Cold Soup

The oddly titled discussion site “HotSoup” is up and running. Sadly, it’s even worse than I had suspected it would be. I honestly don’t know where to begin with a critical review.

From a design perspective, it make little sense to me to put the one clear piece of dynamic content (the really annoying headline bar) at the very bottom of the page. They built the site to have a significant space for ads, but have none, so that leaves a huge empty block on the page. The upper right of the homepage has a little blurb extolling the people who founded the site, but then tries to convince you it’s not about them.

Click through to a feature contributors post, and you get even more confused. Something called the V-Factor rates posts on a scale between “never” and “definitely will”, but completely fails to indicate what they will never or always do? What the hell is that?

Perhaps the most vexing thing about the site is the apparent lack of any correlation between the name and the content. Their content is divided into “Issue Loops” but that bears little relationship to Hot Soup. They might as well have called the site Eggplant.com.

Honestly, I don’t get it. I have a lot of respect for the people involved in this, but it may be the most poorly conceived idea since Kevin Federline.

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