[Announce] Bitquestion - bitcoin powered questions and answers

[FreeMoney]

Putting up your own bitcoin trivia questions with little bounties at random times would be good promotion.

[Transisto]

I've been waiting for this kind of product for a long time,  Will take a look.

Get ready for some hard one's.


... Sample of a kind of questions worth a lot http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/u86pi/got_hit_by_a_car_can_somebody_help_me_figure_out/c4t9m2w

[ribuck]

For what it's worth:

1. This has been done before (http://bitqna.com/) but BitQnA has almost no traffic. The fatal flaw of BitQnA is that they mix free with paid questions. Free questions drive out paid questions.

2. Your notification options don't include the most useful one: to receive an email whenever a new question is posted for answering.

3. The site seems rather slow.

4. It's bizarre to have a dollar sign in the logo of a BTC-based site.

5. The site is open to the following "social" (i.e. non-technical) exploit: Suppose Fred wants to know an answer to an important question that will require a lot of work to answer. He posts the question with a generous bounty. Lots of people work hard on the answer, and post their answers. Fred creates a second account, and posts some kind of answer similar to what the others posted, then selects his answer as the winner. In that way, he gets a high-priced answer for 10% of the cost. This is a financial attack against honest answerers by dishonest questioners.

I've also been working on a Bitcoin Q&A site, but I don't feel I have a viable business model for it yet. Everything has to be "just right" if people are going to pay for answers in a world where most things on the internet are free.

So I will be watching bitquestion.com with interest.

[wladston]

@FreeMoney: yeah, we are going to post some trivia questions in there. Search Engines technologies make it hard to find a question that is not easily replied...

@Transisto: awesome to hear that we look forward to being your dream questions platform.

@ribuck:

1.wow, thanks for the link. We didn't find that site before. We'll see what we can do to differentiate our service.

2. I didn't think that would be interesting, because the users would get ramdom questions they don't relate to. But considering we don't have much questions, we'll add this feature, thanks for the suggestion.

3.About the slowness, it seems bitcoind takes out more memory than we were expecting. We are working to make the site faster, it should be faster in a few minutes.

4. Haha, the problem is that most people don't know the bitcoin sign yet, and the dollar sign is an internationally recognized representation of money. In the future we plan to accept credit cards for buying bitcoin "credits" to ask questions too. That's our "secret" plan to spread bitcoin usage and adoption.

5. We are aware of this problem. To protect agains it, you should check the past questions the user has proposed. When the exploiter accepts his own answer, all other rejected/non-accepted proposals will show up, in the order they were posted. So it will be easy to check if a user performed this exploit. To properly fix this issue, we will work on a reputation/score based system. Users will be able to spot this exploit and "flag" the exploiter's reputation on the site. While this isn't out, we are relying on the good faith of the bitcoin community.

6. We also have doubts about the viability of the site. Maybe we'll need to make fundamental changes on the way it works. Maybe not. we are following the Lean Startup methodology and not trying to get everything right the first time, but instead learn from experience. We already think is a very good way to get your questions answered for bitcoins, so we invite you to try out the service

[ribuck]

1) we're taking a 10% commission

i like your idea, but 10% won't last in this environment.

You're right. They will need to increase it to cover the costs associated with administration, spam fighting, advertising, etc.

[wladston]

1) we're taking a 10% commission

i like your idea, but 10% won't last in this environment.

You're right. They will need to increase it to cover the costs associated with administration, spam fighting, advertising, etc.

We'll try hard to keep it at 10% (because we think it's fair) while still providing a great service. With the right algorithms, (almost) everything can be accomplished

[kiba]

What's your technology stack and is it possible that I could do some development in exchange for some bitcoin?

[kiba]

@kiba we're working with django and postgres. We definitively could use some help with the bitcoind interface, (django-bitcoin). If you are a python/django coder, please send me an email (wladston at wladston.net) and we'll talk.

I am no django developer, but I am a ruby on rails developer. Should I still apply?

[mollison]

There are four categories: Open, Discussing, Closed, and Recent.

The name of the second category is grammatically incorrect and confusing.

Does it mean: Open questions with more than one comment? (Then, the grammatical thing to call it would be "In Discussion".)

Or: are these "discussion questions," i.e., questions that will have no single, straightforward answer (stackexchange likes to close questions of that kind). If this is the case, it will take some extra work to differentiate the two types of questions. Also, it's not clear to me how a bounty would be distributed for that kind of question.

Finding a gramatically correct and precise name for this category would make the site immensely more user-friendly.

[wladston]

mollison, thanks for the awesome user feedback. We tried to explain how it works in the how_it_works page. When a question receives a reply proposal, it moves from open to the "discussing" category. The question owner has then to decide if he will accept the answer or not. If the question owner rerejects all his proposals, then the question goes back to "open". (Additionally, the question owner can ask clarification on the answer he got, but in doing so the question will still be in discussing mode)

The question owner will only be able to accept one answer proposal.

So, what would be the best name for the orange category ? we are not native english speakers!

Thanks!

[ribuck]

What about merging the "Open" and "Discussing" categories? If I visit the site, I'm interested in seeing all the currently-active questions. The old closed-off questions are not so interesting.

[gweedo]

What about merging the "Open" and "Discussing" categories? If I visit the site, I'm interested in seeing all the currently-active questions. The old closed-off questions are not so interesting.

there is a "recent" category showing all questions js

[wladston]

What about merging the "Open" and "Discussing" categories? If I visit the site, I'm interested in seeing all the currently-active questions. The old closed-off questions are not so interesting.

there is a "recent" category showing all questions js

yup, that's why we created the "recent". And we assumed most askers would be interested in seeing open questions, to avoid competing with other's people answers. Isn't that fair ?

[kiba]

People should be rewarded with partial answer somehow. One guy might not have all the parts of an answer, but several people will.

[wladston]

People should be rewarded with partial answer somehow. One guy might not have all the parts of an answer, but several people will.

Kiba, that sounds like a great idea, I haven't thought about that before. I will include this in our TODO list, thanks for the suggestion!

[wladston]

We've made some progress on accepting zero-confirmation deposits. You can check out the status of our research here : http://bitquestion.com/static/files/paper_accounts.pdf. If you find anything that looks wrong on that paper, please email/pm us.

[mollison]

mollison, thanks for the awesome user feedback. We tried to explain how it works in the how_it_works page. When a question receives a reply proposal, it moves from open to the "discussing" category. The question owner has then to decide if he will accept the answer or not. If the question owner rerejects all his proposals, then the question goes back to "open". (Additionally, the question owner can ask clarification on the answer he got, but in doing so the question will still be in discussing mode)

The question owner will only be able to accept one answer proposal.

So, what would be the best name for the orange category ? we are not native english speakers!

Thanks!

This is a great site, but right now, it's not too easily usable. It should be 100% obvious what it does and how it works to someone within 10 seconds; otherwise, you lose their attention. You should not make anyone "do work" to figure out the site. You should make it as simple as possible while retaining functionality.

In line with this, I have several suggestions.

(1) Get rid of the spash page where you choose "Ask a question now" or "View open quesitons." It's easy to see those options from the "main" interface and having the splash screen just creates an extra annoying step and places a wall of text between the user and the site.

(2) Just have "Open" and "Closed" categories.

(3) Whichever category a person is looking at, they should have a "sort" control bar that allows them to sort by value of the question or date of the question.

In general, this is an awesome site, so I hope you don't mind the feedback

[wladston]

This is a great site, but right now, it's not too easily usable. It should be 100% obvious what it does and how it works to someone within 10 seconds; otherwise, you lose their attention. You should not make anyone "do work" to figure out the site. You should make it as simple as possible while retaining functionality.

Yes, I fully agree.

(1) Get rid of the spash page where you choose "Ask a question now" or "View open quesitons." It's easy to see those options from the "main" interface and having the splash screen just creates an extra annoying step and places a wall of text between the user and the site.

I agree the splash page could get anoying after a while. But for people that *never* went into the site, if could be a good idea, don't you think ? It's a quick way to understand what the site is about within 10 seconds. I'll carry out a change that only displays the splash for fresh users. Do you think that would fully address this problem ?

(2) Just have "Open" and "Closed" categories.

For most people (not the question owner and not the question first replier), the only way to know if someone is trying to answer the question at this right moment is seeing if the question in "Open" or "Discussing". This was made to avoid double replies and it has some other hidden functionality considering the question expiration time. Do you think that was not a good design idea ? Why ?

(3) Whichever category a person is looking at, they should have a "sort" control bar that allows them to sort by value of the question or date of the question.

Yup, this is high on our todo list. We'll try to release this feature as soon as possible.

In general, this is an awesome site, so I hope you don't mind the feedback

We love the feedback! And we hope to hear more from you soon!

[kiba]

I agree the splash page could get anoying after a while. But for people that *never* went into the site, if could be a good idea, don't you think ? It's a quick way to understand what the site is about within 10 seconds. I'll carry out a change that only displays the splash for fresh users. Do you think that would fully address this problem ?

It's called data, my friend. Let data decides, not what you conjecture.

Do A/B testing or soemthing.

[wladston]

Do A/B testing or soemthing.

Indeed, we would like to experiment more with A/B tests. They are not that easy to implement but they are on our todo list.