Two Essential Features For Question & Answer Services


cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ViaMoi

I’ve spent some time on Quora, Yahoo Answers, and similar sites, but the one thing that continues to frustrate me while I use them is that there are so many similar questions with similar answers, and there are so many answers delivered as attempts at humor or cleverness which do not really address the intent of the person asking the question, and therefore are clutter on the page.

These sites, however, seem sold on the idea of retaining everything within a question in some form. If you are trying to provide a service where people can get great answers to good questions, you need to be able to remove material that is not providing that value. I’m not talking about deleting controversial answers; those should remain available. But let the material of no substance go away. If you just gray it out and tell me it was downvoted, I don’t know whether it was controversial or just junk, so I still have to invest in clicking it and reading it. This is undesirable.

Secondly, and most importantly, there must be a way for two similar questions asked to be merged. Consider the following questions:

  1. How do I learn to play the guitar?
  2. What specific things should beginners focus on when learning guitar?
  3. What’s the first thing you should master when learning to play the guitar?

These are three actual individual questions on Quora right now. Quora and other QA sites become more difficult to navigate if these similar questions are not merged into one question. There is also the value added of increasing the likelihood of finding the one really great answer if you merge the questions.

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Quora Meets Twitter?


cc licensed flickr photo shared by dkscully

I think it would be a simple matter to mark Twitter questions, that is, questions being directed to anyone and everyone, with the hashtag #?so people who would like to know what people are asking would be able to do so easily and respond to them. (We could just look for tweets ending in a question mark, but some would be rhetorical, and others would not be intended for exposure to the “hive.”)

It seems like an easy enough task to make a web page that would cull these hashtagged questions from Twitter and compilied them in one place in real time, as opposed to using Twitter’s limited search. As a matter of fact, I’ll suggest this to my Twitter developer friends, and I’ll update this post if and when they create something like this.

If it proves popular, maybe we’ll put onead on it, so as to pay for whatever hosting (or API calls) would be required.

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