HN Explorer

My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

27 points by parker ↗ HN
Hi everyone, I just launched a side project I've been working on for the last month or so ... it's fairly simple, but I'd love your thoughts.

http://www.ChompChompDead.com --> it's roughly what happens when you get eaten by a shark. We like to think of it as open-sourced comedy.

Anyways, there's a cast of 10 members who submit articles that are rated by the public. At the end of each week, the lowest rated cast member gets demoted, while the funniest member of the community is promoted.

Basically, this is one of those 'life is too short' kind of initiatives. I just love writing and reading comedy, nothing existed like this before, I knew I could build it... so I did. I'm not really expecting to profit off of it -- I merely wanted it to exist.

I'm launching it with the help of a bunch of screenwriters and comics I know. It's amazing how much the creative world doesn't understand about the online world, and vice versa. Hopefully this is one of those things that helps to bring those two worlds closer together.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy! Maybe you can even try your hand at being funny :)...

33 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 74.2 ms ] thread
utnick
I think you are on to something here

perfect site for the aspiring onion.com writer

kyro
I think that's a really neat idea. I'd definitely visit.

However, the design needs improvement. Please stop using that font. Add some color to it. Segment the site a bit more, it seems a little jumbled to me. Perhaps encapsulate each section of the site into it's own box, like the comedy pieces and 'the cast,' etc. I had some difficulty reading the links under your header image. Give your headings/subheadings/piece headings some more differentiation - everything is black and I feel like on the home page, the heading for the first piece is a subheading for 'Fresh Kill.'

Other than that, congrats on launching. Seems like the type of field that could generate a very lively and tight knit community.

parker
Thanks for the feedback -- it's funny, I showed my design mockup to a bunch of designer friends, and they all said take the borders/boxes off of things, and leave as much white space as possible :).

As for colour on the site, I deliberately left it monochrome with the intent of focusing your attention not on the surrounding bits, but on the text in the content area. I'm guessing this might not be working in that case!

As for the font -- are you using Safari? When I was cross-browser testing I found that Safari seems to render black courier font almost grey-ishly. The reason I'm using it is because it seems to be the least represented standard font-family on the internet. It feels like it comes from another era.

Overall, the design was going for a 'film noir' aesthetic. Weird font, labeled headings, and contemporary content with a classic broadsheet-looking feel. I could be way off though, let's just say I didn't spend too much time iterating it...

kyro
Oh, I definitely understood what vibe you were going for. Perhaps it just doesn't translate well to the web, or the design feels odd because it doesn't fit inline with your typical web 2.0 design (which isn't bad).

As for your designer friends, their opinion should definitely be weightier than mine. Maybe the monochromatic theme you've given it is blurring the entire page for me.

jprobitaille
Have any of your designer friends ever seen an issue of Army Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Man)? That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the page.

Anyhow, It looks like a really cool idea. Count on me to toss in some chum soon.

J

parker
Man, I wish I could say the design was intended to be like something that cool! Alas, it's just a case of 'don't bite off more than you can chew' of working within my abilities. But that army man looks really cool. The best comedy is spartan in its presentation anyways ;)...

I look forward to your contributions. The Chum will basically turn into a chaotic comedy twitter I hope...

Prrometheus
I like your font and color. It has a very amateur, Drudge Report-esque feel to it. It fits your open-mike style comedy site.
brentr
Looks like the site has a lot of potential. I love a good laugh. I was rolling on the floor after reading the FAQs.
lux
Neat idea, but I'd like to see something more visual. When I'm looking for comedy online, I'm in more of a "stop reading, just watch" mode. That's what works well with funnyordie.com, although that feels like it's becoming more of a showcase site for already famous comedians to advertise their upcoming movies... Even the Onion has pictures with their stories.

What about allowing some images and even home-made videos in posts as well (e.g., jokes, routines, skits)? I imagine there's help for people afraid of moving pictures somewhere in Alberta... ;)

opportunity
Can you provide RSS feed so that I can subscribe it in my reader?
parker
Sure, you can subscribe @ http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChompChompDead

Feedburner may have its faults, but I still find it very useful.

opportunity
The feed has partial content. Can you publish feed with full content like TechCrunch or GigaOm does?
parker
Good point -- changed my raw feed info to full text. Thanks for pointing this out...
poppysan
Great idea, The look---not so much. It is a jumble of text and bright colors which confuses me (I had ape-brain transplant). So if you want to make an improvement, I'd start there. Otherwise, Great!
yters
Awesome, finally an intelligent social site where being funny won't draw allusions to digg and reddit:D

Anyways, I'm in. May be just the creative outlet I need.

yters
I wrote a fairly lengthy article and published it, only to find I'd been logged out:(
parker
Hmmm, thanks for the head's up, I smell a bug. I'll double check my session flow after registration tonight.
yters
It's either that, or I wasn't automatically logged in after registering. Either way, there is at least a usability bug. If a person can write a submission without logging in, then the published work should at least be caught somehow, so it doesn't disappear into the ether through a user mistake.
parker
Hey, it did actually catch in the database, it just didn't register your user number. I've put your user number on the entry now, so it's live. I think there was one page in the site that didn't carry over the session variables, but that bug has now been fixed.

Thanks for submitting, I liked your article!

xekonic
Looks interesting. I had a few good laughs.

I may have missed something, but it seems that some articles i'm able to chomp, while others im not. Is this intended, or a bug? I thought one was hilarious, when to chomp it, and it said "Chomped!" I hadn't chomped it. So I was a bit confused. Bug maybe?

parker
Yeah I noticed the non-member chomping seemed a bit weird, I'm going to double check this tonight, thanks for the feedback. Basically, it should allow one vote on each story for each unique IP, whether you're logged in or not. I hope it's not allowing only one vote total for each non-logged in IP.

Maybe I should add a 'beta' tag at the top -- but I'm assuming my target audience wouldn't even know what that was ;)...

parker
It was a bug. Thanks again for the head's up. You should now be able to vote for anything once even when you're not registered.
izaidi
Hey, great idea. As a former comedy writer I think it's really cool you decided to focus on written content instead of the usual YouTube stuff; comedy articles are an underappreciated form these days.

I agree with those who've said the design needs some work. I can see what you were going for, but I'm not sure you got there -- film noir is a tough look to pull off on the web. The monospaced font does feel like it's from another era, but to me it feels more like the early 90s than a 40s broadsheet. Personally I'd go with a regular serif font like Georgia, with a healthy amount of linespacing. For consistency's sake, I'd also keep the number of fonts you use to an absolute minimum -- the use of Tahoma on the right sidebar makes the "Cast" and "Popular Articles" sections look sort of like RSS widgets that don't fit in with the rest of the content. All that aside I do like the simplicity of the layout.

Yeah, I love the idea and I hope it takes off. Best of luck.

mattmaroon
The comedy article is hard to pull off because it's so rare an unexpected. There's not much precedent so it seems like an unusual art form. I think it would be easier to write stand-up, sit-coms, or YouTubeish videos.
izaidi
Yeah, the only really good era for written comedy was the 70s, when the National Lampoon had millions of readers. These days when comedy articles appear in the mainstream they're almost always in the fake news format, which is pretty rigid. Even the more creative outlets like McSweeney's have a fairly narrow style.

There are a bunch of decent college humor publications out there, though, and some of them have wide readership at their campuses. There might be a large enough base of people familiar with the form for it to get some mainstream traction again, if it's given the chance.

mattmaroon
Yeah, that's awesome. Very impressed.

I agree about the design, it's just too colorless. And this is coming from someone who does a lot of design for a lot of different things and always has people tell him he uses too much black and white.

parker
Thanks Matt, I'm glad you dig the concept. The simple comedy article is a lost art imo. A lot of sites buried themselves into one format or another, which is why I like the concept of leaving the format entirely up to the writer. In that regard, entertainment is generic. As long as people like it, it'll get the support.

My original idea was to have everything black/white, and then have like insanely weird mouseovers on things, but it ended up looking like an 80's ode to graffiti gone horribly wrong. Perhaps I went a little too crazy on the simplicity front.

willphipps
This is a cool idea - but I think you definitely should have video.

If you could reach out to the stand up community and get them submitting videos it'd be cool - there are thousands of them as well, so filtering the good stuff is always tricky. Maybe you could tie your voting system into that.

If you are using wordpress I would recommend showinabox.tv - it lets you easily add video to your blog and let people subscribe to it. I'd consider offering footage in HD or Hi-Resolution on Miro (www.getmiro.com) it's by far the best video rss aggregator. I think youtube videos are such poor quality they really don't do most videos justice, when there is an opportunity for people to watch them full screen in DVD quality.