from Rotten Tomatoes) anyway, so this fits my usage pattern for reviews.

Are you planning to harvest tweets and other social media to help beef up your review base?

I've bookmarked your site for next time I look up film reviews.

Absolutely. One area I feel similar sites are lacking is linking in to the the social space so that's definitely something I'll be doing. Thanks for the bookmark :)

http://www.opinbot.com/reviews/show/agdvcGluYm90chwLEhVyZXZp...

Is this the site you were asking about in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=622042

What did you choose ?

:) That was for another website. In the end I used the advice I got here and told them to up the offer or to forget about it.

They didn't up the offer enough so it never went any further. It's been about 8 months now and I don't believe they have done anything with their idea so I guess I made the right decision. If you're interested the site mentioned in that link is this one: http://www.lost.ie

Sorting of reviews maybe? and you should make more stuff clickable -- like your logo for starters.

I agree with with you about the logo. I'll need to fix that. Reviews should be sorted in descending order. Do you mean having an option to change the sort order?

it's a bit like http://blippr.com but no reason there can't be two (or three) similar.

I like the layout, and colours, looks easier to find media than Blippr. Good luck.

I agree that the design is a bit overdone, but I don't think it's too bad.

The most annoying thing to me is that several of the snippets are more than one sentence long. :(

Nice!

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