I have no idea what this site is. The 'about us' link in the bottom left is hidden enough to make it annoying (if this wasn't from HN, I probably would have closed the tab). When I do visit the 'About' page, it's a wall of text.
Your call-to-action of 'Apply to Join' should be far more apparent. (Assuming that is the CTA?)
Your tag line of 'The 11K Club - A Giant Space Ark Spreading the Seeds of Humanity Across the Galaxy. Join Us on Our Journey.' is bad for two reasons: 1) It's at the bottom of the page! 2) Sounds extremely pretentious -- far too grandoise. It also doesn't say what you do in any way.
We take your points about the volume of text. But this isn't the marketing stunt - the stunt has already taken place. We got 13,300 people to sign up to a site that they knew nothing about. We admitted some of those people today. The idea of the site is a community of people who help each other. They initially help young people find employment and accumulate karma in doing so. They then use their karma to barter help for themselves from the clubs members.
It's a big experiment and won't be to everyones taste. I appreciate the 'journey' page is quite long and detailed but it'll give you an idea as to what we set out to do.
The tagline was from a member - it was his reason for wanting to join something he knew nothing about. But again, we take your point and we'll look to test it a little more.
Thanks for the feedback though, it is appreciated and we'll look to make things a little clearer for those visiting the site for the first time.
