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Show HN: Ask X anything – AMA shouldn't be a one time thing

askxanything.com

75 pointswang2bo224 comments

The main difference between this and a traditional AMA is that the AMA host agrees to answer questions beforehand.

There is no such guarantee in this product - how do you plan on combating questions that just sit idle? If questions just sit unanswered this is basically a twitter aggregate.

Yeah I don't understand the value in this as a platform to ask/answer questions. If I want to ask someone something at their twitter handle, why go through this when I can mention them directly?

The only value would be that this has a centralized placed to view questions that were answered or are waiting to be answered. Even then, AMA threads don't just vanish. You can always go back an view them or visit the tabled[0] subreddit to read the AMA without the extra comments.

[0]: tabled.reddit.com

If 1000's of people are asking the same question then its more likely to be answered.

I mean I think there could actually be value in a twitter aggregator for topics you're interested in (no idea why Twitter hasn't done something like that). But I agree.

Twitter did do something like that. Hashtags. It started as a way to help users categorize their tweets. It still serves that purpose, but it also functions as beacons to users and a way to highlight a specific sentiment.

It has some benefits for influencers to adopt it. On twitter, instagram, and youtube, the comment section is quite messy. If you're a big name, you'll be overwhelmed by questions, and same questions are asked over and over again. Going through all those questions to pick out important ones is tedious. This is basically a zendesk for them (if they want to engage with their followers). So you're right, like AMA, going from influencers' side probably has a better chance to bring the community up.

On the other hand, the fact that an important questions getting large number of thumb-ups is a statement by itself. Imagine a question for POTUS with 10k thumb-ups but got no answer from him/her. It's a headline material.

This was tried at least once before (e.g. FormSpring), and that was the exact downfall: sites like this turned into ghost towns.

I think this is a reasonable idea.

However, you have a two sided market with a classic chicken and egg conundrum.

There are two solutions to this problem. The correct one is to provide value to one side of your market without requiring a match on the other.

You could offer celebrities a standard AMA hosting facility, if you can make your product somehow better than the alternatives. This seems hard.

Better is to focus on the kind of people who will visit to ask questions. Collect together links and content (preferably syndicate it) that relate to their heroes. So find all the AMA for a celebrity and throw together interview links and the best videos you can find into a fanpage. Then share your collection with fans on reddit etc. Once you have traffic, you collect questions, then contact your celebrity and ask them to do an AMA.

Focus on niches with dedicated fans without obvious destinations for this material. Promote. Rinse. Repeat.

People have setup Github repos with issues as ongoing AMA's. I think a lot are forked from here:

https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama

Wow! Thanks! It's great to know there're DIY solutions. I will try to approach them and see what they have to say.

Doesn't ask.fm achieve the same purpose?

And there is also a curiouscat.me I wonder, is market that big for such number of clones?

and @justinkan tried Whale

1) I want to facilitate dialogue between influencers and followers, not dialogue between friends. You don't need thumb-ups/downs for the later: there's not enough interest to justify that.

2) I don't want to create another social network, and there's little chance influencers sign up here anyway. Hopefully letting influencers engage through their established channels make things easier for them.

Is this different from Quora because it relies on twitter so those who answer don't need to be on the site?

Yes, and this also brings other benefits. 1) They don't need to provide proof, as they tweet the answer from their official account. 2) They keep the engagement with their audiences in their established channels (I plan to add youtube in future too).

This is well done but the struggle is going to be getting a critical mass. If you can get one or two well known people to commit to answering questions regularly then that will attract users. A lot of people used Whale initially to ask Justin Kan questions [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/justin-kan-launches-video-...

I see what you’re trying to do here and like it conceptually. (Although I’m not sure how it compares to existing venues such as Quora, etc.) Very long way to go in making it interesting/useful from a product perspective and attracting an audience though, basically just a splash page currently.

That's also what I thought when I started developing it: I can imagine myself reading such a site when it's established and active, but building one up would be quite challenging. Someone has to try though.

Your biggest competition is more Quora instead of AMAs in my opinion

Minor correction: that "whom" should lose the M

Thanks, it's corrected.

You should add a $$ aspect on this to incentivize the Twitter users to answer for cash. YouTube does this kind of, and there's another app that does this too I forget what it's called though.

Answers will quickly lose credibility the moment an asker finds out that the answerer was monetarily compensated to answer their question.

I would think the money would come from the asker as a bounty for the answer. Where do you envision the money coming from?

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