flipside

You do know that Groupon is matching donations to all 3 causes up to $100,000 right?

If it's a choice between ignoring and acknowledging/raising money/pissing people off, at least Groupon is doing something.

Not offending people is a surprisingly ineffective policy for change, believe it or not.

If it were that easy to convince people homeopathy was bogus, we'd have world peace by now.

Most people believe what they want to believe, evidence be damned. Sad, but true.

Here's my take from having gone through a similar problem, it may or may not be relevant to you.

A few years ago I had a great idea for a product and would pitch it to whoever would listen. I had the domain, had a plan, just had to execute. I'd barely gotten started when I ran into a wall, instead of working I would just stare blankly at my computer. I had zero motivation to do any actual work.

And yet, I was still passionate and believed in the idea, which led me to a similar place as you where I'm wondering "what gives?"

This situation showed me that I had an internal problem, that while I could function in environments with external motivational factors, if I removed them, I had nothing. Something inside was holding me back.

It was only through a combination of months of therapy and soul searching that I was able to find the source of my motivational short-circuit, I had given up on the first thing I ever truly wanted without even trying to achieve it. After that epiphany, motivation has been the least of my concerns. Heck, I'm working on my plans for world domination at this very moment.

So here's my advice, take the time to debug your brain, it won't be easy, but it beats having that error message pop up for the rest of your life.

Cost is relative and does not need to translate to a monetary value.

1. An entrepreneur spending $500 on a gift after they've IPOed/sold the company compared to when they're ramen profitable. The significance is different because the level of sacrifice is different.

2. A hacker setting up a blog as a gift (easy) versus writing a sensitive poem (hard). The challenge and amount of effort (real or perceived) are what count in this case.

This is why unique, hand-made, decorative items work well as gifts, because they show a large time investment without having any appeal to gold-diggers.

When courtship is reexamined in this light, it fits the model pretty well actually.

Quora seems to think that scaling votes will allow it to preserve the status quo of "high quality" answers.

Is it just me or does that seem pretty naive?

Props on figuring out a way to incentivize edits. I've been working on a similar idea but this one is pretty elegant.

Any Q&A site that discourages potentially useful answers is doing it wrong.

As it happens, I've come up with an algorithm that would solve the most common problems with Q&A sites (included the ones cited in this article) and am in the process of building a prototype.

Hapa Pride! (Hawaiian term for multi-racial)

This is an example of the gap between what people think should make them happy and what actually will.

Once upon a time, I thought I could be happy if did the things that seemed to make others happy. When I realized I couldn't find happiness that way, I grew depressed because I had run out of excuses.

I'm lucky in that I eventually discovered a path to true happiness but I can appreciate the terror of reaching a dead end and losing all hope.

Moral of the story, do what makes you happy, not what you think should make you happy.

Is wanting to put Demand Media out of business a noble goal?

By creating a service with better content of course.

Vivek is absolutely right about Quora's scaling chances. I made the same assessment back in October when I first started using it and their recent unveiling of their future plans just confirmed it. Quora is niche, it picked a good niche to go after, but it's still niche.

For a Q&A site to take over the market, it needs to be designed with scaling in mind from day 1, it's just that type of market. Thinking that social was the only missing ingredient was pretty naive, though it did advance the state of the art a bit.

The last thing I will say is this, the real deal Q&A site won't have people questioning it's scaling potential, but rather why nobody figured it out before.

The best real world example I can think of is elitism, the idea that the smartest people are always the best for solving problems.

I like this article because it's related to the algorithm I came up with for handling group diversity with scaling issues. Still working on the implementation though.

"This is a Great Article on Recursion"

This or Shapado would certainly making prototyping some new Q&A features easier.

If I don't know ruby or python yet, which one would be easier to tinker with?

Is it better to apply early while I look for cofounders or wait till I find them and then apply?

As someone who once planned to take a secret to my grave, this whole thing saddens me.

I was luckier in a way that altered the course of my life, I let slip to a friend in college that I had a secret. I had no intention of telling him of course, but then he went ahead listing dozens and dozens of possible secrets until he skipped over mine. So I took a chance and I told him and he accepted me.

Looking back, that was the first crack in the darkness. People like me and Bill Zeller might only drop a hint that something is wrong once in our lives, don't be afraid to go chasing after it.

Thanks for finally sharing Bill, rest in peace now.