In 1 Sentence Explain... | Hacker News Reader

In 1 Sentence Explain...

1sentence.com

34 pointsdiesellaws30 comments

1 Sentence is an experimental concept in simplified explanations. Would love to get your feedback.

Based on a very short look around I can't see this really being interesting att all.

However, here's an idea I would like. The same website, fully moderated to the point that answers are not community-contributed, but sought out by website staff. For examplee, "In one sentence, explain what's great about SF for tech companies" you might reach out for an answer from pg, and a couple of other similar people.

And doesn't have to be all tech, or even all well-known. For example one on there was "Explain why Justin Bieber is popular". The answer "because teenage girls exist" is entirely worthless, however perhaps there is someone in the music industry who could give an actual interesting thought, in one sentence, on that topic.

I like this idea, but I think you'd have a really hard time making money off of it. People won't be spending enough time on the site to extract enough value from their visit, and the moderators and contributors you talk about would need compensation for their work in making sure the content is spot on.

The fact that this is intentionally microcontent-based makes this both interesting as well as VERY hard to monetize.

You're right, my comment was based more on a "I'd love to read this site" than "here's a good business plan". Who knows, maybe it would be possible to either extract enough revenue from it to at least compensate moderators, or perhaps just become an interesting enough place that clever people are willing to pitch in and help out for free.

Another great point - monetization. It is not impossible to monetize this website via ad words etc, however for proper moderation you would definitely need real funding/cashflow.

I didn't clarify this anywhere, however I would like to now: I never intended to make money off this website - at all.

It is just a fun challenge and a problem I wanted to solve for myself: How can I find an explanation of something in only one sentence (currently, it's all over the internet and not in one central location). So 1Sentence was my quick attempt to fulfil this need.

I appreciate your serious and well thought out feedback. I truly intended this to be a "meh, go for it" website while I focus on building my startup http://barkles.com.

It has definitely attracted the 'crazy' ones who post random and pointless info, but that is what I was aiming for.

I can lock it down for login only, and do exactly what you suggest and it could actually become a great resource. However the full moderation that is needed will take me away from Barkles, which is not what was intended.

Great to see that people are using it anyway, and having a lot of fun with it.

Although, if you do have a look around you will see some great answers amongst the stupidity, which actually helps the people who posted that (everything links back to their websites).

Again, thanks for the well thought out feedback, really appreciated.

Diesel

Was your aim just to see how people respond, or are you hoping that in 3 months, a year's time it's being actively used? And, if the latter, still as a random "look what I made in a weekend" way, or a "woah, check out how much money this brings me"?

In response to this Corin: Was your aim just to see how people respond, or are you hoping that in 3 months, a year's time it's being actively used? And, if the latter, still as a random "look what I made in a weekend" way, or a "woah, check out how much money this brings me"?

Literally just to see how people respond.

Money didn't enter my mind.

I understand where Corin is coming from but his well-meaning advice completely misses the potential. The question "Explain why Justin Bieber is popular" and the answer "because teenage girls exist" are both BRILLIANT - the fact that Corin can't see the point of them doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with him, it just means that he is out of tune with the type of humor that most normal people enjoy.

A site like this is a novelty, potentially an extremely popular one. It will never be a storehouse of proper knowledge, like a sort of mini-StackExchange, full of the sort of things that Corin might consider "worthwhile" - think logically, what would be the point of "reaching out" to Paul Graham and other worthies ... for single sentence answers!

Seriously, this thing's true destiny is to be a dynamic stage for funny thoughts and funnier answers, and in that it has tremendous potential, tremendous value.

My advice would to look beyond the constraints of your own idea of what 1sentence will be, ease off on deleting answers, let your users lead the way and ignore the advice of techies who can't see the simple beauty of your idea - these are the type of people who orignally wrote off Twitter with grand, huffy statements about not wanting to know what other people were having for breakfast, completely failing to realize that something important was shifting in how people communicate.

Well done.

Thank you so much. I literally put this together in a few days and didn't think much of it so I am happy it's been received so well.

The simplicity is what makes this work, and all your points are spot on.

In terms of the deletion, that was a pure human error - apologies.

I am surprised that even with open posting that most of the sentences were actually quite genuine. I am also surprised to see the responses are equally as genuine: http://1sentence.com/in-one-sentence-explain-programming/

There are some brilliant explanations on the website, and moving forward into a 'logged in' posting model would be the next step if I were to take it further - not sure as of yet.

The users are definitely leading the way, and it's impressive to see - I will be watching closely the next few days to see where to take it.

Thanks again for your great insight and activity on 1Sentence - very much appreciated.

Diesel

I know you weren't making this connection directly for me, but just for the record I have actually been a big fan of Twitter for quite a while ;)

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.

The problem is that you don't get a good one-sentence explanation, you get a bunch of one-sentence explanations of widely different quality, frequently contradictory.

I'm not sure this would help anyone understand anything. But to test it: I currently don't understand the Diffe-Helman Key Exchange, so I'm gonna read the explanations.

[pause]

Error establishing database connection. Well, so much for that experiment.

In one sentence explain why the server is down: Error establishing database connection. (it worked! lol)

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

We have moved it to our Cloud VPS so it should now cope with the traffic. Thanks, Diesel.

In one sentence explain how asinine 1sentence.com is.

http://1sentence.com/in-one-sentence-explain-how-asinine-thi...

Added by yours truly.

Very nice. I think the website itself provided the best answer when I visited the page: http://cl.ly/8wTr (unedited: scout's honor, and you can tell by the pixels)

Lol, yes that is a funny sentence. however, some people have found it as a good tool to get useful explanations too.

In regards to the database error, that's just because I was unprepared and did not expect 10,000+ hits in one night to a small server. We have since moved it to our VPS server, will see how that goes.

Thanks for the feedback though :)

Is one sentance supposed to make it easier to understand? Because, for example the "explain programming"-answers made it more abstract and I guess people who does not know it would not understand it after "bla bla set of instructions bla bla".

Making explanations smaller means higer abstractions which means it is often harder to understand.

Edit: I do like small explanations. Like simple-wikipedia small.

"Is one sentence supposed to make it easier to understand?" - To many = yes.

In my eyes, this would be perfect to get an explanation of new trends (e.g. a year ago it may have been this: http://1sentence.com/in-one-sentence-explain-social-media/)

But overall it's an experiment, and I didn't think many would use it (Until I posted it here: Thanks HN community).

So I will be seeing how it goes over the next few weeks, and see what the data suggests - but so far, I would say many love the simplicity of one sentence explanations.

Cheers for your feedback!

I like the concept. Has the potential to be very addictive! Needs some moderation though, I see spams.

The best question is "In one sentence explain why this hit 1st page on HN"

http://1sentence.com/in-one-sentence-explain-why-this-hit-1s...

1 Sentence is an experimental concept in simplified explanations. Thanks for trying it out!

Nice site! One suggestion, remove the "In one sentence explain" from the posts. My eyes get tired of seeing that over and over...

Thanks mcphilip. Agreed. I will look into that. Thanks for the suggestion.

I like it - a good destination for a few minutes of diversion and good to hone your technical writing skills.

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

Thanks zwieback!

It's very limited in functionality currently, and it was built as a side project to http://barkles.com - I won't be putting much time into 1Sentence, but that is a great suggestion - and if there is a way to implement it with Disqus comments I will surely consider it.

Thanks!

Next move: 140characters. Sure, constrains are good and often lead to creativity but arbitrary constraints… I am not sure about.

Thanks rimantas - we are working on a 200 character limit side by side debating platform - its currently in private Alpha testing and working well so far.

http://barkles.com

Did this idea come from Reddit?

No, I didn't use Reddit. It just came from my mind and want for a one sentence explanation to something.

I was thinking the same thing. The first thing that popped into my head was r/explainlikeimfive.

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