the 'someone just joined this page. boom!' is so annoying and distracting. if that were to stay, i wouldn't ever use the site.<p>what it says to me is, 'we are more interested in eye candy then real features'.<p>why?<p>because you are constantly trying to distract me from the actual content.<p>the 'take another poll' button constantly gets covered by the noise.<p>the techie side feels the need to tell you that i had to get my cursor in just the right place ( using latest google chrome ) to even make the next poll button work, that is when an annoying 'someone just voted' message would let me. i tried. took me 2 minutes to manage to click it.
I'm really tired of subjective words like "beautiful" in the title. What makes this particularly beautiful? It's a fake wood-grain background with a few buttons and randomly-indented gravitars.<p>Let's try and stay away from ad copy for showing off our projects on HN. "I made this" is enough reason to click the link.
I have to say I didn't enjoy it. The pops on the side are pointless and annoying and the ad placement on the side just helps show how poor the flow of the page is setup. The next arrow on the side feels like it was just tacked on like a sticker on some random stall. Comments themselves have some weird padding between the headshot and the text etc... Maybe some people like it but it's not how I would have done it.
When I choose a poll option I immediately get taken to a page with just an ad on it. Perhaps one of your advertiser's use of document.write is to blame?
I prefer the cleanliness and simplicity of Google's Spreadsheet functionality that enables polling, as well as the free real-time results, graphing options, API, etc.