Beautiful design and functionality.<p>As for the actual debating though, there leaves much to be desired.<p>When people argue, they simply do not put their statement out there to take its stand. They interact with the opposing arguments, and pick their points apart. What you have is simply an aggregate of a bunch of individual opinions, with no real debate going on. Responding to someone in this interface is extremely difficult, so no discussion is going to happen.<p>Maybe take a look into threading replies?
The layout is dull. I can see the two-column view as logical, but you could use that to some sort of advantage, such as having people directly talking to eachother on both sides. So you might have one argument under a column and beside it all the retorts to it.<p>Also, look into some sort of comment sanitization technique, the very first argument I saw come up was "penis penis penis" and not far below it simply "wtf".<p>This is a website that relies on user participation and right now you're not offering too much to your users.
An empty "friends" page is the most depressing part of any new social platform. (screenshot <a href="http://cl.ly/3K0s0k3s2Y332H3X0U0E" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/3K0s0k3s2Y332H3X0U0E</a>)<p>For a new user, why not start with the popular tab as the default on the stream page until they get followers/follow people?
Neat idea. I believe this is the second site I stumbled upon that has the pro/con threads laid side by side.<p>Once the traffic gets going, it might be nice to see some of the featured dogfights. Would be interesting to see whether a good percentage of the "dogfights" could be nonpolitical as well as political.
This is neat. Coincidentally, I helped build a site a while ago with much less design polish, but essentially the same idea.<p><a href="http://nooges.com" rel="nofollow">http://nooges.com</a><p>Essentially a daily topic was posted, and people could disagree or agree.<p>Hope your site does well.
Just signed up. You should have FB connect so that it can find my friends and let me see their debates, ala Quora. You should also have a publicly directory of debates so I can see what is going on.
We launched Barkles.com last Thursday and have had some incredible "Dogfights" and feedback already. We would love to hear the Hacker News community opinions - tell us what you think!
I like the interface. Really simple and it presents the content nicely. I found myself browsing quite a few of the dogfights on the homepage. Great work on it!