Ask HN: Are there any meta question answering sites on the web? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there any meta question answering sites on the web?

6 pointsamichail7 comments

Such a service would forward your question to appropriate web forums and bring back the answers to you all in one place.

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I don't know of any but this is ,IMO , a very good idea.

(Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me Amichail,and it turns out,that by reading HN , I have subscribed to your newsletter. :) )

I'm not sure if this is entirely what you are searching for, but would Mahalo meet the criteria of what you're looking for?

The idea is to leverage the best expertise on the net... not just what is available in any particular forum/site.

So wait - you would submit to various forums lots of crossposts and then send it back to me? A spammer's dream!

I suppose you could limit the number of forums that it sends questions to at any one time to say 3 or so.

If the user doesn't get satisfactory replies, then it could post to 3 more and so on.

As a guess: Not likely to work. Different forums are different little cultures. Data-mining a culture tends to be viewed as a hostile act by the members. "One post wonders" and similar tend to be viewed with suspicion. Even if you could get past that, such queries sent to multiple forums would practically be guaranteed to violate cultural expectations of one or more of the forums to which it was forwarded. The only way this would work would be if you had a staff who made it their business to belong to a bunch of different forums, be in good standing in those forums, and know how to rephrase any questions sent them so it meets cultural expectations of the various forums. This is already done informally when someone like me says "Hey, if you want, I can ask around and let you know what I find out, if anything."

A few HNers had a phone conversation with Philip Greenspun along these lines a few weeks ago.

We looked into it for a while. The problem, as other posters have pointed out, is that this is a spammer's dream.

The general tool -- Social Media Monitoring and Interaction -- has been done in several different fashions, mostly in a one-way format, but done.

There is some interesting potential here, but it gets tricky once you move past the initial rush of "Wouldn't it be cool...."

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