In 1 Sentence Explain...

I do see your points, but and I'm not saying my suggestions would make it a more popular site, or give it a better chance of making money, or a better chance of lasting longer. Simply that it would make it a site that I would enjoy more.

And obviously I can see that my Bieber example was humour, and my point wasn't disagreeing with that, simply that a site for of actually insightful answers would, to me and to many others (not saying the majority) would be far more interesting, than a site full of random humoour.

Would it be a waste to get pg to write just a sentence? Perhaps, but if so that means I have picked a bad example. I've seen many examples in the past of something quite complex being explained in an easy-to-understand one seentence way, which would have left me wanting a lot more had it been in my area of expertise, but in fact I much enjoyed.

Here's an example, the P = NP problem. Sure, some people will enjoy reading pages and pages about this, but others not so much. A well-worded one sentance on why people care about it could therefore be interesting.

Add that to many other topics, and essentially you're building a database that lets people learn a very little about a wide range of areas. What was the actual logic behind schrodinger's cat, how do birds fly, why is moore's law the case?

I would enjoy browsing through that, I think. And, hopefully, some of them would be "I already knew that", some would be "I don't really care", some "that's quite interesting" and some "hmm, I need to go find out more about this".

So really I wasn't trying to slightly alter this concept, I was pitching a totally differeent purpose of an almost identical website, that in my very subjective view would be better.

It would be useful to have different ways of scoring answers, separate buttons for "funny", "insightful" or "clear".

But seriously though, thank you for your thoughts. I did not expect it to be such a hit on HN, and the website was thrown together in a couple of days.

In response to this: "you get a bunch of one-sentence explanations of widely different quality, frequently contradictory."

You are spot on. That is the world we live in - often widely different quality and frequently contradictory [in everything]. For a social experiment, to see how many people respond in a helpful way vs silly way (commenting is open - when the site isn't being hammered by HN's community) was one of the pieces of information I wanted to find out.

The other is to show that no one sentence will ever work for all, and every sentence may be helpful to someone yet annoying to another.

But the main reason 1Sentence was born: It is currently not easy to track down one sentence explanations of a topic without travelling the net hoping someone has written it. Sometimes all you need is one sentence to explain a product to another person or even yourself. So in that regard, it worked.

I appreciate your feedback and thoughts, thank you!

Diesel Laws