Neat site, but not sure how well the content scales. Pithy rhymes and alliteration get stale pretty quickly. Obviously, the beauty of Urban Dictionary is the ability to lookup words that are actually in use. So it has practical utility outside of its obvious entertainment value. Not sure this works the same way.
Thanks for the feedback! We're just starting out and this is an excellent stress test for us... Any other concerns or comments are greatly appreciated.
Alliteration and portmanteau are a given for something like this. However, we designed the site to be able to handle submissions like foreign words, obscure English words, and also completely made-up words. Additionally, the scenarios don't necessarily need to be word-less lexical gaps! They can describe something which may already have a bunch of words associated with it - the WFT platform being used, in that case, as a voting (or popularity contest) system for the existing slang. Last, to counter the practicality of UD, WFT has the ability to search based on the scenarios and keywords. Once our databases are bit more filled out, users will be able to come to the site to search for a situation and see the most commonly-used (or most clever or whatever) words for that.
I do agree, however, that it may take some effort and some tweaking of the site to encourage something more than the lowest-common-denominator submissions from the general public. Then again, there's a trade-off there between improving content and alienating potential users.
Thanks for the feedback though! Lots to think about!
Sorry for the stalkwardness, but I guess my horrorlarity made everyone feel totally brewed.
Now could those who're downvoting me please tell me what about my feedback they found either inaccurate or irrelevant?
A site like this, if it becomes popular, will absolutely further the trend of everyone wanting to talk like they're a Zooey Deschanel character. Which may or may not be a good thing. Agree? Disagree?
I'll rephrase it: the definitions on the site, or at least the few-dozen I looked at, seem like forced attempts at a particular strain of hip cleverness. Which is what one often sees when middle-aged writers try to script hip teenagers. And in a fairly horrifying social phenomenon, it's becoming self-reenforcing amongst the target demographic.
"In Life*, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist.
"On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.
Our job, as wee see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Liffhttp://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html
KENTUCKY (adv.)
Fitting exactly and satisfyingly. The cardboard box that slides neatly into an exact
space in a garage, or the last book which exactly fills a bookshelf, is said to fit
'real nice and kentucky'.
This is actually a pretty good idea. Not sure about its longevity as Urban Dictionary tends to have a somewhat practical use, like a crowd-sourced dictionary. This is pretty fun though, I'll play around with it for a bit and see if I get hooked. The layout needs a little work I think.
Looks like a fun thing to do - especially when gamified. Execution is a bit off though. The reply process is way too complex: if you need my email and a username for no clear reason, make me sign in or let me do it anonymous. Way too many required fields for responding - I can imagine that sometimes you just want to post a word without further explanation or detail.
The design could use some streamlining, too. It looks like some spammy Q&A site now.
Wow! I didn't expect it to take off like this! Hopefully, everyone is able to access the site okay now...
We're very new still, so we very much appreciate the feedback and comments so far! I know you guys are a very knowledgeable group of people, so any other comments and feedback that you might have will absolutely be added to the backlog!
This is so great. I submitted a ton of stuff despite having to type my username and email every time. Might be hard to scale, but there's definitely a lot of potential joy in this. Many of the winning words at the moment genuinely made me giggle.
Might be interesting to see what happens if you hide the vote count until after someone votes. I look at a word I like and if the vote count is already really low, I figure it will never get to the top so I don't vote for it.
33 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 78.3 ms ] threadAlliteration and portmanteau are a given for something like this. However, we designed the site to be able to handle submissions like foreign words, obscure English words, and also completely made-up words. Additionally, the scenarios don't necessarily need to be word-less lexical gaps! They can describe something which may already have a bunch of words associated with it - the WFT platform being used, in that case, as a voting (or popularity contest) system for the existing slang. Last, to counter the practicality of UD, WFT has the ability to search based on the scenarios and keywords. Once our databases are bit more filled out, users will be able to come to the site to search for a situation and see the most commonly-used (or most clever or whatever) words for that.
I do agree, however, that it may take some effort and some tweaking of the site to encourage something more than the lowest-common-denominator submissions from the general public. Then again, there's a trade-off there between improving content and alienating potential users.
Thanks for the feedback though! Lots to think about!
Now could those who're downvoting me please tell me what about my feedback they found either inaccurate or irrelevant?
A site like this, if it becomes popular, will absolutely further the trend of everyone wanting to talk like they're a Zooey Deschanel character. Which may or may not be a good thing. Agree? Disagree?
I'll rephrase it: the definitions on the site, or at least the few-dozen I looked at, seem like forced attempts at a particular strain of hip cleverness. Which is what one often sees when middle-aged writers try to script hip teenagers. And in a fairly horrifying social phenomenon, it's becoming self-reenforcing amongst the target demographic.
"On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as wee see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Liff http://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html
The design could use some streamlining, too. It looks like some spammy Q&A site now.
We're very new still, so we very much appreciate the feedback and comments so far! I know you guys are a very knowledgeable group of people, so any other comments and feedback that you might have will absolutely be added to the backlog!
Thank you all so much!
There were several books published with compilations of them, sniglet-a-day calendars, etc.
I like this:
http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml
and thank you for this site