

Ask HN: Please review my new website - kjf
http://onesentencereview.com

======
chaosmachine
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".

~~~
ErrantX
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.

~~~
kjf
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.

------
bendtheblock
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.

~~~
kjf
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.

------
gchakrab
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!

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

------
natch
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.

~~~
kjf
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.

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

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

~~~
ricosroughnecks
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!

~~~
MotorMouths
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>

------
shortformblog
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-we-forgot-the-
mainstream-bands-this-week)

[http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-now-
we...](http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-now-we-do-them-
when-we-feel-like-it)

[http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-no-
vam...](http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-no-vampire-
weekend-sophomore-slump)

~~~
kjf
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...

~~~
shortformblog
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.

------
metamemetics
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.

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

------
nzjames
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.

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

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

~~~
kjf
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.

~~~
somedaywings
onefortyreview.com ?

------
aw3c2
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!

------
patio11
"If it fits in a tweet, I don't want to see it anyway."

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

------
petervandijck
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.

~~~
petervandijck
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.

~~~
kjf
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.

------
swombat
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.

~~~
kjf
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 :)

------
wildsalmon
[http://www.opinbot.com/reviews/show/agdvcGluYm90chwLEhVyZXZp...](http://www.opinbot.com/reviews/show/agdvcGluYm90chwLEhVyZXZpZXdzX3Jldmlld3JlcXVlc3QYkk4M)

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

What did you choose ?

~~~
kjf
:) 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>

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

~~~
kjf
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?

------
Roridge
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.

------
cookiecaper
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. :(

------
hockeybias
Nice!

