We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism

Oh man, not another &quot;11 sexy girls with star wars tattoos&quot;...<p>Normally I would follow &quot;if you don&#x27;t have anything nice to say&quot; but since you literally asked for it:<p>Your site tries to build a better mousetrap in one of the worst corners of the internet (better means &#x27;worse&#x27; in this case). &quot;List sharing&quot; is a known cheap trick for internet marketers who are the bottom of the barrel, exploitative of both original content creators and those prone to being sucked in to mindless content (aka internet junk food).<p>Maddox has a memorable rant that sums it up better than I can: <a href="http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ranker_sucks" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net&#x2F;c.cgi?u=ranker_sucks</a><p>Your site is not unlike the &quot;reply girls&quot; cancer that devalued youtube, or the fake thumbnails showing cleavage on related videos for everything.<p>Why would you want to &quot;revolutionize the world of lists&quot;? This doesn&#x27;t even make sense.

I call BS. This appears to be a new take on &quot;Show HN&quot;...trying to get attention. The site works, looks OK, and you appear to have users, so it doesn&#x27;t really suck. If you thought the <i>concept</i> sucked, then you wouldn&#x27;t have done the site in the first place.<p>If this were a legit post, I would say this:<p>I think this is a relatively crowded niche you&#x27;re in. I&#x27;m also sure that you dramatically overspent if you actually spent $200K getting this developed. But it appears that your developers did what you asked them to do....&quot;make me a functional site that does X&quot;. So if the end result &quot;sucks&quot; to you (99.9% of your users don&#x27;t know or care about CSS and other issues mentioned in these comments), then there is only one person to blame.

Hey! I just want to say, this is awesome and I wish you the best of luck.<p>I am a Developer and I noticed a few really concerning things in your CSS:<p>1. I believe you&#x27;re committing the greatest CSS Sin: Emulating the DOM structure using nesting. Here is one example: &quot;#site-header.newheader nav&gt;ul&gt;li&gt;a.buttonGreen&quot;<p>That CSS Selector should not exist like that. You shouldn&#x27;t be using ids (first) and second this should be be: .buttonGreen {}<p>It looks like bad Sass or LESS is being used and nesting is being abused. If you&#x27;d like more advice on how to fix this I have written many talks.<p>The reason these selectors are a problem is because of the extremely long paint time. Right now your site takes around 30ms to paint. It should be closer to 10ms.<p>2. The CSS classes used are meaningless. Above there&#x27;s a &quot;buttonGreen&quot; class. However, what if you redesign and that button is now blue? Do you just edit the CSS (like should have to be done) Or do you change your HTML and CSS to reflect a basic styling change? This only hurts you and maintaining your site.<p>3. You&#x27;re loading 2.4 MB of data on your home page. 1 MB of that is images, which is fine, but that means you have 1.3 MB of data loading. The good news is that on mobile almost 100% of what you are loading are images, however, that number is still 2 megabytes. I&#x27;d see if there is a way to lower that number.<p>4. It is extremely busy. I was really confused when I got to the site. I am not a good designer so I cannot give specific advice, but I&#x27;d think &quot;calming&quot; the site would help a lot.<p>5. On Chrome Mobile I cannot click the hamburger button. It does nothing.<p>6. You need to simplify your creation flow. You have 4 pages right now, it should only be 1.<p>7. Your select boxes need a dropdown arrow.<p>8. USE NATIVE SELECTS and restyle them using CSS. Use a fallback for IE and IE only!<p>9. Mobile functionality is not the same as desktop functionality, this is a big one that needs to be fixed. You should be able to do the EXACT same things on mobile that you can on desktop.<p>10. The goal of the site should not be browsing, I don&#x27;t think. I think it should be about: Creating lists and sharing lists. Browsing should certainly be an option, but make creation and sharing more prominent than browsing.

It lacks the touch of a good designer. Everything seems slightly off... from colors, to fonts, to text placements, to 20 other small touches. It all adds up to an amateurish feel. Some examples:<p>1. The colors. Ugh.<p>2. The formatting of the content boxes should be more consistent. All pictures should go to the edge and have the same height. Logos should have padding, not stretch to the edge (e.g. YouTube). Even once this is fixed, the different palettes in the different pictures are what&#x27;s contributing to the clutter. Maybe make all the pictures b&amp;w... not sure. Do you need the chrome for these? Boxes with shading and extra lines is a bit dated. Check out digg.com for a better example of this style. Generally this is the biggest issue.<p>3. The &quot;Popular Lists&quot; graphic should be half&#x2F;half on the area above&#x2F;below. Right now, just a few pixels lay on the green area. Plus the white is too close to the off-white of the section below. If not for the shadow, I probably wouldn&#x27;t be able to tell you were going for.<p>4. Something looks odd about the font in Chrome. Certain letters seem bold, or somehow &quot;stretched&quot; a few pixels too tall. (e.g. The &quot;E&quot; from E3, the &quot;B&quot; from Best Viral Videos)<p>5. The anti-aliasing is inconsistent. Text isn&#x27;t being anti-aliased at all. The logo is anti-aliasing unnecessarily (at the top&#x2F;bottom of squared letters). The pictures seem to be low-quality JPEGs which contributes to this issue.<p>Assuming all the formatting is done via css a good designer should be able to fix most of this in a few days.

The content and audience are I suspect far more important than what your site does at this stage, and you should narrow the scope on both of those.<p>You have what looks like a serviceable site to produce lists (not really a complex challenge). I&#x27;m not sure why you think your site sucks? I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;ll get some feedback on styling, content etc (it&#x27;s not really to my taste, but hey, it&#x27;s not terrible either), but if you are seeing slow growth, it&#x27;s probably not because your site tech&#x2F;design sucks, it&#x27;s because no-one really deeply wants to make lists in the first place. The idea and marketing is the problem, not the execution.<p>So, who is the site for, what&#x27;s the target market&#x2F;demographic? Who are they making the lists for?<p>Perhaps instead of targeting everyone, you should narrow your focus, and start targeting a particular market. This sort of site needs either a very specific focus to which the list making and content are tailored - say shopping lists, or it needs a specific demographic.<p>If you want to make this a social site, perhaps target a demographic like Norwegian teens OR mums if you have experience there, but don&#x27;t target the entire world from the start.<p>If you want to make money from shopping, maybe tailor this to just best of lists of products for particular niches and invest in content?<p>As it is I don&#x27;t see how lists about <i>These 7 Things Will Make Any Man Want to Fight for You</i> and <i>Best Tracks in Mario Kart 8</i> are going to keep anyone on your site. The content just isn&#x27;t compelling at all (there are hundreds of existing content farms churning out stuff like this like buzzfeed etc) and it is far too scattershot.<p>PS Install some caching software prior to posting on HN :)

Escape them inputs, dawg!<p>www.listnerd.com&#x2F;lists?letter=&lt;&#x2F;script&gt;&lt;script&gt;alert(document.cookie);&lt;&#x2F;script&gt;

I&#x27;m surprised no one is asking the obvious question: why does this website exist? Why do I care about lists? When would I use this site? Does the world need another Buzzfeed&#x2F;Upworthy&#x2F;Viralnova? Sure, as others noted, the CSS has problems, the design looks off, and the UX is potentially confusing. But I don&#x27;t think your problems are technical. The problem is your concept: you built something the world doesn&#x27;t need.

Backstory: We run a media company and we&#x27;ve put more than $200k of our own savings into Listnerd - not counting the thousands of work hours we&#x27;ve also invested. It&#x27;s a list blogging platform &#x2F; social network centered around top lists. We&#x27;re growing extremely slow, so after 1.5 years in the grind, we&#x27;ve come to the conclusion that our site sucks. Please help us out by destroying us with your criticism.

I clicked the Create a list text on your homepage instinctively. That&#x27;s how people use the web. It should be hyperlinked.<p>I like the idea of making lists because it speaks to my passion for process. I want to be able to bookmark lists as well as monetize and own my content. If I can run my own ads on the site, then I&#x27;m less scared of creating original content through that venue. Your terms of use sucks and is not favorable.

After having a look and reading your interview with marketingstartups[1], it is quite an interesting idea.<p>It strikes me as an evolved incarnation of Buzzfeed[2] in that the entirety of its content is user-generated, whereas this wasn&#x27;t the case with Buzzfeed until recently, and even now, I believe user submissions are subject to moderation.<p>I don&#x27;t think you should give up yet. I wouldn&#x27;t. I would start by simplifying the design (sure, it looks nice, but it feels over-ornamented), defining stricter guidelines for posting (e.g. encourage &quot;Top&#x2F;Best X&quot; type posts in lieu of general free-form lists, and figure out other ways to start driving traffic to it.<p>I wish you guys the very best and again, don&#x27;t give up yet.<p>PS: Please get in touch if you&#x27;d like to talk more.<p>[1] <a href="http://marketingstartups.com/2012/12/18/interview-with-listnerd/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marketingstartups.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;12&#x2F;18&#x2F;interview-with-listn...</a> [2] <a href="http://buzzfeed.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;buzzfeed.com</a>

I like the idea but my first impression is that the front page is a tad overwhelming. I didn&#x27;t actually read the top green pane until after looking at the images, which may say something about how users look at the content.<p>Perhaps interestingly, my first click was to Browse Top Lists, only to find that Porn Actresses, Page 3 Models and Hentai artists all feature in the top 5 and 4&#x2F;9 trending lists have the same pink handbag image, even for the Best Web Apps list. You need an adult category which you can hide the NSFW lists in and then not display this to logged out users. As already noted, I think the content is your biggest problem; I may not be your target audience but regardless there&#x27;s little there to be encouraged to comment on or find inspiration from for new lists.

This is what people spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars on. Building a goddamned new LIST site.<p>Sigh. There. That&#x27;s your criticism. Shameful.

The colors and font scream &quot;Barney&quot; (like, the old kids TV show). I think they could work if you desaturated one or both of them a bit and went with a font that was a bit less &quot;fun&quot;.

Do you use your site? I mean, do you enjoy making and reading lists?<p>Honest question.

Some things I noticed...<p>The homepage fails HTML validation. 32 Errors, 7 warnings<p><a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.listnerd.com%2F&amp;charset=%28detect+automatically%29&amp;doctype=Inline&amp;group=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;validator.w3.org&#x2F;check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.listnerd....</a><p>Homepage isn&#x27;t being cached (intended?, in fact you have quite a few elements that have no caching set. Run PageSpeed Insights perhaps?<p>Login Overlay - can&#x27;t escape to close.<p>Seems I can create a list without signing up? At least, that&#x27;s what the button click seems to indicate (I didn&#x27;t go through the entire process).<p>None of the &quot;Create a List, Share It, See It&quot; images actually do anything.<p>Doing a Search on &quot;Select *&quot; resulted in your following page taking 12.06 seconds to process before returning No results found. Searching for &quot;Random&quot; took 10.24 seconds. You have a major bottleneck in your search system.<p>The blog takes you to a totally different layout. This is jarring.<p>Homepage returns quickly, but the &quot;Best Tracks in Mario Kart 8&quot; took twice as long to return. If I had to guess, you are fully rebuilding the page each load? If that&#x27;s true, did you scale that out against the database?<p>The trending lists block on the bottom of each list page is much larger then the content beside it, consider including fewer items in the list.

Hey Eric,<p>I thought Listnerd sounded familiar. You helped me out with SEO last year with your Offer HN, so I&#x27;ll try to give some useful advice back. Sorry to hear that Listnerd is struggling.<p>Listnerd doesn&#x27;t really grab my attention upon first visit. Maybe I&#x27;m not the target market but upon opening it up I&#x27;m not interested in making a list. Making a list sounds like work. Why should I spend part of my weekend doing work on some random site? I think you haven&#x27;t demonstrated a value to your visitors.<p>It also seems to bland to me. It doesn&#x27;t really differentiate itself from the more established list sites like BuzzFeed. Why should I read ListNerd over BuzzFeed or Reddit? What features, angle, or value does ListNerd bring to the table that those sites do not?<p>Some nitpicks: You should update your copyright in the footer to 2014, and the gold&#x2F;yellow color on some buttons doesn&#x27;t seem to match the rest of the color scheme.<p>Positives: I like the name. I like the create list process from a ui and design perspective.<p>Edit: I like the video on the homepage but it is hidden away. Make it more prominent.

I rather like it but how the heck did you manage to spend $200K on it? Would you mind opening up about exactly how the money was spent?

Giving my feedback about the big things I care about:<p>The biggest problem I see is that you have no HTTPS support for this site. There are very good reasons for having HTTPS even if you aren&#x27;t transmitting something you would consider &quot;secret&quot;. With modern 64-bit processors and session caching, there&#x27;s really no excuse for not having HTTPS available on every page. That said, you don&#x27;t even have HTTPS support during login, which means that password information will be completely sniffable. It&#x27;s not at all clear from the login popup that this will be the case.<p>Additionally, the actually design degrades nicely with Javascript turned off, which is commendable, but logging in&#x2F;signing up is still Javascript-only. Ideally you&#x27;d want a site that keeps all the functionality that it <i>can</i> have without Javascript with Javascript enabled. It might look slick for people using Javascript, but you really don&#x27;t need an in-tab popup for login&#x2F;signup.

After clicking around on some of the lists to get a sense of what the intended content is, I think it suffers from a little bit of an identity crisis.<p>By which I mean that the base, bottom-feeding type lists are already supremely well-covered by every other slideshow&#x2F;listicle media property (Buzzfeed, the &quot;suggested&quot; stories at the bottom of every news site), so it would probably be difficult to attract any meaningful marketshare.<p>Whereas the curated lists of items, or recommendations are all things I&#x27;d use Pinterest for. Being able to organize and customize the item information seems like it could be a competitive advantage for you (Basically on Pinterest, your options are: Make a board, put pins on it, maybe comment on the individual pins; there&#x27;s no sense of &quot;ranking&quot;).<p>And it sounds like you&#x27;re sort of looking at Pinterest&#x27;s revenue model, but their user growth is kind of crazy, so they might end up sucking up all the air of that particular vertical.

I would be very interested to hear more about the user Listnerd <a href="http://www.listnerd.com/Listnerd#lists" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listnerd.com&#x2F;Listnerd#lists</a> and how Listnerd has created 492,988 lists and received 3,072,466 votes!

I think it&#x27;s hard to say why one thing takes off like Reddit, then something else, very similar doesn&#x27;t. If you have SEO and decent organic traffic and it doesn&#x27;t take off, look to sell it and move on to another good idea. You shouldn&#x27;t continue wasting time and money unless you feel you&#x27;re not wasting it.<p>A. Why would people post their own lists to your site? What benefit do they have for doing this? No karma, raffle for free...gas or video games, nothing.<p>B. 4 long steps to create a list? Ok, fair enough. . . but I guess that brings me back to A.<p>C. You don&#x27;t provide anything different or beneficial than the current top &#x27;list&#x27; sites like pinterest and reddit provide. I think you provide less.

For some reason I arrived at the bottom of the page for the homepage and the auxillary pages I clicked to (the technology lists, then the &quot;top webpages&quot; lists).<p>I didn&#x27;t realise until reading comments here about clicking the &quot;make list&quot; button; then when I went back and looked I realised I was scrolled to the bottom on page entry. Bizarre, never seen that before, presumably a bug.<p>[FF30.0 on Ubuntu]<p>Now looking at the main page I&#x27;m trying to click on the big &quot;create a list&quot; element ... but no the button is at the top of the page, you need an arrow pointing to the button and&#x2F;or to activate the &quot;create a list&quot; element IMO.

I clicked a list. It had a list of ten little images. I clicked an image - I expected a bigger version of that image. I got the same tiny image and some text. I don&#x27;t need the text; i do need bigger images.

You seem to be resizing the footer in javascript (I haven&#x27;t looked at the code so could be off base) and sometimes it seems to go a little crazy. When I first scrolled to the bottom there was a huge empty space below the &quot;blog browse about... &quot; stuff. About 800 pixels I would estimate. It seemed to go away when I refreshed and resized the page, but something caused it to happen at least one time, so under the same conditions it will happen again.<p>In general it looks nice, I agree with most of what other people are saying so I won&#x27;t elaborate too much.

Why the self-deprecating title? You could&#x27;ve said &quot;Show HN: List blogging with Listnerd&quot;. This makes me wonder how you spent $200k and why you&#x27;re so unhappy with the result.

I&#x27;ll take a different tilt:<p>Your biggest problem is that you have 4 people listed on your team page yet there are two with the title &#x27;Project Manager&#x27;. From what I can tell from playing with the site, it just lets you build &#x27;top 10&#x27; style lists and allows people to vote&#x2F;comment on them. Frankly, this is a weekend project for a good developer or for a better outcome, a good developer&#x2F;designer pair. What exactly are the project managers doing?

Nice try but all you&#x27;ll get from HN is a bump on your analytic graphs and I bet not one real user.<p>Anyhow I wonder how you came into pouring 200k into this idea (or maybe this is a catch number to get HN attention). Did you do any sort of validation prior to that? FYI I&#x27;d built this whole site for 5% of that budget

Get rid of &#x27;beta&#x27; on the site header, there is no need for that and just makes you look cheap. I also dislike ratings on 1-10 scale (instead of 1-5, for example). What&#x27;s the difference between a 2 and a 3, for example, or 8 and 9? It take too much thought.

What&#x27;s the breakdown for $200k on a site like that? Can you tell us what&#x27;s the tech stack?

How were you expecting to make money?

I feel like I could have programmed this site in 40hrs, tops. Let&#x27;s say someone with a few years experience charged $50&#x2F;hr, that would be $2,000. You could probably at least halve that hourly rate on odesk if you wanted to.

1. Maybe the lists themselves should be ranked. I&#x27;d like to downvote &quot;top 8 tracks in Mario Kart.&quot;<p>2. The 3-panel header interferes with swipe gestures for page navigation, like, a lot. Try not to break common interactions like that.

When the list first loads, it is not visible on the screen but instead pushed down by a large margin. Also I believe many of your hits will come from google searches vs friend shares. Maybe make 100 SOE lists in house.

I can&#x27;t decide whether this is trying to be a lightweight meme site, a high quality luxury magazine product review site or some evil spin off of Facebook that my friends are just going to share ads with me.

You have a very good page rank and alexa traffic numbers (yes, taken with a grain of salt) so you must be doing something right. Have you been around for awhile, or did you buy an existing, older domain?

I think HN is the wrong kind of audience to seek feedback from for your specific site. It appears to be pop-culture&#x2F;teen culture focused, which you won&#x27;t find here in HN.

Visually it&#x27;s pretty ugly, but concept and functionality seem very sound. I liked it against my will, so just give it a makeover and you&#x27;ve likely got a winner.

I think the idea is great - I actually had the same idea last summer and built www.curate.im which ended up getting absolutely nowhere (log in with username &#x27;test&#x27; and pw &#x27;test&#x27; if you wanna see inside).<p>In terms of your actual site, the focus seems to be less on the content itself and more on sharing&#x2F;commenting on things, almost trying to force people to interact with the site. Not a huge fan of the content on there right now either - a lot of it is quite trivial Buzzfeed-esque. This isn&#x27;t inherently &#x27;bad&#x27;, but it&#x27;s just that there are plenty of sites where you can find that kind of content.

Nice idea but the design is a little dated. I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s intentional but people are fickle, and pretty &#x2F; obvious always wins.

$200k for that site is a ridiculous considering you could have learned to implement it your self and hired out the design.

Brilliant marketing stunt. Take my point.

Why would I want to do this?