You should categorize because someone people wouldn't care about certain issues but will fight tooth and nail for others.
Like us being entrepreneurs, we would have an opinion on "fast fail", so we would want to get to these topics more quicker than something related to politics or sport.
Categorising allows you to focus resources on which categories drive the most traffic to the site.
Also, try to be more specific in seed content. Having broad topics thesis doesn't make for good arguments. For instance "which team is better Lakers or Celtics", may become "which team would win 2010 champion-Lakers or Celtics". It's narrower and more focus which makes for an easier argument. Broad categories require much wider and deeper knowledge to begin to address the debate.
People would like to post stuff quickly without having to signup.
Eventually, they will realize that "hey I want to track what i posted", so they sign up.
anonymous posts can very quickly change the atmosphere from thoughtful to spiteful, and it makes spamming/trolling much more difficult to stop. So you have to weigh those costs w/ the benefit of one fewer barrier to posting.
I'd argue for the opposite, allow anonymous in the beginning (during "bootstrap mode"), to minimize hurdles for new users, and switch to users only when anonymous users become a nuisance.
With the up vote and down vote arrows, have one or the other light up when you mouse over a specific one, instead of having both light up. It will make it clearer which arrow you are about to click.
I like the layout of the two sided debates over the debates with more than two sides. The two sided debates have the sides and results right in the middle at the top of the page. On debates with more than two sides, having the sides and results off to the right makes them easy to miss at first. The first debate I looked at was a more than two sided debate and because of the layout, I was a bit confused on what the sides of the debate were. It seemed like the comments were the sides because of their placement and the up/down vote arrows.
Thanks for the input, I just made the quick css change. You're right about the multi-side layout, but I couldn't really think of any other way to do it. Actually, I think if I put all the sides above the arguments horizontally they would be easier to compare and more visible. I'll test something like that out.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 46.7 ms ] threadYou should categorize because someone people wouldn't care about certain issues but will fight tooth and nail for others.
Like us being entrepreneurs, we would have an opinion on "fast fail", so we would want to get to these topics more quicker than something related to politics or sport.
Categorising allows you to focus resources on which categories drive the most traffic to the site.
Also, try to be more specific in seed content. Having broad topics thesis doesn't make for good arguments. For instance "which team is better Lakers or Celtics", may become "which team would win 2010 champion-Lakers or Celtics". It's narrower and more focus which makes for an easier argument. Broad categories require much wider and deeper knowledge to begin to address the debate.
People have a scanning behavior when they are looking on sites so they are looking for certain keywords and "zone" might not be apart of it http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
People would like to post stuff quickly without having to signup. Eventually, they will realize that "hey I want to track what i posted", so they sign up.
For an part-time and fun project this is a very cool web app. I like the simplicity and it seems like a fun way to talk about various issues.
As a startup idea, you would do better finding an idea that doesn't revolve strictly on creating a web community from scratch.
I like the layout of the two sided debates over the debates with more than two sides. The two sided debates have the sides and results right in the middle at the top of the page. On debates with more than two sides, having the sides and results off to the right makes them easy to miss at first. The first debate I looked at was a more than two sided debate and because of the layout, I was a bit confused on what the sides of the debate were. It seemed like the comments were the sides because of their placement and the up/down vote arrows.