Show HN: Quetree – A Q&A site that is tree-based and hierarchical

https://www.quetree.com

by schwanray • 8 years ago

91 41 8 years ago

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Thank you for checking out our new site. We have worked really hard on this for a very long time (years) to bring you something very new and exciting. Included a video tour before posting here to HN so that you can view some of the main features without having to sign up. But please do sign up if you like as your engagement and opinion is highly valued! Thanks and have a great day!

chrisco255• 8 years ago

Why not have an immediate, interactive, browsable demo on home page rather than a video demo? Or why require sign up to view at all?

mirimir• 8 years ago

It seems like a useful approach. But there's so little content so far that it's hard to tell. Could you perhaps say more about how this improves on Quora etc? Also, how will you handle moderation and verification?

Edit: I see that, as with Quora, users retain copyright to all of their content, and grant perpetual license to the site. Presumably, then, Quora users could migrate their answers to Quetree. But I'm not sure how corresponding questions could be handled.

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Thank you very much mirimir for your profound comment. There are some differences with Quora - more emphasis on knowledge rather than celebrities to follow, less noise, discover new questions with new knowledge gain... There is a points system with medals and trophies for moderation and verification (also followup questions :) (Had the idea before Quora back in 2008). Please keep in touch through the contact-us page! You're awesome!

gitgud• 8 years ago

Interesting project, so each question can spawn sub questions, is that the tree?

Also looks good, but it's very hard to use on mobile.

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Thank you kindly! Yes hopefully can build a mobile app soon! The current design did not lend itself easily to mobile screens.

adrianmsmith• 8 years ago

I think you should be careful of “perfect is the enemy of the good”.

I’m sure a mobile app would be the perfect solution. Nevertheless, until that materializes, it would be worth investing a day or two to mobile CSS.

It won’t be as good, but for people wanting to use your product now, it will be sufficient, and will be the difference between them using it and not.

Unbeliever69• 8 years ago

There is a saying in the graphics industry, "Output drives process." Always design with the output in mind. As this is a project that took years to create I can see how designing with responsive in mind could be overlooked or put on the back-burner. That being said, it will be a thorny bush to prune doing it later rather than sooner. Good luck.

CGamesPlay• 8 years ago

I think you should focus on populating this with questions yourself. Building a community is a chicken-and-egg problem and you need to have content to get people to start to contribute questions. It will also serve as a great way for others to understand what the site is about.

Good luck!

schwanray14• 8 years ago

That is very thoughtful and helpful advice, much appreciated! Thank you :)

hegz• 8 years ago

Doesn't work well on mobile.

jv222222• 8 years ago

1) Well done for shipping! That is a huge achievement!

2) (For future projects) IMHO It's not advisable to work for "years" on a project without showing it to end users. It's basically a big guess. For best results make sure to start building your audience from the start. Even before you code anything. When you pick an idea to focus on, if you can't build some kind of list of people interested in it just from a landing page with a "Join the waitlist" button, then it's a big sign that the idea might not be the best or that you don't have the capacity to market it.

3) Your key premise is that people care about hierarchical Q&A. There is no true way to know this without asking people. So, again, ask them at the beginning of the "years" before writing a line of code.

4) Your site boils the ocean. It's almost impossible to build up a user base with a site that is not focused around a niche. For example, Stack Overflow's first version was focused on the topic of Tech/Coding Q&A and then they rolled out sub sites. So, your best bet will be to pick a specific niche to focus on and then when you grow and build that topic, then start to move to other topics. That is a tried and proven strategy. (Also, it's only by picking a niche that you know WHO to market to and what marketing strategy to use).

5) Your main marketing message is based around "features" but very few end users care about features they care about how your product will make their life better and how your product will make them a better person. So, your marketing copy should be about "benefits" not "features".

Please read this set of free ebooks for more info on that: https://copyhackers.com/get-it-now

6) Again, well done for shipping! If you ever work on another project I would recommend to pick something you can ship in < 3 months, even better just test it with mockups and a landing page before building anything. The sooner you can get feedback the sooner you know if you're moving in the right direction.

I hope that this feedback is taken in the spirit it is meant, which is just to be helpful.

Good luck with your project!

kristiandupont• 8 years ago

You managed to articulate most of my thoughts in a much more constructive and encouraging fashion than I could. That’s inspiring, thank you!

nsomaru• 8 years ago

The call to action to download the copyhackers book doesn't work for me. Any other way of getting it?

jv222222• 8 years ago

1) Go to: https://copyhackers.com/

2) Hover over "New here"

3) Click copywriting ebooks.

mettamage• 8 years ago

This is a really inspiring comment. I am just going to make a note to self on as to why:

0. Well-intentioned and you can read it

1. Next to well-intentioned also a simple but effective feedback style (the hamburger model: compliments at the top and bottom and the 'meat' in the middle)

2. Amazing advice (need to flesh this out more)

3. One call to action (copyhackers.com)

I need to reread this a couple of days later.

hyperpallium• 8 years ago

All spot on, esp the niche and user-problem focus; but sounds more R&D innovation than market launch. e.g. bitkeeper not github; relational algebra not oracle; lisp not java.

The earliest of adopters ("enthusiasts" and "innovators") want cool technical features, not benefits.

schwanray14• 8 years ago

HN - Replies:

Yes thank you very much for detailed and helpful comment. You are very right in your well written points. Discovered “The Lean Startup” book only very late in the game lol. But I doubt it would have changed our course much since we are true rebels and any Tried and Proven Strategy is probably not exciting enough ;) ! Thanks again and have a great day!

kyriakos• 8 years ago

Mobile version in 2018 should be a priority. I'm reading HN on mobile and even though I like your idea I may forget what's all about by the time I switch to desktop later today.

raleighm• 8 years ago

Very cool - congrats on getting it in shape to present to the world.

Similar comment to others, but the visitor is left to wonder what a really excellent use of the site might look like. The thread w/ the largest number of posts[0] doesn't really get very far. The thread in the demo video is a bit hard to understand. If "B" were known by the OP, why would he ask a question as simple as 2+5? If "B" were unknown, wouldn't the question be what is "B" in the relevant domain (whatever domain that is)?

The video seems to show how the site might work, which has me interested. What would have me signing up would be a video showing how the site did work to really move some discussion forward.

Congrats again getting it out in the world. Best wishes as you continue to refine it.

[0] https://www.quetree.com/branchview/v67n

schwanray14• 8 years ago

This is what is so great about HN and the members here. You even went through the trouble of finding the longest thread. Thank you very much for your valuable input and for your kind wishes! Will try the best to refine the soonest and best we can. Please keep in touch through quetree.com/contact-us.

God bless HN and all its great members!

Thanks again and have a great day!

explainplease• 8 years ago

Looking at https://www.quetree.com/branchview/v67n, the only difference from a typical, threaded forum appears to be the "Q" or "A" label on each post. Am I missing something?

macspoofing• 8 years ago

I'm struggling to understand what you're going for and how this hierarchical Q&A format is supposed to work.

1) Your example in the video is too contrived.

2) I haven't seen one Q&A thread that actually illustrates your concept ... meaning others aren't getting it either.

schwanray14• 8 years ago

You were very right macspoofing, the video was watched to the end by only a handful of the people and have been removed. The video was a bad idea in hindsight since those who could've got a feel for the sight by using it for themselves and then given an opinion about it never did. And now that chance to get the smart people here to do that is gone. But thanks for your input and have a great day!

pythonik• 8 years ago

Well done.

I have been thinking about commenting and debate platforms lately, mainly two aspects

a) How to map comments/arguments in a way that the system by design encourages healthy debate and at the same time remain very intuitive to read (and contribute) for not so regular user For example: I am big fan of http://en.arguman.org/ is great work in mapping argument but might not be easy regular naive internet users

b) How can platform ensure that majority which may be is in favor of certain side (of argument), it doesn't influence rational argument. I am referring to trolls. Example: http://kialo.com/ is a good implementation but arguments can be pulled to one's side by sheer majority.

unlimit• 8 years ago

Congrats on the launch. But could you please darken the text, I am finding it difficult to read.

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Thanks and the font has been darkened. Please enjoy!

kwhitefoot• 8 years ago

It seems odd to me that so many questions are answered by referring one to a video. For me at least this simply means that I won't ever know the answer because video is a very inefficient way of presenting simple information and I don't feel inclined to use the time.

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Not sure which answers you are referring to because there only about 3 or videos in the site. May be you were talking about the demo and the help videos. The demo video has been taken down.

vortico• 8 years ago

Community building is the most noble project on the Internet, and this is a unique attempt to organize it further. Communities, not software or commerce or entertainment, is what the Internet was motivated from in the 90's and will be the most remembered aspect in 50 years, so it is important to create experimental community harbors like these to possibly incubate future massive projects.

However, I am curious why you chose two features from which to derive your community software.

Voting: This has been demonstrated by major websites to form "mob opinions", hide individuality, and discourage of unpopular/unoriginal ideas. It is somewhat agreed by Hacker News members that voting should represent quality of comments. But as the size of a website approaches infinity (like Reddit, or Facebook comments with "liking"), this type of culture breaks down, so voting is eventually only used to game the system to promote comments that follow your personal opinion. Differing opinions are a beautiful aspect of humankind, and they are lost when a comment's score is used to make it visible in an unequal manner to other comments. Additionally, voting has little correlation with the effort that goes into a comment. A one-word reply is just as likely to have the same score as a wiki-like hand-typed article and will therefore be artificially promoted to the same level. I believe that if you're running an online news website, sure, absolutely promote "top" content. If it's a community forum, give people an equal voice.

Threading/hierarchy: Human conversation has not and will not change as a result of Internet community software. Hierarchy is unnatural, chronology is natural. If the goal of a community is to generate "answers" to "questions", sometimes this unnatural feature is necessary, but use caution and don't over-hierarchy-ize the organization. Having a "Support" and "Not support" feature like in your video demo adds to the paperwork of posting an answer while not offering much benefit, and it seems a bit O(n^2) to me.

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Thank you for your very intelligent, thought provoking and inspiring comment. Building a great community around knowledge is the dream. And I really appreciate your curiousities!

About voting: we really thought really hard about this very hard thing and it is a very hard problem to solve. As you said earlier, we need more experimental communities to really be sure as there may be limited unadulterated evidence as to its effectiveness currently. But we looked at review sites as a guide - they seem to work pretty good. So the argument is: if people can help each other choose products or services they could theoretically also help with choosing ideas. But we know its not as easy as that.

We are starting by catering to the good members, those with only good intentions and not to game the system, and then to worry about how the bad or unsuspecting ones can spoil it for everyone. So given such a group of good members we thought it more beneficial for everyone if each person could make it easier for the next one by making a good choice and voting up. It would be better to use their time and efforts. This is contrasting to where no one is trusted and each person has to start from the beginning and go through all choices thus not benefitting from the time and thoughts spent by those who went through the same thing before.

But you hit at a deeper problem here which is really really hard to answer: how do you make something popular while giving equal importance to every other thing. By giving something precedence, e.g. calling it a better apple, aren’t you by definition making all the other apples worser? And if you call all of them equal then do you do justice to the already ripe ones?

But this problem really kept us up at nights: what will happen to the the poor and specially bright genius who can achieve transcendental insights but is against huge hoards who simply “don’t get it”. Because it is indeed a beautiful aspect of humankind. And that brings us to your last point - namely the supporting, conflicting feature. That one was designed with this very thing in mind. So that the inspired can create a conflicting idea to what has been accepted by the majority - and those who see that there is a conflicting answers to the prevailing accepted one, will hopefully take a closer look then and then spend more time deciding. Those who voted earlier on the prevailing one can change their minds and vote on the new insightful one and slowly the acceptance rating will sway to the new one as will the ranking and medals (it is all implemented already). A big part of Quetree is identify what is the popularly accepted so that we at least know if that needs to change and have a shot at changing it. Quetree is incepted to may be help change what is popular to take us closer to a world where the majority is wiser and more adaptive.

But the supporting and conflicting feature is not meant to quadratically complicate answering - it is served as an extra feature to be used when needed as exampled above but is safely tucked away hidden, and have to be expanded to use.

To address your other good point about hierarchy, that one is truly experimental. The idea is to encourage the path towards hierarchy-izing ideas and may be even over-hierarchy-izing them over over-hierarchy-izing men and kings that us humans have been doing naturally for eons. If we can have a hierarchy of ideas we can constructly move them around (ideal mobilization vs social mobilization ;), they won’t mind nor fight back, unlike the kings or authoritative figures who hold on for dear life.

I like how your brain thinks and I suspect we could’ve hung around and have long philosophical conversations that would be both enjoyable and inspiring. Please keep in touch, thanks and have a great day!

joebo• 8 years ago

Nice work. A few thoughts came to mind after reading other comments.

I wonder how the tree concept works when responses are long or short. It seems to me that short would encourage more of a "ping pong" style thread which may be desirable in a tree form instead of a long-form question and reply.

It may be interesting and enjoyable to contribute to a site if there was a short length constraint placed on the reply. For sake of example, let's say it was 140 characters. That would force replies to be concise and give more of an anchor for others to jump off on in the conversation.

It could also make it more of a competition -- who can succinctly reply to the question with the most clarity?

Lastly, I think this could go a long way towards mitigating the curse of knowledge when people communicate. I see this and experience this when I participate in technical forums. It's easy to use jargon or advanced topics that the person may or may not understand. The tree approach gives a simple way for a follow-up question around the topic.

You may even consider tying this into the "five whys" which is a common questioning approach

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Thank you kindly Joebo and thank you for your awesome ideas. In fact we have thought about this exact thing, and there is a set height to the answer window to encourage short answers beyond which the users will have to scroll down and there is a page numbering system to show you how many pages there are/are left. We didn't go all the way and put a hard limit though but it is a very interesting idea and will see if others like it as well. The idea of the competition for succinct bullseye answers is also awesome! Since answers can be voted up and those with long answers requiring the scrolling may not be read as much or questioned more, there is an indirect route to this end effect currently implemented but may need improving. Please check it out and give feedback if possible.

Ah the "curse of knowledge"! That is such a bulls eye, home run, out of the park, spot on, accurate assessment and perfect read on your part! The curse of knowledge alienates most of the brightest minds from the rest us which is really sad and simple access to structured questioning could help remedy that age old problem.

As far as I remember the "five whys" should end in a feeling. Right now I feel really energized and inspired by your input since I now know that there are those out there like you who I really need and hope will get directly involved in helping this thing grow in the right direction! Do please keep in touch will ya!?

vfinn2• 8 years ago

I think we need something like this, but I'm not sure if this is the answer. This type of tree-like Q&A would be good for problem solving, e.g. "How to save the oceans?" -> "How to save the oceans from plastics?" -> "How to harvest the plastics from the oceans?" -> "How to use AI to sort out different plastic types?" (obviously I can't sketch here the multitude of branches I'd like). You know, wiki for problem solving. There would be branches for whether we could burn the plastics, how much energy would it take to burn the plastics, and whether we should ship the plastics eventually to shore and how? Ideally we would have mechanism to reward the best answers, and in the end invite the whole of global community to solve these problems whether it is in terms of economics, chemistry or engineering. Dream on :).

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Thank you so much for that as it is really well thought out and it is so refreshing to find someone instantly "get it"! I would like to personally invite you to create those questions sometime in Quetree and then we can figure out how to invite the whole global community to solve them! But please do keep in touch as it is very valuable to have people aligned with our vision from the very beginning! With help from people like you we hope to reach out to a broader audience and once we do, who better to help run things than those who were there from the start. Thanks again for your valuable input and hope to communicate with you again soon!

vfinn2• 8 years ago

Thanks! I thought what I said was pretty trivial, but why I "got it" so quickly was that I had a similar idea myself. Sure, I'd be interested to hear more, at least.

glifchits• 8 years ago

I was just thinking that something similar to this would be really interesting for reading/peer-reviewing scientific papers. Scientific knowledge is built atop of claims made in previous papers, each claim having its own statistical strength. It would be awesome if each footnote in a paper was not just a citation to another publication, but a link to the first time that claim was made, with its p-value and sample size prominently displayed.

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Thank you so much for this awesome post! We did think about scientific papers and journals but are not phd level scientists ourselves. We thought more in terms about how hard it is for journal writers to spread their knowledge to a broader audience. Your point is very interesting and novel. Really wish we could discuss further about it and possibly implement it! Please get in touch!

samirm• 8 years ago

Awesome idea, however the example video is too simplistic and abstract.

schwanray14• 8 years ago

Yes agreed, and it has been removed. Thanks and have a great day!

Show HN: Quetree – A Q&A site that is tree-based and hierarchical

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