No, you're not belittling it at all. Communicating the purpose and value of the site clearly and quickly has been a recurring problem (and we still haven't gotten it right yet).
To answer your question: The value to you is to find new stuff. So if you are interested in crime comics, you would come to Seekler to quick find some new comics to buy. Ditto with music, movies, etc. If you happen to have an opinion on some area, it'd be awesome if you made a list yourself, but it's not necessary.
For most users it will simply be a place to find new things or peoples' opinions on things, much like people go to Wikipedia for facts. I would also like to point out that we are working to help users that create lists to be able to use that information to help them discover new things. If you have a list on your favorite movies, we could suggest users' lists with similar movie tastes. This would help you to find movies on other people's lists that have similar interests to your own. Along these same lines we plan to eventually add features letting you view merged lists other than the entire community, allowing you to view merged lists on groups like your friends, people from your state, or other groupings that users might find interesting.
In that way the site will be rewarding to users who build up communities to express opinions on any common shared interest.
I think that this would be very useful. My biggest complaint would involve having to sign up and create my own lists in order to see lists that best match my own. That takes a lot of time and energy.
Perhaps utilizing lists people have created elsewhere on the internet, just to supplement things? I mean, I have all that stuff already in facebook. Perhaps you could use that information, and allow me to find other people/movies/books/magazines without having the feel like i'm putting time and effort to join a new community.
That's the only thing that would stop me from signing up and doing it all right now. (I'm playing devil's advocate just a bit, sorry for the harshness).
No, a devil's advocate is definitely what we need. I hear good feedback, not harshness.
I think you're right - the user account is going to our biggest barrier to entry. I think that using the info that already exists in a user's profile on Facebook, Myspace, etc is a great idea. For Facebook, we could build an app that grabs this data. For other services, we might just be able to scrape the data from their profiles on demand.
We definitely want to make it as easy as possible to input data into Seekler. Thanks for the great feedback.
To answer your question: The value to you is to find new stuff. So if you are interested in crime comics, you would come to Seekler to quick find some new comics to buy. Ditto with music, movies, etc. If you happen to have an opinion on some area, it'd be awesome if you made a list yourself, but it's not necessary.