DISCUSSION: Are the increased number of questions an advantage or a disadvantage?

I feel similarly and see it as a problem... right now. I find myself looking at all the questions and becoming befuddled. And, unfortunately, I look at the M$0.25 and am not motivated to answer some questions fully.

Some questions coming in from Twitter are REALLY good and, I hate to say, if they were at the M$1 level, I would probably be more motivated to answer them more fully. Right now I feel that I'm at quantity and not quality. What would fix this overwhelming feeling, I believe, would be a way to filter questions to ones that are within your expertise or interest.

I'm REALLY waiting for a series of features that allows this. Just automagically importing questions from Twitter to "see how we do when we get 1000 questions a day" seems silly if the right tools aren't implemented. --/rant.

Let me STOP you all right here! I've been here before - I recognize that tree. I am a veteran of another well-known Q&A site that is, very sadly, on its way out.

Back in the glory days when all was sunshine and rainbows, we used to ask questions like this: Are there too many questions? Are the good questions getting lost in the wash? Is it distracting to have too many questions, some of which have questionable quality?...so the community adapted to this new mindset.

They started intentionally only answering eachothers' "quality" questions and ignoring the questions funneled in from other sites and outlets. "Let's self-police! ", they'd say."Let's only answer GOOD questions and ignore the riff-raff!

". "Yeah, too many questions dilute the site's quality! Arrrrr!

" and "She's a witch! Burrrrn her!" (...ok maybe not the last one...) So the snobbery led to fewer answers. Which led to fewer newbies.

Which led to fewer questions. Which led to less to do on the site, and eventually boredom. Which led to old-timers running off.

Which led to the site's downfall. Friends don't let friends turn their back on site proliferation. Embrace the popularity and enjoy it, never taking for granted that we NEED this flood to stay afloat!

Learn from me, friends. I know these things.

Advantage. More questions = more keywords = more traffic More traffic = a better system The solution to volume may be proper categorization.

This is an excellent discussion to bring up. Couple of things: 1. The Answers site is still in beta and we are in a test period of trying to hit 500-1,000 question a day.

We will drop this back down to 200-500 questions day if things go horribly wrong--but they haven't obviously. 2. We have been getting an extra 10-20,000 page views per day thanks to the new questions and about 10k new folks per day coming to Answers.So, more questions does equal more traffic.

3. We have been told that the way Askville was able to grow so quickly was that they pumped computer generated "bonus questions" in their service. We don't want to do this because it ruins the sense of community, but there is a lesson that more questions does equal bigger.

Bigger does not, of course mean better. 4. Pros of more questions: more to answer, more tips to be made, more SEO, more users, ,more complete index of qestions.

5. Cons of more questions: things move by super fast, decreased sense of community since people are spread out across questions, spam. This is all a great big experiment so let's try the following: a) another seven days of this to get a full 10 days of testing b) another thread in 10 days with some stats that we will share c) complete transparency and open discourse in finding out what's best or everyone.

One very important note: In a new version of the Answers home page you will see the following: 1. Last 10 tipped questions.2. Top 10 most interesting questions (voted by *YOU*!

) 3. Last 10 untipped questions. This new section means that the first 20 questions will be excellent in terms of quality and sense of community.

This should solve the "home page moving by too fast. Every category will move to this format as well, so if you go to Health you'll see top tipped questions, most interesting then untipped. FINALLY, the tagging system is the start of something very big: a custom home page where you will automatically be shown more of what you like.

So, imagine a home page made up of: 1.10 Questions that are tagged similar to my top 30-50 tags (i.e. You tag 10 questions Corvette and 9 questions Tesla you get Tesla and Corvette questions to your custom section).2. The last 10 tipped questions.

3. Top 10 most interesting questions (voted by *YOU*!) 4. Last 10 untipped questions.

This 40 question home page will be epic... and with the M2 design it should fit in a similar amount of space..... you guys rock for giving so much feedback!

More questions are better. Twitter questions raise the awareness of Mahalo Answers which should produce more traffic to Mahalo Answers and more on site questions. Right now my wife doesn't answer questions on Mahalo answers because she only likes to answer math questions.

She will spend a significant amount of time on Yahoo answers answering math questions for free. It would be great if we could get those people to ask here so she could at least get something for her efforts. Knowledge should be worth something and Mahalo should be applauded for trying to micro monetize knowledge bites.In my case Twitter sized questions get Twitter sized answers unless they are really interesting.

Succinct answers aren't necessarily bad. I've answered the same 25 cent question at least 4 times from Twitter so if you are in it for the money watch for the repeat questions. Remember it's only a duplicate to you because you've seen it before, the 4th person who asks it is just as interested in the answer as the first person.

It's going to take some time to get the kinks out of the system but I think in the end the reality will match the vision.

Hopefully it will be a moot point soon with all the upcoming changes with 2.0 and a functional front page. As with everything in these early stages it's an experiment and what we've seen on our end in the days we've done this (I think it's been about 10 now) Is a lot more new members answering questions and a higher participation on the site. When I first complained to Jason about the increase in importing he shut me up quickly by presenting graphs of the number of new answers were getting.As mentioned though, if you as an untipped question there is a chance it will get lost in the crowd, which has definitively put the need for twitter question filter option for the members who prefer helping members from the Mahalo community on the radar.

Either way, I think by using the search you should now be able to find questions totally geared toward your expertise, If a Lincoln scholar comes to the site they should be able to now find questions about something like Lincoln. mahalo.com/answers/search?q=Abraham+Lincoln As for the 25c on each question.. when were importing 1000s a day I guess it easily ads up in cost, we are always told by users they are not in it for the money, but if they are, there are still tonnes of questions worth more then a quarter, just search by highest tip. mahalo.com/answers/?sortby=sort_tip&filt... All I can suggest is to grin and bare it for now because we're really seeing results on our end of things, we're reaching lots of new users and the activity is growing because of the mass importing.

I would very much like to know how much Mahalo members have asked questions in the last few days compared to a couple weeks before. Personally, I think that Mahalo members are less inclined to ask a question as they believe it will not be seen and they will not get a question. Therefore, they will have to spend the cash to get an answer.

Yet, if you are new - I think very few members will spare the dollars to spend on Mahalo when they are not completely sure of the system. I would like to see three layers in Mahalo. The top would have 10 questions, the second about 6 questions and the third 4 questions.

The top would of course be Mahalo tipped questions, the second Mahalo members untipped questions and the third Twitter questions. Now, it may mean that less Twitter questions are answered - but if a Twitter member wants to have his/her question answered, he/she would sign-up. As well, I think Twitter questions should have $0.25 only.

They want their question answered and if they wanted it answered well, then they should sign up. Mahalo members should have $1 on their questions - unless it is not worthy of a $1 and therefore a $0.25 tip.

I feel that more questions is better simply because more variety, but there needs to be more answerers as you cannot possibly answer every single one, even if you enjoy or find the topic interesting. It would be nice if someone did moderate (or limit) some of them to make sure they are good questions to be answered, or at least understandable, and that questions are not repeated. I also see the 25 cents, and do not put too much effort into them, simply because I know or have a good feeling that the person asking the question may not be reading the answer.It's hard to find questions because they are not tagged.

With regards to this: b) There is no longer any point in asking an untipped question. It won't get seen, and you'll be lucky to get any answers. Yes, I agree, as it's hard to be seen as they are moving quickly.

They should be able to filter questions by the following: 1. Expertise 2. Interest 3.

Geography If you can filter out a geographic region, then you would not have to worry about as many probably.

Today's 25 cent questions may be tomorrow's $2.00 questions. What I mean is that if a twitter asker gets a great response to one of their questions, they may come back and offer a larger tip for the next one. The increased number of questions can be an advantage if the active members of mahalo answers take advantage of them by posting as many quality answers as possible.

The glass is half full.

I have to admit that partly for this reason, I've only answered a few questions in the last week or so. Previously it was possible to keep popping onto here for 5 minutes while doing something else over the course of a couple of hours and stay upto date with the new questions coming in. Whereas now everytime I come here there seems to be loads of new questions and I don't know where to start, so I often just drift away and do something else with my time.

I think that could partly be down to the 25c attachment too, I don't know if I'm ever going to get round to actualy withdrawing my money from here but it just felt alright to spend 5-10min answering a question for $1 whereas 25c just doesn't seem worth it. The problem with just sticking to a particular category is that it'd be easy to miss a really interesting question, that I might not know the answer to but would be interested in how other people answer.

On the question of tips and quality of answers, I highly recommend Dan Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational" (predictablyirrational.com). He talks about experiments in Behavioral Economics that find that quality of work is often *better* when the person is asked to do something as a favor (or for a non-monetary gift) than when they are paid just a little. Basically, monetizing a social transaction turns it into WORK, which has very different expectations.

I get way more satisfaction out of the points and belt advancement than I do from the money. The observations in "Predictably Irrational" are statistical, and may differ from any individual's experience. But it is consistent with @jasoncalacanis's statement that the size of the automatic tips didn't make a whole lot of difference to the quality of the answers.

Come on Philipy; you know you're gonna find the questions you really want to answer, either just by bearing the "read through," or by filtering by category, but I still see what you mean. I personally never go straight to a category, and if I know you're pretty versatile, like me, you like a reading through, and are interested in answering a variety of topics. I say, whatever brings a lot of traffic to the site (which more questions means more traffic) is an advantage (more than less).

If your question is important enough, and exclusive to a more select population of members, then I think it is worth tipping a buck on. However, I don't know what the filtering process is specifically, for Mahalo funded questions, and you might be on to something if you want to go there.

I would never have stuck around unless you had a certain volume of questions. More questions in my world mean that Mahalo is achieving success and growth. I can only justify my time where as long as the questions keep flowing, I am only limited by how quickly I can answer them.

I see a couple of overriding themes. First, some of you are struggling with HOW to answer questions. You are not required to be an expert with anything other than search engines.

That's because the information is readily available on the Internet and sourceable. A few suggestions for how to become an expert at searching: pandia.com/goalgetter/index.html internettutorials.net/ Furthermore, .25 is a fantastic rate! Sourcing is the most important element you can add to your answer, and if you pick 1-3 sites that have the bulk of what the user wants, you can add content to your answer just enough to make them curious and want to check out what you found for them.

You are lucky to have the flexibility to choose your answers, be as independent as you are and choose the amount of content you will provide. People are asking SMS text-answer services these questions all the time over their mobile devices. Some of us are out their competing for .10 a question on answers that are much more difficult than anything I've seen here!

We have to find the premium sites extremely fast and push the information through to the consumer before rapidly moving on. You know why we do it? Because something is better than nothing.

Because the questions keep flowing, and as long as they do, we were only limited by how good and how fast we are. In my world, every question has to be answered. I can't have a 'preference'.

If a question comes my way, even if its calculus, I must answer it, and I must do it with quality and accuracy. The only questions I can be selective with are what I choose to specialize in. Why put the burden of "understandable questions" on the asker?

Have an avenue to ask for more clarification if you really need to. A QA component with feedback is all the quality assurance you need. Recruit more people to answer and keep the questions flowing.

Use the questions and answers to feed Mahalo Greenhouse. You will be the coolest interactive news site ever if you pull it off and don't shy from expansion.Be ambitious and be willing to compete. You're fun, you're cool, you're going to be a great social networking site and service, and I love being here!

No complaints. Please, if anyone doesn't want a .25 question, make me aware of it and put it my way. If you don't know how to answer a question, I would be happy to help you and make some suggestions on how to approach it.

. 25 may appear on the surface to not be much, but all you have to do is answer 4 questions to reach $1. That is a tremendously good rate.

You would have to answer 10 to make that rate elsewhere. If questions go unanswered, that is more opportunity for your answer to be chosen. However, it is not good for a service to have customers who do not get a response.

They will go elsewhere if you cannot adequately provide to them. Recruit.

Very interesting discussion, particularly as I just got done pulling in a few questions to MA from Twitter... Two quick things I want to bring up, both have which have already been mentioned by other users above: (1) We will soon be adding "filtering" options to Mahalo Answers that will allow you to easily discover the questions you want to answer, without a lot of "wading around" through a lot of other questions. So if you want to ignore the .25 incoming questions from Twitter and Facebook, you can. (2) New questions from Twitter bring in new users.

Not all of them will go on to be active, engaged, productive members of the community like the people commenting on this thread. But some of them will be. And they will then ask better questions, and give better answers, and offer tips to the community, and bring in new users, and so on.

More users is win-win...We get to keep Mahalo going, you get more tips (and the elevated status of your green, purple, brown and black belts). For now, I'd suggest using search and categories to hone in on questions you'd like to answer. And maybe consider popping down into the .25 cent questions now and trying to help a new user (or someone trying out the site for the first time using another service)...I think a lot of the incoming questions are still kind of interesting...

I like to see what the friends questions are being answered. The work to find interesting questions is alot. Prioritizing the important questions is important, since, time is valuable.

Using other peoples research and clustering around the important questions is a option I hope Mahalo recognizes.

Yeah, I like it because I can help people more! :).

I personally have no interest in taking the time to answer a question for 25c. I liked the $1 minimum a lot better. The idea of answering 160 questions to get to the payout level seems a bit extreme.

I have really dropped off on my number of answers the last few weeks for that reason, and I hope it changes soon.

I like the additional questions, but not ALL of them. Some type of moderation needs to occur, as many of the questions (including several that I have answered) are just too simple or plain silly to be part of Mahalo Answers (e.g. What was the score of the Mets game?). It is an advantage, but only if Mahalo Answers can find a way to filter-out the gravel from the gems.

Personally, I tend to skip over the twitter questions. Even if *some* of them have interesting questions, and twittering to mahalo is a neat concept, I feel like we are being flooded with questions from people who might not really be committed to answering other questions. In that case, we are being overwhelmed.

I feel we could solve the problem of never seeing un-tipped questions, and the flooding from twitter for that matter, if we just revamp the home page. Why not set up the display in three columns: Tipped, Un-tipped, and From Twitter. If it wouldn't be too tough on slower connections, it might even be a good idea to have more questions per page, or even make it so that one can determine the list length themselves.

This way, the top, say 20, questions from each category are on display as soon as you log in. Maintaining that display when you choose a topic like "Science" would be a good way to sort through the twitter, tipped, and untipped simultaneously while quickly and easily finding questions you feel you can answer.

I'm hoping I still won't feel lost when we all get upgraded (will it make me feel perky again?!)

1) More tipped questions-Awesome! 2) More "untipped" (tipped by Mahalo) questions-largely from twitter-disadvantage Untipped questions seem to only get 0-2 answers, it's worth it to ask for free, but not ideal.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.