Approachio – Wisdom of the Crowds | Hacker News Reader

Approachio – Wisdom of the Crowds

approachio.com

If you think you're going to harvest the "Wisdom of the Crowds", please go read James Surowiecki's book of the same name. http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/...

If that's too hard, at least understand the summary on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Four_eleme...

A quick look at your site and it's clear you don't get point #2 Independence as you're showing people the prior avg before they submit their answer. I'll bet your site will suffer from a lack of #1 Diversity of opinion as well, as most websites tend to gather abnormally high concentrations of like minded people just through the natural ways they acquire and accrete audience.

This was just an MVP so didn't bother to put too much effort into tackling Information Cascading.[1]

I was hoping that because there are many answers above the folder, it might negate information cascading.

Lack of diversity will be definitely be a problem =D

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade

To Ryan Kirkman and Thomas Davis: could you make some of the data freely available to the Natural Language Processing community?

If this is something that interests people, then it will be worth the time to automate this process. I suspect that there are blog entries, twitts, facebook updates that already answer these questions. Now we have to mine them. "Gold standard" set of Q/A would make it easier.

EDIT: But I hope there will be a way of getting Q/A in a bulk, right? Thanks

NOTE TO SELF: This could be a data mining or text mining web app. Check if the interest grows in time.

We will be releasing a .json endpoint for each question with all the meta data and results. Stay tuned!

So I just added minimal json export functionality, if you add .json at the end of questions you should get a response.

e.g.

https://approachio.com/question/7/how-long-should-the-averag...

Quite tangential, but I wonder—what’s the general attitude these days towards [websites having installed] AddThis?

I recall it has somewhat sketchy privacy record (made the news this year with canvas fingerprinting). This website uses AddThis so I thought I’d ask.

Try my app voicepolls.com, we are very much based on the theory of crowds. If you intend to pursue this further you should give us a call and try our API. We do predictive analysis and have a very large active community!

I'm getting oauth errors on your site when trying to log in with Facebook. I wanted to say that 30 hours is a decent workweek.

How will the quality of your results be different from Wolfram alpha who do it without crowd sourcing of course but are quite good?

This seems to be more about subjective-but-quantifiable questions [like this](https://approachio.com/question/7/a), whereas WA only does objective questions.

Just a thought- putting the login screen after the user submits an answer would increase overall participation

Might just be me but I generally feel deceived when a site does that, especially if the sign up form is huge.

It might not just be you but I for once appreciate sites that let me "touch" the goods before I "pay".

Is your sign up form huge?

Click on login, click on email, hit enter -> anon loggedin.

No Google login, pass.

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