Thanks for your colorful comment. You’re so observant: YouTube does indeed have ratings! In fact, every site on the web has similar rating systems. But behind the scenes, in the real world of business, people actually care about the quality of those ratings. It’s called media research, and it’s a $1b service business. No other site except CrowdRules deals effectively with this issue. That’s why we built CrowdRules.

* Shawn: Sorry that the site didn’t make a good first impression on you. I hope you and others look around more, because there’s more to it than you noticed at first glance.

* Rayne: Good questions:

- Why Ruby on Rails? Different tools fit different needs. PHP lets me make a quick site, but is a pain once it gets complicated. Java lets me write enterprise-grade applications, but requires an immense amount of effort to build and even more to change. Ruby on Rails is a valuable middle ground between these that let the small CrowdRules development team quickly build a sophisticated, maintainable application that we could rapidly adapt to new requirements. Some call this “cool”, while others describe it as a “smart business decision”. I recommend you spend a weekend skimming through Dave Thomas’ “Agile Web Development with Rails” book to see what the big deal is all about.

- Why Macs? Not sure. CrowdRules was built and deployed on Linux. Using Linux gave us a productive desktop environment and solid server platform. It included many excellent packages that sped up development, and made it possible to custom-built a high-availability cluster and put into production within weeks, rather than months. Its flexibility also let us automate all the setup and maintenance of systems, applications and dependences. In a few minutes, these scripts can install a new developer desktop, create a virtual machine, or build a new cluster on servers thousands of miles away, and then update these with a single command. The combination of these features make Linux hard to beat.

I have to think there’s value in an honest voting system.

Thanks for taking the time to visit the site and write a comment.

While everyone has their own ideas of our site design – some love it, some hate it, most are neutral – I’m sorry that you didn’t take the time to use CrowdRules and find out what we actually do. There’s a lot more there than you described.

CrowdRules is a contest-based system that allows people to do question and answers with videos. Many people using our site are creating their own video questions and responses. CrowdRules primarily allows businesses and individuals to do self-serve media research, which is a $1b service business ripe for disruption by a free site such as ours. For movie studios, record labels, and anyone else running contests one-off, this is a godsend. No-one else has provided this service except bix, and bix’s voting can easily be gamed.

CrowdRules may at first glance appear – to someone looking at just one or two pages – to only be about linking YouTube videos and rating them. Perhaps that’s our fault for not making things perfectly clear about what you can do on the site. And I agree with you that such a site would truly be a boring and old concept, not to mention patently absurd, and a waste of tens of thousands of lines of RoR code. That’s why what you described is the tip of the iceberg for our site. We’re adults. We wouldn’t waste our time. We thought this out.

We are taking advantage of the fact that our users can park their videos at YouTube, or Veoh, or Brightcove, or any other video sharing site, then link them to us. Using YouTube is a convenience for our members, but this is not about rating YouTube videos. Even in its simplest form, people are grabbing dozens of videos from other sites and using their friends to create a collaborative video ranking list, another service that no one else provides. And YouTube ratings are among the most gamed ratings on the web. Their rating system is completely useless.

So, the fact that you didn’t take the time to find out more about the site most likely means that it’s not for you. That’s okay. But there are people who get it and are finding it quite useful.

Thanks.
David

Horrible site design as well.

I know that its a server-side language, but really – what’s the big deal about Ruby, or Ruby on Rails? It has a rather vocal fanbase, and it is associated with some of the best-designed programming-centric websites (Ruby, RoR, RailConf, Engine Yard, FiveRuns, etc.) out there (compare to the PHP or Java websites)

Also, why is it that I just happen to hear “Ruby” and “Mac” in the same sentence alot? It’s as if most Ruby programmers are Mac users or something….