

Ask HN: Feedback Please - Lit - youngj
http://lit.factorii.com

======
swombat
At the moment, it seems like a vote-blog of short stories... nice, but what
are you trying to do? What do you see it growing into? What's your aim with
it?

It's hard to provide feedback without knowing what you're trying to achieve...

~~~
youngj
It's a site where writers can share and promote their work. I'm well aware of
the dozens of writing communities out there, but most of these sites operate
in a forum or blog model, which I find rather difficult to filter good
content/writers from the bad. The voting process on Lit is modeled after a
Markov chain where every writer has an assigned global rank. I'm hoping the
competitive nature of the site will motivate people to submit their best
writings. Eventually, I'd like to make this the destination where aspiring
writers post their work and get discovered.

~~~
unalone
Advice (my first writer's start-up, which shut down a few years ago, tried a
similar tack): ranking writers encourages people to write easily-digestible
fluff and ascend in the ranks by essentially not playing fair. You can't
remove the factor of individual taste from a writing site. In fact, the best
models (which is what I'm working on now) encourage such individuality.

~~~
madmanslitany
I would second this; I don't have any experience with writing startups, but I
used to post to fanfiction.net when I was younger. I quickly noticed that the
stories with the most reviews and attention weren't really "stories." They
were written in script form and frequently revolved anachronistic popular
humor being injected into the original work.

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unalone
Whoo! Always fun to see a writing start-up.

The styling is blandly nice - that's a compliment. Reading your words feels
nice. It could be better, but then it could always be better. I love the feel
of the site.

What's the point? What do you offer that other sites don't offer? Right now
it's nice but very, very generic.

~~~
swombat
I thought we might find you here...

Why are you not on IRC these days, btw?

~~~
unalone
Adam and I just launched our beta, and between that and the copy of _Infinite
Jest_ somebody mailed me I've had no time. It's all work, reading, sleep. I'll
be back on eventually.

...creep.

------
daveambrose
I like the design but I didn't "get it" when I first landed on the page. After
poking around for a few seconds, I saw what you're trying to do.

Why not throw up an "about"?

~~~
blhack
Came here to say this.

When I first landed, I thought the buttons on the right were something like
what digg has, then I thought that they were the dates of some blog posts. I
finally realized that they _were_ points like digg has (I think?).

An about section would be a good idea too. Is this place for short stories?
Novels? Comics? What?

Also, the meat of the page seems to be too...centered? For some reason my
eyeballs like things to be on the left side of a page and not in the center.

Just my 0.02

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kolya3
The sidebar font uses the same blue as the facebook "Log in with Facebook"
above. (1) This makes me think that clicking these links will ask me to log
into Facebook (2) Overall feels like you're phishing for my Facebook
username/password. You need to explain what your site is before anyone will
feel comfortable logging into Facebook via your site. Furthermore, WHY would I
log into FB through your site? Are you going to pull in my friends list and
send them spam on my behalf? Are you going to post in my activity feed? These
are all questions that a user will have and you need to be very clear about
upfront.

------
youngj
This is one of my first Rails apps with the user profiles powered completely
by Facebook Connect. I used the Facebooker
(<http://facebooker.rubyforge.org/>) plugin, which was relatively painless to
integrate into my app.

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huhtenberg
The overall appearance of the website is "confusingly similar" to that of
typophile.com, which is a high profile and very active online community. If I
would've just randomly came across it, I would've assumed it was a typophile
spin-off.

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unohoo
Convey to the users what the site is about. After a few minutes of trying to
figure, I just didnt bother further.

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arthurk
Nice design, but what is Lit? To me it looks like a blog.

