Show HN: Quetree – A Q&A site that is tree-based and hierarchical

1) Well done for shipping! That is a huge achievement!

2) (For future projects) IMHO It's not advisable to work for "years" on a project without showing it to end users. It's basically a big guess. For best results make sure to start building your audience from the start. Even before you code anything. When you pick an idea to focus on, if you can't build some kind of list of people interested in it just from a landing page with a "Join the waitlist" button, then it's a big sign that the idea might not be the best or that you don't have the capacity to market it.

3) Your key premise is that people care about hierarchical Q&A. There is no true way to know this without asking people. So, again, ask them at the beginning of the "years" before writing a line of code.

4) Your site boils the ocean. It's almost impossible to build up a user base with a site that is not focused around a niche. For example, Stack Overflow's first version was focused on the topic of Tech/Coding Q&A and then they rolled out sub sites. So, your best bet will be to pick a specific niche to focus on and then when you grow and build that topic, then start to move to other topics. That is a tried and proven strategy. (Also, it's only by picking a niche that you know WHO to market to and what marketing strategy to use).

5) Your main marketing message is based around "features" but very few end users care about features they care about how your product will make their life better and how your product will make them a better person. So, your marketing copy should be about "benefits" not "features".

Please read this set of free ebooks for more info on that: https://copyhackers.com/get-it-now

6) Again, well done for shipping! If you ever work on another project I would recommend to pick something you can ship in < 3 months, even better just test it with mockups and a landing page before building anything. The sooner you can get feedback the sooner you know if you're moving in the right direction.

I hope that this feedback is taken in the spirit it is meant, which is just to be helpful.

Good luck with your project!

Community building is the most noble project on the Internet, and this is a unique attempt to organize it further. Communities, not software or commerce or entertainment, is what the Internet was motivated from in the 90's and will be the most remembered aspect in 50 years, so it is important to create experimental community harbors like these to possibly incubate future massive projects.

However, I am curious why you chose two features from which to derive your community software.

Voting: This has been demonstrated by major websites to form "mob opinions", hide individuality, and discourage of unpopular/unoriginal ideas. It is somewhat agreed by Hacker News members that voting should represent quality of comments. But as the size of a website approaches infinity (like Reddit, or Facebook comments with "liking"), this type of culture breaks down, so voting is eventually only used to game the system to promote comments that follow your personal opinion. Differing opinions are a beautiful aspect of humankind, and they are lost when a comment's score is used to make it visible in an unequal manner to other comments. Additionally, voting has little correlation with the effort that goes into a comment. A one-word reply is just as likely to have the same score as a wiki-like hand-typed article and will therefore be artificially promoted to the same level. I believe that if you're running an online news website, sure, absolutely promote "top" content. If it's a community forum, give people an equal voice.

Threading/hierarchy: Human conversation has not and will not change as a result of Internet community software. Hierarchy is unnatural, chronology is natural. If the goal of a community is to generate "answers" to "questions", sometimes this unnatural feature is necessary, but use caution and don't over-hierarchy-ize the organization. Having a "Support" and "Not support" feature like in your video demo adds to the paperwork of posting an answer while not offering much benefit, and it seems a bit O(n^2) to me.

I think we need something like this, but I'm not sure if this is the answer. This type of tree-like Q&A would be good for problem solving, e.g. "How to save the oceans?" -> "How to save the oceans from plastics?" -> "How to harvest the plastics from the oceans?" -> "How to use AI to sort out different plastic types?" (obviously I can't sketch here the multitude of branches I'd like). You know, wiki for problem solving. There would be branches for whether we could burn the plastics, how much energy would it take to burn the plastics, and whether we should ship the plastics eventually to shore and how? Ideally we would have mechanism to reward the best answers, and in the end invite the whole of global community to solve these problems whether it is in terms of economics, chemistry or engineering. Dream on :).

Nice work. A few thoughts came to mind after reading other comments.

I wonder how the tree concept works when responses are long or short. It seems to me that short would encourage more of a "ping pong" style thread which may be desirable in a tree form instead of a long-form question and reply.

It may be interesting and enjoyable to contribute to a site if there was a short length constraint placed on the reply. For sake of example, let's say it was 140 characters. That would force replies to be concise and give more of an anchor for others to jump off on in the conversation.

It could also make it more of a competition -- who can succinctly reply to the question with the most clarity?

Lastly, I think this could go a long way towards mitigating the curse of knowledge when people communicate. I see this and experience this when I participate in technical forums. It's easy to use jargon or advanced topics that the person may or may not understand. The tree approach gives a simple way for a follow-up question around the topic.

You may even consider tying this into the "five whys" which is a common questioning approach

Thank you for checking out our new site. We have worked really hard on this for a very long time (years) to bring you something very new and exciting. Included a video tour before posting here to HN so that you can view some of the main features without having to sign up. But please do sign up if you like as your engagement and opinion is highly valued! Thanks and have a great day!

Very cool - congrats on getting it in shape to present to the world.

Similar comment to others, but the visitor is left to wonder what a really excellent use of the site might look like. The thread w/ the largest number of posts[0] doesn't really get very far. The thread in the demo video is a bit hard to understand. If "B" were known by the OP, why would he ask a question as simple as 2+5? If "B" were unknown, wouldn't the question be what is "B" in the relevant domain (whatever domain that is)?

The video seems to show how the site might work, which has me interested. What would have me signing up would be a video showing how the site did work to really move some discussion forward.

Congrats again getting it out in the world. Best wishes as you continue to refine it.

[0] https://www.quetree.com/branchview/v67n

Well done.

I have been thinking about commenting and debate platforms lately, mainly two aspects

a) How to map comments/arguments in a way that the system by design encourages healthy debate and at the same time remain very intuitive to read (and contribute) for not so regular user For example: I am big fan of http://en.arguman.org/ is great work in mapping argument but might not be easy regular naive internet users

b) How can platform ensure that majority which may be is in favor of certain side (of argument), it doesn't influence rational argument. I am referring to trolls. Example: http://kialo.com/ is a good implementation but arguments can be pulled to one's side by sheer majority.

I think you should focus on populating this with questions yourself. Building a community is a chicken-and-egg problem and you need to have content to get people to start to contribute questions. It will also serve as a great way for others to understand what the site is about.

Good luck!

I'm struggling to understand what you're going for and how this hierarchical Q&A format is supposed to work.

1) Your example in the video is too contrived.

2) I haven't seen one Q&A thread that actually illustrates your concept ... meaning others aren't getting it either.

Mobile version in 2018 should be a priority. I'm reading HN on mobile and even though I like your idea I may forget what's all about by the time I switch to desktop later today.

I was just thinking that something similar to this would be really interesting for reading/peer-reviewing scientific papers. Scientific knowledge is built atop of claims made in previous papers, each claim having its own statistical strength. It would be awesome if each footnote in a paper was not just a citation to another publication, but a link to the first time that claim was made, with its p-value and sample size prominently displayed.

Looking at https://www.quetree.com/branchview/v67n, the only difference from a typical, threaded forum appears to be the "Q" or "A" label on each post. Am I missing something?

Awesome idea, however the example video is too simplistic and abstract.

Interesting project, so each question can spawn sub questions, is that the tree?

Also looks good, but it's very hard to use on mobile.

It seems odd to me that so many questions are answered by referring one to a video. For me at least this simply means that I won't ever know the answer because video is a very inefficient way of presenting simple information and I don't feel inclined to use the time.

Congrats on the launch. But could you please darken the text, I am finding it difficult to read.

Doesn't work well on mobile.