Show HN: Screech - Tweet your answers to real questions | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Screech - Tweet your answers to real questions

screechapp.com

21 pointsSamPiggott23 comments

Good idea! Sometimes, if a tweet goes to 3 lines, the next & reply buttons get pushed a little below the footer text, which stacks on top of them. You can still select the top of the buttons, but just so ya know. In fact, just positioning those buttons consistently so you can rapidly scroll through the possible questions would be nice.

Anyway! I like it, if you decide to keep developing it with better parsing of questions (identifying and removing rhetorical, etc.) and show "other replies" below the actual question to show if others have attempted to answer already.

Also, also, I saw someone on your twitter feed suggested you take it off-twitter, but I think the real joy of this is the potential to help a complete stranger who had no idea the whole world was actually listening.

Thanks so much! About the frontend comment - I'd not really heard anything about the actual design, so that's a very welcome piece of feedback - I'll add that to the bugfix list.

I think half the reason I really built this app is because I keep saying on my own Twitter "I want to learn how to do ____ - but I don't know where to start!". When I don't hear anything back, it's a little bit demotivating. I really love the idea of strangers helping strangers with their work and goals too; but I also feel that the questions would be better suited to those who have specified exactly what kind of questions they can answer.

Food for thought, I guess. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it :)

No problem! You definitely have a bit of a double edged sword on your hands. Personally, I love the idea that you could help a complete stranger who thinks they are just yelling into the void, at the same time, it would probably be a more useful service if the queries were sent to it directly and tagged by expertise, blah blah blah.

So, do you integrate both behaviors? Cut your baby in half? Whatever you choose to do, I'll be interested in the result. Good luck!

I also liked the idea. One way to ask questions would be using a hashtag (#screech?). So questions that use the hash would have a better chance of being selected. It would be nice if you could choose some keywords to filter the questions in your area of expertise.

It's so strange that you say that - I actually initially coded it with this exact idea in mind! The only reason I pivoted to regex queries was that in its initial stage, I would have no questions to serve up - but I think #screech is subtle enough to be integrated when the userbase is there!

Thanks again for the feedback, I really appreciate it!

I think the suggestion is that you first look for questions with the hashtag and then if you don't find any look for questions the way you currently are. That way a small user base can make use of the feature but for everyone else it stays the same.

You should also take a look at youasked.it. They're very similar. I think giving the user a chance to filter questions by topic is a very key feature that is missing right now from your implementation.

Hey, Zack, wanna see me drink a milkshake through my nose? #screech

It's official. Version 2.0 demands Vine integration.

Or you could pick up questions for existing popular tags. #stackoverflow might be one of them.

But the hashtags would contradict what I think is the best feature of this site — that you don't even have to know about it to use it.

Great idea! Just one suggestion. Make the name linkeable to their profile or better to the tweet itself, because sometimes you need to understand the context to answer a question.

I hadn't even considered contexts...! Great stuff, thanks - added to the list!

I think http://www.lazytweet.com/ is a similar idea that has been around for a while but never got especially popular, maybe there is something you can learn from it.

I went looking for something that existed when I first set out, and I didn't come across this - thanks for the pointer.

I guess what you can learn from that is "write some copy that is easy to google ASAP" :)

http://youasked.it/ Answer random questions from people on Twitter

This is a neat idea, though the quality of questions is terrible. Would probably be a good way to garner a decent amount of followers if you spent 20 minutes answering a ton of questions. Not very clear on how to 'ask' questions though..

Hey John, thanks for your comment. I'm working on the questions at the minute - I agree, it's tricky to filter out what are/aren't questions, so that's something that I'll develop to be a little more sophisticated for a future version.

I suppose the purpose of the app was solely to answer questions, really; I didn't even think about the "asking" side - again, something that I think the app could benefit from in the next version.

Thanks again John, really appreciate your feedback :)

The quality of questions is the main problem, yes. May be they can be upvoted or downvoted, so they would appear more or less frequently?

This is a great concept - giving each question a score and allowing it to gain/lose exposure based on it, similar to HN/Reddit.

Wouldn't that make it a minimal quora/SO that you don't have to specially post your questions on?

Or, and while we're at it — location filters for location-based questions would be the greatest (although much more hard to implement) feature. I don't want to answer someone's question about his homework, clearly directed for his friends, but I would gladly give advice to a tourist who found himself in a place I know.

I think that the system requires some form of filtering - be it by location, score, hashtag or otherwise. A featured which allows a user to get to the questions they can answer quickly is definitely something that needs to be developed.

It'd also be great if you could add keywords you wanted in the questions surfaced to you, targeting the questions you get more specifically at what you're familiar with ("plumbing", "pipes", "leaking" questions for plumbers etc). Increasing relevance would help make it more useful.

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