
Review others websites and they review yours - pdx
http://feedbackroulette.com/
======
patio11
I feel that there is the danger here of a blind leading the blind effect. I
tried it out for giggles. Not to pick on my reviewer, but here:

 _There are alot of words on the landing page [of BCC]. Look at some of the
ycombinator pages and you will notice the average site has about 45 words and
4-9 links. Don't give them so many options and so much to read. Otherewise,
looks good!_

The quality of your users' interactions with FeedbackRoulette is directly
related to the quality of the advice they receive. To recruit and retain the
best users who give the best advice, you have to be giving out advice which is
worth their time. The above quoted advice is well-intentioned but does not
convince me that I am likely to realize business value by continuing to be
engaged with the service.

To see another take at resolving this problem, take a look at StackOverflow:
by breaking the 1:1 nature of the communication, you can use people's desire
to peacock to get hypercontributing members of the community to be responsible
for most of the good advice on the site, and let the 90% who do no writing
merely vote the good stuff to the top. Hopefully they pick the right good
stuff. If, on the other hand, StackOverflow picked two random programmers with
a question and connected them, the average experience of using it would be
getting your query on Rails ActiveRecord validation answered by a junior Java
programmer from India. That would be a much less effective StackOverflow. It
would likely not maintain the interest of somebody like John Skeet (who, if
you are not familiar with the SO community, is something of a local legend).

(Sidenote: if this reviewer was right and there are in fact YC companies with
45 words on the front page... how do I put this gently... there must be
someone in your alumni network who you trust on SEO, right? Talk to him about
whether that is a good idea. It will be a very brief conversation.)

~~~
sundarurfriend
> the average experience of using it would be getting your query on Rails
> ActiveRecord validation answered by a junior Java programmer from India

Please avoid such racist stereotyping. There are terrible and awesome
programmers in every community, and it's an insult to put them in the same bin
and call them the same name. I found it quite offensive myself.

~~~
solutionyogi
I did not find anything offensive in that line. He did not write

'...answered by a __terrible/awful __Java Programmer from India'.

If he wrote following,

'...answered by a Perl hacker from Germany.' his point will still be valid. I
think you are reading too much into it.

P.S.:I am an Indian.

------
jamesteow
I like the idea. I think there should be a skip button as there are a couple
sites that I wasn't able to review properly (one specifically asked for people
to review it in another language and the other required me to sign in).

I also think it'd be cool if the homepage showcased some of the highest rated
sites, like the way Logopond (<http://logopond.com/>) works for logos.

~~~
p4r4d0x
Agree with this. I cancelled a review because I simply can't give very good
feedback on the type of site I was given. I waited a while, clicked 'Review
Next' again and got the same site.

If the creator of FeedbackRoulette is reading, skip button pronto!

------
melvinram
I reviewed 4 sites just for kicks and submitted my site to it. So far, only 1
person rated my review so I got 1 feedback point and 1 review for my website.
Seems like getting an ROI on my time is dependent on a) whether people see the
rating buttons b) click on them. Seems like something that needs to be fixed.

------
GFischer
How about a twist on the original idea:

Reviewers submit a short review with the basic findings and points of
improvement, and hint at a more in-depth review.

For a nominal fee, you could access a more in-depth review and consulting
(maybe with coding help, etc..). The site could be a nexus between people
needing reviewing help, and consultants, for a small fee.

Top reviewers could make a living out of this, other people can submit good
reviews in the hope of being picked for consulting work.

Just my 2 cents of brainstorming (probably millions of buts to this one).

~~~
mattblalock
I really like that. I do general consulting from time to time and would love a
great tool for lead generation for small web based businesses.

Could really work well for connecting consultants with new clients they would
otherwise never find.

------
amichail
Sounds familiar...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1227543>

~~~
Kudose
That's what happens when you tell someone an idea that is fairly simple to
implement and don't act on it in over 200 days, IMHO.

------
ollysb
This really works as a concept. I've signed up and reviewed a couple of sites
already. I'm looking at one now that looks suspiciously like spam though.
There doesn't appear to be a spam button for when you're looking at a site. If
a site isn't spam then being labelled as spam is still useful feedback for
them, even if it does mean going back to the drawing board.

------
bluethunder
Please allow the website owner to rate the review he receives and allow his
sites to be reviewed based on the rating of the review that he has given.

So for example: If i rate site A.com and the siteowner of A.com rates my
review as 5/5 then my sites should be eligible for 5 reviews. The ratios could
be different - essentially reward owners for better reviews.

I see a very clear monetization opportunity here. I pay money and get X number
of reviews. I am sure you would have thought about this. Cool stuff.

------
melvinram
It would also be nice to be able to talk back with reviewers if they allow for
it. I've gotten some interesting comments and I'd like to either ask a few
clarifying questions or just get to know them a bit better. A 2-way
communication message would be nice.

~~~
mattblalock
Definitely!

------
benchmark
I can see this being a big success. Feedback roulette does everything right: I
immediately understood the website and could participate.

Reviewing the websites even has an addictive quality to it.

Interested to know the business model.

Nice work.

------
danvoell
We submitted our site this morning and have received really good feedback,
which we are going to implement on our site. I also reached out to the team
with feedback and received a quick thoughtful response. I understand there is
a danger to a free product, but people, it's free and you get rapid feedback,
you don't have to use the feedback. I definitely think some sort of scoring to
get top feed backers up to a higher level (which people could pay for) could
create a value proposition.

------
spokey
I wish I could see and possibly review sites without handing over my email
address. I'd like to be able to explore the kinds of sites that are posted and
possibly the kinds of feedback they are getting before creating an account.

(Also, what if I don't have a website I want reviewed? I guess that violates
the 1:1 relationship feedbackroulette is trying to develop, but I'd be
interested in what non-"webmaster" folks have to say if there are any willing
to submit a review. )

------
jamesjyu
Do not send passwords in the clear via email! That is all.

~~~
aw3c2
This usually hints at plain text storage of passwords, so: Please do not store
passwords, store (salted) hashes instead.

~~~
jodrellblank
Unless you want to be able to send your users passwords by email, in which
case don't.

------
p4r4d0x
I've posted a couple of decent quality reviews and most have been accepted
with 5 star ratings. However, very few reviews are coming back the other way,
leaving me feeling like I've somewhat wasted my time.

Perhaps this will change later, but in the meantime, perhaps sites could be
circulated around instead of just being assigned to one person (which is what
I presume is happening.)

------
AppsOnCloud
I liked the idea, but I think there should be some sort of options or
categorization of websites that you are submitting and you would like to
review. I just tried it out and I got a website to review - but it did not
have any details on what aspect needs to be reviewed.

------
ig1
You might want to check out the model <http://www.critters.org/> uses where
members get to pick what they want to critique. I think it might work better
than the random-matching approach.

------
amichail
Currently there is an incentive to rate reviews as follows: if you want to
increase the probability for that person to review another of your sites, you
would give them a rating similar to your rating (which could be quite low).

------
fylox
Maybe it is just me but I don't understand the current mood, building a new
website for things that can already be done in a comfortable manner.

Feedbackroulette could be reduced to reddit.com/r/feedbackroulette (imho)

------
tsbaron
Interesting concept. What's the business model here? Advertising? Maybe a
premium service where you can choose which sites to review and be able to
target certain reviewers for your own site.

------
raffi
Feedback Army will get you many responses without giving up anything more than
a few dollars. <http://www.feedbackarmy.com>

~~~
huhtenberg
Raphael, have you added filtering by reviewer's location? Most of responses
come from Asia and from people eager to earn your 60c per response. They are
positively biased at best, and half-assed and incompetent at worst.

~~~
raffi
Dear [person whose name I don't know], You have a right to reject (and
automatically request a new response) for any half-assed or incompetent
responses.

That said: I receive a lot of positive feedback on the service and in the
instances when someone contacts me with a bad experience, I take care of them.
I'm a little surprised to see such a pointed comment about FBA on Hacker News.
If you used the service and had a poor experience, I wish you would have given
me a chance to do something to make it right with you.

~~~
huhtenberg
We spoke over the email back in July. I emailed you to say that the quality of
the feedback had gone substantially down for the reasons I posted above. You
replied suggesting to reject as many responses as I felt needed and
alternatively to refund the purchase. This is just, and you do in fact take
care of the poor experiences.

I rejected good half of responses, but it also made me realize this:

 _Having thought a bit more about this whole situation here's what I think is
the root of the frustration - I would rather not get to the point of needing
to reject comments._

 _There are some obviously half-assed comments, and these are easy to reject.
However there are other comments, still useless, that clearly had some time
and effort put into them. Rejecting these seems unfair, especially considering
the price point. And there is lots of these comments._

 _That's why an ability to focus the survey more precisely is IMO essential._

Hence - my question. Have you got a chance to add country filters to FA or
not?

------
vyrotek
There's another site that does this, I think its called Hacker News :)

~~~
melvinram
HN isn't always the right demographic for feedback. I could this particular
service improving to limit/filter feedback in a way that would make them more
useful.

Also, there are a number of other improvements that would really make this
site a lot more valuable for getting feedback than HN, such as rating feedback
givers, incorporating Silverback, etc.

~~~
philwelch
This site isn't the right demographic for feedback either, unless you're
building a website solely for other people who also have websites.

~~~
melvinram
Touché

