Ask HN: Would you answer Yes or No questions for 5 cents a pop? Why or why not? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you answer Yes or No questions for 5 cents a pop? Why or why not?

4 pointshsikka15 comments

I was thinking of starting a project where people can ask you simple yes or no questions and you get paid 5 cents! Just to see what people think!

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I suspect the hard part would be finding people to pay to get their questions answered.

Sure I could spend £10 and ask a bunch of random people "Do you like cake?", but without more detail such questions will be simplistic.

If the answerers are being paid to respond it's only a matter of time until they get replaced by bots. I'd spend a few hours writing something to scrape an email, SMS, or web-page and just reply "yes, yes, no, no, yes, yes" if I was going to earn money from it.

In short it's a cute idea, a kind of crowd-sourced yahoo-answers, but "Yes/No" feels like too easy a reply. Forcing users to respond "properly" with actual detail doesn't help much either, if you get a question like "Why is the sky blue?". 50% of people will copy&paste from wikipedia, 25% of the people will think "That's too hard, I'll wait for another question", and the remaining 25% will say "God", "It just is", or "The answer doesn't matter, if it weren't blue you'd just ask why is it red".

In short:

* Simple questions are too simple.

* Complex questions will probably go to the wrong people, but they'll reply anyway to earn their money.

* You need to be able to "Judge" answerers on different metrics to stop bots.

* I suspect many answers would benefit from direct conversation between poster and replier; for example you might say "Your answer was interesting, but why did you say XX?" (i.e. Allow answers to be interactively refined.)

To extrapolate this a bit... it could be effective to ask a credit card provider a well phrased question 'how many people buy cake at 8am' and use their data-set which is probably being put into phase for this type of question now, but this feel a tangent from the original premise.

Ironically, the people that said "No" just answered a binary question for $0.00. So, does that mean their answer is "yes"?

Exactly ;)

No. It means they are willing to do it for free, not for $0.05.

If you do something for free, you show you are a nice person. If you do it for $0.05, you show you are poor or a cheapskate.

Dont be so quick to draw the QED tombstone!

The OP is asking about answering questions plural as a low paid freelance gig.

Someone who cuts their grandmas lawn isn't saying they want to cut everyone's lawn for $5 each.

You're asking the wrong question. Everyone will agree to answer yes or no questions for 5 cents. As another user mentioned, people get excited and think they could be earning $90 per hour, so you'll hear lots of people supporting your idea.

In reality you're going to have a difficult time finding people willing to pay for those answers, and that's where you'll succeed or fail. People answering questions will certainly not be earning $90 per hour, but they''ll be lucky to earn 10 cents per week, because I guarantee you'll be short on questions.

There are also countless reward services that pay people for answering questions or surveys, watching videos, signing up for offers, etc. As someone mentioned on Reddit, Google even has one (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...).

Folks on Reddit seem enthused! https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5x7evy/people_of...

Depends on the person's financial state at the time. The contradiction this question gets to is ,if the question is worth a throw away amount, then no. But if the questioner research s the questionees expertise and pays to access it then yes.

Basically a long way to say no

No. The questions I'm likely to be interested in answering are worth more than that. I fill out a survey for fun or to move the needle on some pet issue occasionally, but doing it for pennies seems neither fun nor profitable.

You'd need some kind of captcha to stop bots, which would probable be prohibitive.

Or human bots, as @ 2 seconds per question, that would be $90 dollars per hour.

Right. The platform I was thinking about was mobile, so bots may be prevented there? Also the human bots would probably be bottlenecked by the fact that there would need to be askers asking the questions. Essentially, I am thinking of charging 8 cents to the askers per person.

I think you will find more then enough people willing to answer questions. Not necessarily hn readers though... Your bottleneck will be the question askers, people who want to ask (random) people questions. You would at least need to have some audience selection, e.g. only ask this question to asian females aged 28-48 interested in crocheting. That way the question askers maybe get some value out of it.

no, because thats a shitty use of my time. but i know lots of people who would happily sit in front of a computer clicking yes or no all day.

at ten questions per minute, thats a decent salary for a lot of folks.

No, it seems like a dead end way to make money.

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