Hi HN, I am developing LeanReviews with a goal to make it easier to share opinions about anything people care about. People often have lots of opinions about lots of things but dont usually write elaborate reviews. LeanReviews makes sharing quick reviews almost trivial. I had submitted this to HN about a week ago but could not get any response. So I revamped some things and am resubmitting. I hope I get some feedback - any feedback is good feedback. Thanks.
Hey thanks for the feedback. You are right need to look at the UI. Also, thanks for pointing out the bug. Main issue presently is that I am not getting much feedback. Is this form of review/opinion visualisation something that people want? There is a network effects problem.
I think that even if it is only something that interests 25% of people, the data is worth a lot more than the service and perhaps you need to find a way of using it.
I think the user submitted reviews/opinions would be very useful. Since review submission is easy, probably a lot of people might choose to submit their opinions. This would mean that we can asymptotically approach the true crowd opinion about something. This is definitely a hypothesis but the content in such a case would be very useful. Lead generation, brand awareness measurement, quick buy/dont buy decision helper, random content exploration, etc. are some possible uses.
Hey thanks for the suggestion. I was also thinking of doing something along those lines. However, dont have enough content presently. Some kind of sentiment analysis would be useful.
Not much presently. Its just restricted to the bar chart. Infact that is mostly another form of visualisation of the content. There isnt much content presently for doing sentiment analysis where you could show a goodness meter for something based on the words being submitted as reviews. I am not finding much time to work on new features between collecting seed content, finding users, getting feedback, etc. Of course, that cannot be an excuse for not getting the features done. Infact there are lots of other items in the pipeline that need to be done - eg. spell check, more general search - presently its mostly exact match with some help from autocomplete, social integration, chat, etc.
1. There is not much user input validation, if any. For example, I submitted <h1>Broken</h1> to the San Francisco page, and it broke the "Explore Review Frequencies" section.
2. There is no checking for repeating submissions. Using a while loop on "send_review('stuff')" repeated my submission until I refreshed the page. A way to fix this would be to save an array of user ids per topic, but unfortunately that would require user login. Or, you could save an array of ip addresses, though obviously there are easy ways to get around that.
Hey thanks for letting me know of the bugs. Presently I am not disallowing repeated submissions. Earlier submitting a review required you to be logged in. However, I thought that might put off users who didnt want to go to the hassle of signing up with an account. But yes that is something I need to solve. Also, you are correct - there is not much user input validation. So lots of work that needs to be done.