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Show HN: Q&A for HN users

askolo.com

142 pointsshazad72 comments

I would suggest having MUCH more information about what I'm signing up for before I actually hand over my information. All I know from the homepage and the about page is that its some form of Q&A website. You should have screenshots of what it looks like once you're logged in, better yet, let us see the questions without being logged in.

Comments like this are almost always the top comment...yet people just can't seem to get the basics right. I'm not a designer, so I know it's much easier said than done, but what's up with the blatant refusal to learn from others' mistakes?

Because the complaints are those of a vocal minority. Most people don't worry about "handing over" their information, viewing screenshots before they sign up, or if Facebook login is the only option.

Most people just aren't very picky.

It's not just about "handing over information"--the original question applies: what, exactly, am I signing up for? It just says "ask people questions."

Granted, there are "About" and "Privacy" links at the bottom of the page, but a few more sentences might be helpful.

I agree with your statement 100%, and yet I think even just a one sentence blurb would be really helpful in getting people to spend the time to bother waiting for another page to load: it doesn't have to be about "handing over" information... you still lose people in the conversion funnel by not enticing them to bother thinking about the next step.

I don't mind the handing over information part, but I will almost always leave a website that wants me to register without showing me what they do. It's laziness on my part, and I don't complain about it in public, I just don't sign up for those websites.

Sites like this are just throwing away users for no good reason.

if people don't get what your site provides or does in the first few seconds then more than likely they won't sign up. One reason so much time and effort is spent on A/B testing, to create an optimal page that will result in the most sign ups.

The fact that the top comment on HN posts is so often some sort of complaint or snarky remark is arguably a problem with HN itself. It's much broader than this post. It's the comment thread of analogue of the tendency of indignation-inducing stories to rise to the top of the frontpage.

Lame complaints may be a problem, but I'm not so sure about complaints in general.

A link like this exists to give you a one-sided case for using an app. Following that up with a counterpoint seems like the most informative way to proceed. I think the HN standard should be that comments of the form "This would likely improve your product" deserve to be voted up, while "Here's why this won't work" should be voted down.

Hey all - thanks for all the comments. This is clearly something we can improve a lot on and we'll work on getting something pushed out. I appreciate everyone taking the time to let us know.

That's a good suggestion. You can click on a users profile image right now to see their current questions and answers, but the homepage could definitely use some improvement to show more information.

A list of users sorted by the follower count would be a very good step in a right direction.

Agreed.

More information is necessary. I'm really scared of signing up to something with my fb account without know exactly what for.

It's not a question of people jerking around the every topic like this, here in hacker news. It's an actual need that those who made the service didn't pay attention to.

This is exceptionally well designed and thought through. It seems like it could be a lot more valuable than just Q&A for HN users, though that's a smart place to start. I'm impressed with the attention you've paid to some of the details, like the "Curious" counter.

One thing that has held me back from Quora (apart from needing no new ways to spend time online) is that absolutely everything seems public, such as who upvoted what. That makes me uncomfortable, like I'm under a harsh spotlight all the time. Most of the things I think, or say in conversation, are tentative and exploratory. I don't want to be publicly committed to them by default; I want to make that choice myself and be aware that I'm making it, like posting on HN. I'd be surprised if lots of users didn't feel this way, so maybe that's an opportunity for you to differentiate yourselves. In any case, I'd be interested to hear what you've made public and private by default and what your ideas are on the subject more generally.

It will be interesting to see what this grows into!

Thanks for the feedback!

We wanted to a create an interesting space where people can find out about other users on Hacker News. Let us know your thoughts!

I might as well ask the obvious question: what separates Askolo from Quora?

Thanks for checking it out. The key difference isn't so much what you can't do with Quora, but rather what you don't do. People don't use Quora as a place to ask specific people questions.

We're interested in optimizing Q&A around thought leaders and experts. Quora works well for finding the right answer to a question - we're interested in finding out a diversity of opinions.

good answer. I actually would rather ask specific question to a specific person trying to capture their brain, rather than shooting my question into the ocean of internet. if you execute properly, this may be big. think email versus twitter - twitter wins on so many level because people can always "let go" conversation and never been spammed with questions, versus email when once given out, a popular individual would have to quickly change it before drowning in spa,. this way if some tech celeb (or any celeb in that matter) is willing to answer questions, he/she may signup to your site and say "hey im ready to answer, ask me a questions".

best luck to you!

"We're interested in optimizing Q&A around thought leaders and experts. Quora works well for finding the right answer to a question - we're interested in finding out a diversity of opinions." What you said there means everything to me and would have convinced me to spend more than 10 seconds on your site. What you said on your about page means nothing to me. "Askolo wants to create a space where knowledge is easily accessible. Users can use their Askolo accounts to find out more about others and to share their thoughts."

some interesting profiles - http://askolo.com/alexis http://askolo.com/harj http://askolo.com/patio11 http://askolo.com/iamwil http://askolo.com/edw519 http://askolo.com/aaroniba

I like it and I hope more 'interesting' people will register soon; I think I should say that before I start whining.

Why didn't you put this (or some sort of similar) information on the landing page? If I was randomly sent link to your site (ie. without context such as HN comments or relatively high score) I would have no idea what it is, and leave forever.

Also I don't like the bar saying ASKOLO on the top - there is no content on it, and it just takes precious vertical space from my small laptop screen. I already know where am I, no need to repeat that. The second bar, nagging me to signup or login is kind of distraction too.

Also, I hope for some filtering features for questions (hide unanswered, hide comments, hide answers - so I can quickly skim only through the questions - I think this could be handy when there is more content on the site).

Hey rednum, thanks for the feedback. You can do some basic filtering on both the newsfeed and the individual page if you look right above the questions section. It's set to show all by default, but I think we can probably do a better job of making that more prominent.

Weird that nobody mentioned AnyAsq, which is pretty much the same thing: http://anyasq.com/

Although Askolo looks better and nicer to use, so hopefully it'll stick around. I just created my profile, ask me some questions about design!

http://askolo.com/sachag

Hey sgdesign - thanks for the comments! We wanted to take a different focus and offer a more conversational format for users vs. an iAmA style site.

We talked to the guys behind AnyAsq a while back and they're working on some other cool things not in Q&A - we're big fans of the team.

My favorite feature of this site, by far, is "wish". I wanted a service where you could do exactly what it does -- write a note or ask a question to someone, without figuring out his address. i.e. I can ask a question to Dan Loeb, savior of humanity, without trying to find his email address or get an introduction; ideally the people at Askolo will go through that effort on my behalf.

( He's the Third Point Ventures investor who has been trying to fix Yahoo's board for a while, and is about to go to war with Scott Thompson, ideally resulting in the end of their stupid patent troll misadventure.)

Bringing in top quality experts from outside the Silicon Valley bubble is the main thing Quora has failed to do (Larry Summers is on there since he's friends with Marc Bodnick, but not a whole lot of other people like that). Askolo is probably a better format for that kind of person than Quora is.

Thanks rdl! Credit to gschmidt who suggested this feature

This solves a big pain point that I have with Quora. In the early days when Quora was in private beta, it was great because "celebrities" like Zuckerberg, Evan Williams and people like that would answer questions. But as it grew, particularly after becoming public it just didn't scale and all the elite-members left for the most part.

By focusing on people it seems like askolo will be able to avoid that fate as the celebrities won't get drowned out. One danger is to make sure the celebrities don't get annoyed/hounded too much. Need to strike a balance between feeding their ego (hey lots of people want to ask me things, sweet!) and annoying (ugh.. ANOTHER friggin question email). I'm sure you guys will be able to figure it out.

Thanks Omar!

had a similar idea a long time ago (ie. ~2 years) and it was called askcue.com (still online). question sites like these face a huge chicken and egg problem, because you need people asking and answering... sorry to break it to you, but you've ventured into a very competitive and difficult (answers.com, answers.yahoo.com, quora.com, askreddit, formspring.me) section on the internet. still, best of luck to you!

Thanks for the feedback - we're interested in not just Q&A, but really the idea of people search. We see Q&A as just the medium through which users can find out more about other people.

Suggestion / Question: the "suggested users" list disappeared after my first follow, so discovery has become a little tricky.

Does it exist elsewhere? If not, might be a good idea to put it back in.

Hi duggan, it is somewhat buggy indeed. People/Content discovery is a major feature we are working on right now, it will be out next week.

See other profiles at the bottom of someone's profile frequently includes the person him/herself. In general though - it's an excellent idea, but it appears to be difficult to browse people and/or to search for someone specific.

(edit) Also I am not clear if everyone's treated equally on the site or if there are people how are willing to answer questions and the rest - who asks. I'd say that latter would be a more natural arrangement, and it'd be also sensible not to require an account to ask a question.

Thanks eps. We wanted to limit who could ask questions primarily to keep quality high and to alert users when their question is answered, but this is something that we might open up if people prefer it.

How did you get so many people to sign up pre-launch? Well done!

For some reason, this is more friendly / easier than Quora. I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's Quora's red, I've never liked that.

On a more specific note, have you considered making the answer textarea not highlighted upon focus? It seems to clash with the surrounding divs.

I also love how I can follow who is in YC right now considering they somehow gained word before everyone else :)

The missing vertical line separating the main content and the sidebar in Quora always makes me uncomfortable - it makes the right end of the each section very jagged. Huge turn off. Then again Quora UX design guys must have seen a good reason to leave it that way ...

Thanks, deepkut! We'll play around a few alternatives to make the answer textarea look better.

It's hard to find people to follow, even though I'm well-connected to the initial group of users (lots of friends in YC, started using Quora in 2009, etc.).

It's made worse because the Facebook Connect prompt on the homepage shows ~12 friends using the site, but once I log in I can't find them. There should be a word for that. Soup Nazi UX or something. "Here's some soup. NO SOUP FOR YOU."

Hey jfarmer, thanks for checking out the site. That looks like a bug - you should automatically be following them if you used Facebook. We'll look into it right away.

I didn't connect with Facebook because I know all the dirty tricks people play. ;)

I can't connect now, after the fact. There are also some simple design oversights. For example, any time I see a list of people, there should be a "follow" button next to their name.

It's actually quite hard to find people to follow starting from nothing, unless I want to follow some of the 8-10 people you suggest automatically.

I'd give the first-time experience a C+.

Good feedback. We have a feature to connect with FB after the fact, but it's a bit hidden so we'll make that more prominent.

Quick nit: your facebook connect icon is a big letter "C" instead of "A" like your favicon... caused some cognitive dissonance, for a minute.

Thanks we'll fix that.

Like the clean interface. Much better than formspring.me

However, each question requires its own permalink. So that people can share a particular Q&A.

Another idea suggestion would be, create a popular answers tab on all users page. So that if someone has answered 101 questions, his best answers don't get lost.

Great suggestions. You can actually share an individual Q&A using the "share" link right below the answer.

Another quick nit: please update your From address for your notification emails to include a friendly name (like Askolo or something). Right now, since no name is specified, GMail only displays the part before the @ symbol as the sender, so I get "notification" as the sender... and that looks like spam.

Thanks - we'll get that fixed up.

Interesting idea (I especially like the wish feature)! Great implementation! How do you plan on getting users to come back after they've read(or asked) what they needed to read? Perhaps you can have a daily/weekly interesting thought-provoking question that will get users to come back...

Please, please include the timestamps for questions, answers, and comments. I'd love to know when some of the questions were asked and answered. If the time is already there (and I'm just not looking hard enough) please tell me where it's at.

A few things:

- How can I see the questions I've asked? - Why aren't the questions I've asked not appearing on the askee's profile? - Is there a person discovery after the initial one on sign up? - What features are coming up next?

hi instakill, person/content discovery is a major feature we are working on - it'll probably be out next week. Regarding why you can't see you questions on askee's profile - the askee may have made all unanswered questions invisible (you can do that too in your settings page) or deleted your question. Right now there's a short text under the "ask" box that explains it - we should have made it more obvious.

So Quora for Hacker News?

I'd interpret more as Quora for people - I think there's huge potential in this space.

One small thing: when I signed up using Facebook it showed the e-mail field as 'undefined' and didn't allow me to create an account. When I tried again every did work as expected.

Two questions (1) How did you get active profiles of so many awesome people on your network?(2) Is there a way to map the HN handles to profiles in this site?

(1) We reached out directly to a handful of people that we admired and a number of them were nice enough to take the time to sign up. (2) Not as yet, although a number of people use the same handle for their Askolo reserved name. This is something we'll definitely look into.

It would be nice if you added the date and time that questions are asked and answered. That would help users gauge recency and temporal relevance.

Hey zeantsoi - thanks for the feedback. Right now questions are automatically sorted by recency. We left out timestamps to try to create a more permanent space for answers, but this might be a useful thing to display since we've gotten a few requests for it today.

Right. IMO, here's an answer by pg where a timestamp would have provided a lot of context:

A: Not yet. I haven't spent much time reading the next batch of applications yet.

Nice site! I think the questions and answers need some kind of visible timestamp though. Q&A, by its very nature, can go stale quickly.

Hey bhousel - thanks for the feedback! Right now questions are sorted by most recent so you can see new questions at the top of a page, but we're looking at rolling out timestamps as well.

It's really impressive how you guys got so many YC people on board before launching. I really hope you're not a YC company because that would make this post dishonest. (I know many YC alums help out each other but have never seen them do it in stealth yet) I'd like to assume that you're not. Could you clarify this? I'm asking because I noticed far too many YC alums and faculty on the profile.

They are YC-funded. PG answered a question as such:

http://askolo.com/pg

That's disappointing. I had guessed they might be, but was hoping they were not, because they commented below "(1) We reached out directly to a handful of people that we admired and a number of them were nice enough to take the time to sign up." I think this is dishonest, and even makes me question the credibility of some of the other occasional posts that come up on the front page. Although I can understand why they are not mentioning YC, something about this makes me uncomfortable, unlike other YC launch announcements on Hacker News.

What is askolo technology stack?

Hey flavio - we're using node.js, mongodb, and redis.

Just emailed these guys a bug report and got a response in <2 minutes. Props.

This site feels like a classier version of Formspring. Nice job!

Well, I signed up. Let's see what happens...

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