Ask HN: Please review my new project, Film vs Film

I've set up a similar voting site with moderate success (about 3.5 million page views in a bit over a year):

http://www.bestsporecreature.com/creatures

A couple of points:

- The biggest hurdle is that you need to have watched both movies to really decide between them - with a simple image voting site, the judgement can be instant. Movie buffs will likely enjoy it, more casual movie watchers like myself probably won't get far.

- related to the above: it needs to be easier/more obvious how to skip a pair.

- to really make it sticky, you should offer something to the hardcore set. In a kittenwars, that's pretty obvious - people can upload pictures of their cats, and keep coming back to see how they do. It doesn't translate very well to movies, because people don't really add "their" movies - and there's even less emotional attachment to a "pairing" of movies. It's mildly interesting, but not something you want to check obsessively throughout the day. You need a way for people to keep score and know when they're "winning".

Which movie is better IS an interesting argument - but the point is often to show off one's knowledge of movies, which this site doesn't really let you do.

How about this: when you create a fight, you can state which movie you think is better, or estimate a percentage win for each movie. Then, your "score" is how many people agree with you through the blind voting on the home page. The more matchups you add, and the closer your initial guess, the better your "score". Add a leaders list, and you're getting places now.

Thanks for not calling it startup. No offence to anyone, but I genuinely like it when people call their projects as projects.

This is an idea I've been working on for the last month or so. I wanted to make a fun and addictive site with a low barrier to participation. After iterating through a few prototypes with friends, I opened the site to the public last week.

Some data so far: The average visitor generates over 50 page views, and stays for longer than 5 minutes. There's significant click-through to Amazon, which is how the site generates revenue. People seem to enjoy the site, but only a few seem to be sharing it with their friends.

I have a Facebook Platform app in the works, which I hope will help to increase the site's virality. In the mean time, I'd be grateful for any feedback you could provide.

I found myself voting for movies I wasn't familiar with. The link to skip isn't strong enough.

I agree with others that there should be some kind of scoring. It's surprising how addicted people get to trying to improve their score, especially if there is some leaderboard present. Just give people points for the activities you hope they will do.

You could give points for correct guesses (maybe with time limit) and give even more points for creating their own fights, possibly depending on how "good" the combination of movies is (not sure how to determine that).

When using this site, it beat my expectations in that I actually found some movies I intend to watch after using it. Stuff I had forgotten exists, like I had watched Evil Dead 3 but skipped 1 and 2. Thanks for reminding.

Got me hooked. I just kept clicking until I realized... hey what are you doing? Stop clicking! So that part is done.

But then what happens?

Addictive, very low barrier to entry - but where's the stickiness ? Why would i go back and more importantly what is there to make me remember my fights of which film won or lost ?

This webpage has a redirect loop.

The webpage at http://filmvsfilm.com/ has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

yet another kitten war? http://kittenwar.com/

I can dig it. The functionality is right there as soon as you arrive. Fun to compare movies I'm familiar with, but also kinda cool to see juxtapositions of movies I have seen with ones I haven't.

Suggestions? I dunno, maybe a big fat arrow to skip to the next pair instead of the text "skip it". For some reason it took me a little longer than it should have to locate that element.

Good name! We could never come up with a descriptive title for this at http://www.greatmovieexperiment.com/ The name seems so obvious now. Our goal was to create a list of the top films by showing all the pairings of films randomly. I presume a "top fights" page on yours will be forthcoming?

Have you considered moving the "Pick one!" column to the middle? It might be more obvious there.

Why is the about-page styled differently from the rest of the site? It also has a stray </a>.

More (minor) html errors: http://vldtr.com/?key=filmvsfilm.com

More details from the movies - tag lines, famous scenes, remind me of the movie - the box isn't enough.

why don't you structure the whole thing like a league? films that 'win' a match, get paired to each other and so on until you find the 'greatest film', Granted, many will disagree, but it should make the project a bit more substantial and may make people come back.

Nice, but to keep me interested for longer, I think it would have to have a bit more to it.

Sorry, this isn't really good feedback, but I think others have covered most of the points. I loved some of the match ups, like the one between The Professional and The Littlest Mermaid. I couldn't decide.

There's something I don't understand : why is everything based on opposition ? I mean, why not create a connection website ? What connects "breathless" ("à bout de souffle") to "la scala" ?

there were some films too close to call but I wanted to see the result.. eg "lost in translation" vs "adaptation"

also would be good to have a filter eg "only show most controversial" or "only show scifi"