> Forums/Q&A involve waiting for answers within a permitted-QA context.
The question primes the brain for the answer. You can use that socratic lead structure without going with a traditional Q&A wait-and-pray approach (ala Stack Exchange, Answers.com, Yahoo Answers, and so on). It does require a specific system design though. You can induce and control the Q&As around a topic, you don't need to wait. Doing it intentionally and rigidly, in some cases leads to a far superior system, as opposed to the chaos and quality problems of junk filled Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers or Answers.com. In the history of the Web only one major traditional Q&A site has ever gotten it really right over time, that's Stack Exchange (and we'll see yet if their commercial interests don't erode what they accomplished, as the VCs demand their exit). The track record is abysmal because most Q&A sites are beholden to an inherently bad approach: relying heavily (and allowing) on large volumes of people with no specialization or passion for a subject to ask & answer questions (so you get a lot of low quality drive-by answers that have to be moderated away or tolerated). It's the equivalent of walking into McDonald's and expecting a five star experience, and then being surprised when it's not (when it was obvious all along exactly what was going to happen, only one outcome was possible). wikiHow, as one example, has persisted (while nearly all other how-to sites have died off in the age of Google Penguin/Panda/etc) at a modestly sound quality for so long, because they set the hows, rather than just waiting around for junk how-to questions to be asked and answered in a mediocre fashion by low quality drive-by contributors; and they accept a lower level of commercialism and volume. wikiHow worked because they do hows in a similar way conceptually to how Wikipedia does topic pages (it's all rather preordained down a strict funnel, instead of wild flailing). You can do the same thing in other ways in the Q&A segment.
Not to mention of course in most cases a site's desperation for ad clicks and page views causes them to intentionally allow volumes of low quality trash to populate their Q&A systems (what Quora turned to as it became obvious they couldn't fulfill their valuation otherwise), instead of aggressively pursuing only quality. Quality in the knowledge space is very slow, it takes enormous amounts of time and requires aggressive, consistent, persistent moderation. It takes a long time to build a high quality knowledge culture that self-reinforces, self-protects.
I don't personally believe all questions have merit, quite the opposite. This is another core flaw to the typical Q&A site. Few questions - in the grand scheme of all likely human-generated questions - have much wide merit. Numerous low value Q&A sites have overwhelmingly demonstrated that to be true over time. It's millions of people walking by, spitting on the sidewalk, and calling it art.
> Therefore slow, not guaranteed, indexed chronologically not logically
Slow is ok. Very few things of great value are built quickly, that's true today, and it has been true throughout history.
Guaranteed you can heavily influence, by adding source requirements and restricting contribution (stepped barriers to contribution, and site-culture acting as an enforcer). I use a system that adds more friction to contribution than Wikipedia for example (I don't directly compete with them, I'm not building another encyclopedia), however there are aspects to my system that play to that approach better than it would on Wikipedia, so it evens out. You also want to build a culture that regulates low quality contributions, including brief / incomplete; you can do some of that technically, however you ultimately need a human culture involved at the center, I believe it'll still be another few decades at least before AI can do it effectively enough top to bottom.
Indexing order can be influenced and dictated by editors into a logical structure, although this buckles under duress on the standard messy high volume Q&A sites with millions of people spitting on the sidewalk. Those are too disorganized, unstructured for that bottling / silo approach to work. The typical Q&A site is a landfill; landfills are mostly filled with high volumes of low value trash, you don't want to go in there and try to logically order it; it's a large amount of effort for a small payoff because the content isn't very valuable (does this rotten banana peel go before that one). You have to narrow the Q&As in topic, quality and volume, on the basis that not every question matters. If you believe every question & answer matters as a site, you end up as Yahoo Answers or Answers.com (ie worthless in the end).
Agreed. I wouldn't want to waste my time reading or organizing trash info. Focusing on high quality info makes sense. Time is limited so we better make and live using efficient systems. Without the clickbait adpalooza value inversion from typical VCs or a high burn rate.
I wonder how far you are in crafting the specific user experience. I create an account with my email/username/password then... I choose a topic to enter? Can anyone add a topic (reddit)? Or admin controlled topics (4chan)? No default topic isolation (hackernews)? Can questions be tagged with multiple topics (robotics, business)? How many sections do I see on the pretopic/posttopic pages (chrono index, logical-curated index, valuable-computed index)? Are normal questions excluded from primary sections (lesswrong)? What can curators/moderators do? How do I become a curator/moderator?
You are right about quality answers requiring passionate experts. And they like it when their great answers STICK. Data persistence (no "erasure after X days"). Higher positional visibility on the question page. Well formed question/tags complementing answer text for on-site/off-site SEO. Natural index that leads guidance-seeking novices/journeymen to learning-curved versatile-valuable answers without additional searching/questioning. Popularity of the infosite itself.
2 key points of consideration. 1. Learn from what existing platforms did right and wrong (stack exchange) and make sure you are sufficiently innovating. 2. Determine your platform design direction/niche by simulating concrete examples (agriculture, Q: tutorials for starting a smallscale commercial fruit/vegetable farm?). I would like to hear your thoughts on how you currently want the site/curation to process/organize that example question.
> I wonder how far you are in crafting the specific user experience.
In terms of launch to the public? 96% complete user experience. A few days of work at this point. In terms of the grand scheme of things, difficult to guess how user interaction & input will alter everything over the coming years.
> And they like it when their great answers STICK. Data persistence (no "erasure after X days").
Contributions are persistent based on their quality. They can be replaced by higher quality content, or removed based on spam / abuse and similar. Otherwise, quality contributions never expire and never lose their value (they don't vanish a billion pages deep, never to be seen again).
> Can questions be tagged with multiple topics (robotics, business)?
Tags are evil (in my opinion) outside of very specific platform types and should largely be avoided. It's an extra distraction, extra friction, extra layer of complexity, extra effort. All negative for the majority of contributors. It can work ok on a site like Stackoverflow, where you have a highly technical audience that will happily nerd out with tags. Less technical persons (most people) will hate dealing with tags. If you can do a thing without tags, it's almost always better to do it without.
> How many sections do I see on the pretopic/posttopic pages (chrono index, logical-curated index, valuable-computed index)?
Logical curated indexing. Sections (content sections or areas, like categories, I assume) are intentionally avoided for the same reason as tags. I've gone to great effort to avoid complexity. I probably put as much time into that as anything, it requires a constant vigilance to avoid bloat and unnecessary 'features.' It's beautiful in its simplicity, hopefully editors will just get it thanks to that, it functions mostly in an obvious fashion (in part by limiting what can be done to a very clear, small set of actions; small, simple actions producing potent combined outcomes over time, that's the ideal).
> What can curators/moderators do? How do I become a curator/moderator?
Almost anything, in stepped fashion. You join to begin contributing (you can do this thing initially, but can't do that thing yet), and you contribute to acquire granular influence over most everything on the site. As you prove you're not a spammer, a bot, a belligerent asshole, a low quality contributor, you acquire mod 'rank' that gives you permissions and greater influence on content. I can pretty easily change the granularity of the whole system, to adjust as I see how editors impact things, where abuse is happening, or where I need less friction on contribution.
Ranking up is not automatic, so it can't be gamed in automated fashion (which would unleash wild abuse). It works on a system from E0 (editor level zero; read-only punishment) to E5 (me), and starts at E1; editors max out at E4. Once you're high enough you can upgrade other editors in a limited way, which is where I begin to delegate outward to the community of editors. I start it, act as benevolent dictator, try to shepherd a proper self-sustaining culture, and then hand it off increasingly over time.
It has a discussion system built into to its backbone, that enables editors to effectively communicate and give feedback to eachother during content building. It should also further community broadly speaking, including system feedback. I'm debating whether to eventually add an inbox editor-to-editor messaging system, I think I might with enough usage (early on it would just be negative complexity layered on top, one more thing to get in the way); I like the idea of all communication being viewable by editors on the platform, so that goes against the inbox concept.
It has a community hub system that shows all activity, all content creation, occurring on the system at that time or in the past. You can scope in on any given activity and it's all basically permanent record (unless there's something particularly bad that has to be literally removed, doxing for example).
> and make sure you are sufficiently innovating
You know what's interesting about the knowledge space right now? These days it's so barren and filled with piles of rotting corpses (most of which have been rotting for a decade and barely qualify as functioning services now), that that issue (make sure you're innovating) isn't something I've spent much time worrying about. What were the last interesting knowledge platforms? Quora 11 years ago, Stackoverflow 12 years ago. Maybe Genius as well (but it has contracted back into itself, back to lyrics). Wikipedia is almost old enough to drink. Few are doing anything in the space. There's no money in it (better to chase enterprise SaaS or fintech), so VCs aren't very interested (every decade or so they collectively forget the past mistakes they made and fund a new round of knowledge landfills they'll run into the ground) - it's a wonderful time and opportunity because of all of that.
> 2. Determine your platform design direction/niche by simulating concrete examples (agriculture, Q: tutorials for starting a smallscale commercial fruit/vegetable farm?). I would like to hear your thoughts on how you currently want the site/curation to process/organize that example question.
It doesn't have sections (eg agriculture), it's not a niche service, and it doesn't do how-to questions or stand-alone question answering. This concept has never existed before at scale, it's unusual in its approach, and it'll immediately make sense. I don't know if editors will take to the knowledge format / approach, we'll see.
Let me frame it better: you don't ask questions on this service. You use questions.
Junk info removed, mediocre info replaced, tags avoided, logically indexed, curation anti-gaming power-tiered, simplicity focused. I like the principles a lot.
I assume that "using questions" means something like contributors post pre-answered questions, hearkening back to the "questions prime the reader for the knowledge" idea you mentioned earlier. Also was glad to hear you're keeping design elements flexible to upgrade to whatever works better.
Sounds a bit like hackernews for compact knowledge, and I am curious how you will handle the contribution rules without sectioning (what kind of info is allowed) and logical indexing design.
I'd love to take a look and offer my thoughts when you're ready for private review. It's hard to find people who share a proactive passion for the progression of knowledge systems. Couldn't find your email on your hackernews bio, so just email me instead!
Your assumption is on the right track. There are ways to use questions, in how they prepare the reader's brain to receive knowledge, that most services are entirely oblivious to. I won't pretend my system is a great advancement, it might fail entirely and accomplish nothing; however, it's absurd how little is actually being done in the space by the major players. I think it's because they largely don't care about knowledge and don't have a true knowledge mission; they're VC businesses playing pretend at it. Quora for example is a clone of a clone of a clone, there's nothing special about it other than it has very modest Silicon Valley refinement. It's the 427th Q&A site in terms of lineage. Their initial one-trick pony was elitism ala FB's Harvard.edu: getting elite people in tech to jump-start it, which pulled in the next tiers of contributors (and they all abandoned it accordingly as it went south, as the elites had no real personal stake in the health of the system; the elites that used to answer questions & interact moved on to posting selfies and stories on Instagram, never thinking about Quora again).
You have the traditional Answers.com Q&A format, which was quasi perfected (maybe as much as possible until AI systems get a lot better) by Stackoverflow. Little has been done with it, mostly what Stack did was aggressively fix moderation and focus on high quality content (and keep the focus there for a long time). You can build a great service just by doing some of those things right, and sticking to it, of course.
You have the knowledge segment technicians, that focus on obtuse, abstract, distant, disconnected technical solutions to structuring knowledge. The semantic Web bullshit (Freebase was a failed product of that) from 10-15 years ago was largely a stillborn spawn of that realm. You still have an army of obsessive knowledge technicians messing with similar semantic Web concepts, having entirely failed to understand the failure of that era and that the knowledge structure isn't even remotely the most important aspect to getting to the proper end goal of maximum knowledge distribution & access. Those hyper technical system efforts almost always die on the lab floor so to speak, and almost never actually impact or benefit the end users: the billions of readers out there on the Internet. It's like living in an ivory tower and never touching the end knowledge consumer. Wikipedia at its heart is a very dumb encyclopedia in terms of its technical structure, and it has done radically more for traditional knowledge access & distribution than just about any other modern service (save Google of course).
The next great knowledge service will probably not be great because it has a revolutionary technical underpinning like a more advanced Freebase or similar. Those efforts will continue to fall flat, because the end reader/consumer does not care about any of that, it's superfluous to what they want. It's like great engineers that can't build great products because they don't understand the user at all and that most people aren't interested in highly technical or complex solutions (tendency toward over-engineering, having no Steve Jobs-like taste or touch for product). Freebase and many technical knowledge solutions put a lot of the technical capabilities in the reader's face in presentation; the key to eg Google succeeding was that it hid all of its incredible complexity behind a single input box of ultimate simplicity. The next great knowledge service will be quasi-dumb in terms of advanced knowledge structure, more like Wikipedia (and or it will otherwise entirely hide its advanced technical structure from the reader and appear dumb / simple on the outside).
The question primes the brain for the answer. You can use that socratic lead structure without going with a traditional Q&A wait-and-pray approach (ala Stack Exchange, Answers.com, Yahoo Answers, and so on). It does require a specific system design though. You can induce and control the Q&As around a topic, you don't need to wait. Doing it intentionally and rigidly, in some cases leads to a far superior system, as opposed to the chaos and quality problems of junk filled Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers or Answers.com. In the history of the Web only one major traditional Q&A site has ever gotten it really right over time, that's Stack Exchange (and we'll see yet if their commercial interests don't erode what they accomplished, as the VCs demand their exit). The track record is abysmal because most Q&A sites are beholden to an inherently bad approach: relying heavily (and allowing) on large volumes of people with no specialization or passion for a subject to ask & answer questions (so you get a lot of low quality drive-by answers that have to be moderated away or tolerated). It's the equivalent of walking into McDonald's and expecting a five star experience, and then being surprised when it's not (when it was obvious all along exactly what was going to happen, only one outcome was possible). wikiHow, as one example, has persisted (while nearly all other how-to sites have died off in the age of Google Penguin/Panda/etc) at a modestly sound quality for so long, because they set the hows, rather than just waiting around for junk how-to questions to be asked and answered in a mediocre fashion by low quality drive-by contributors; and they accept a lower level of commercialism and volume. wikiHow worked because they do hows in a similar way conceptually to how Wikipedia does topic pages (it's all rather preordained down a strict funnel, instead of wild flailing). You can do the same thing in other ways in the Q&A segment.
Not to mention of course in most cases a site's desperation for ad clicks and page views causes them to intentionally allow volumes of low quality trash to populate their Q&A systems (what Quora turned to as it became obvious they couldn't fulfill their valuation otherwise), instead of aggressively pursuing only quality. Quality in the knowledge space is very slow, it takes enormous amounts of time and requires aggressive, consistent, persistent moderation. It takes a long time to build a high quality knowledge culture that self-reinforces, self-protects.
I don't personally believe all questions have merit, quite the opposite. This is another core flaw to the typical Q&A site. Few questions - in the grand scheme of all likely human-generated questions - have much wide merit. Numerous low value Q&A sites have overwhelmingly demonstrated that to be true over time. It's millions of people walking by, spitting on the sidewalk, and calling it art.
> Therefore slow, not guaranteed, indexed chronologically not logically
Slow is ok. Very few things of great value are built quickly, that's true today, and it has been true throughout history.
Guaranteed you can heavily influence, by adding source requirements and restricting contribution (stepped barriers to contribution, and site-culture acting as an enforcer). I use a system that adds more friction to contribution than Wikipedia for example (I don't directly compete with them, I'm not building another encyclopedia), however there are aspects to my system that play to that approach better than it would on Wikipedia, so it evens out. You also want to build a culture that regulates low quality contributions, including brief / incomplete; you can do some of that technically, however you ultimately need a human culture involved at the center, I believe it'll still be another few decades at least before AI can do it effectively enough top to bottom.
Indexing order can be influenced and dictated by editors into a logical structure, although this buckles under duress on the standard messy high volume Q&A sites with millions of people spitting on the sidewalk. Those are too disorganized, unstructured for that bottling / silo approach to work. The typical Q&A site is a landfill; landfills are mostly filled with high volumes of low value trash, you don't want to go in there and try to logically order it; it's a large amount of effort for a small payoff because the content isn't very valuable (does this rotten banana peel go before that one). You have to narrow the Q&As in topic, quality and volume, on the basis that not every question matters. If you believe every question & answer matters as a site, you end up as Yahoo Answers or Answers.com (ie worthless in the end).