Show HN: A tool that complements Google & Reddit for finding niche information

Hi all, thanks for reading and I am super happy that I am finally able to share my project with you. As you can tell it's still in a pretty crude state but I couldn't wait to get feedbacks and start iterating.

LumiAsk is our take on a lightweight Q&A platform that hosts paid Q&A sessions for you as either the questioner or the answerer, and helps you find the right people to engage on your topic of interest.

Our aim is to build something that complements Google and Reddit as a tool to find niche information online, with attempt to address the shortcomings of the alternatives as regularly discussed here on HN.

What it is NOT intended for:

- something for which Google, Reddit etc are perfectly adequate. In fact, we expect it to be the opposite - it is kind of a tool-of-last-resort that yon won't lose anything by trying when everything else fails

- a place for general discussions. Reddit and other online communities are much better suited for that.

- a social site for consuming content (though we won't stop you!). When you visit us, we expect that you need help finding something and probably have not had much luck elsewhere.

Thanks again for reading and I hope you all a pleasant Sunday evening!

Random, but along the same vein I worked on a side project which allowed people to create a paid bounty for answering a stackoverflow question. The way it worked was that you would create a question on stackoverflow, go to our website and pay for your bounty with the stackoverflow link, then when any random stackoverflow user answers your question and the answer is accepted, they can simply create and account, authenticate and we will send then their winnings.

I built a remedial MVP, but it worked. Lots of edge cases and concerns when it comes to handling money movement for multiple parties. If you ever look to expand your use case, that could be cool. I was willing to pay for a Kubernetes stackoverflow question that was killing me, so i built that.

Cool idea. And I like how it’s implemented.

But the UX is hellllla confusing.

https://lumiask.com/node/04489cef-4daf-449e-b85f-459a99e78fc...

“Answering $1.10” ??? I get $1.10? This person already received $1.10?? I’ve no idea.

Share & Request Engagement. They sound similar. Like they’re both things I’d do by send the link to someone. But they appear to be completely different.

The message box is followed by two buttons. But the “request engagement” button appears to have nothing to do with the box.

It’s not ugly. It’s a simple, but nice design. But the placement, copy and naming is all really confusing.