NEW FEATURE/TEST: M$1 tips are up, some notes about the 10 day test?

This site has grown by leaps and bounds since December of 2008 and I see this as only a continuing of that momentum. I saw a huge leap in questions, answers and members once M.A. Went live with Twitter. Talk to your pal Leo at T.W.I.T. And get him to do a podcast of the best of the best of Mahalo Answers, that will be a great way to bring new people in and keep the train a rolling.

A slightly more equitable situation would be if you would add $1 to any tip amount. To my dismay, I clicked "back" to modify a question description (bad news -- it wipes out the description and resets the tip). Then decided to add my own tip which, instead of bumping up the total tip to $2, replaced the Mahalo tip.So basically if you don't tip, you get a free M$1 and if you do tip, your account loses M$1.

Doesn't make much sense to tip under those circumstances.

Good news to all ,this would make mahalo a good platform for Q &A.

This shall be interesting... Now I have to decide whether to give a tip out of my own money or Mahalo's. I typically tip M$1... perhaps I'm going to go to M$2.

To put it into perspective, when I just logged in 30s after the Jason mailing list post I got the site unavailable standard error message - my best guess is a temp capacity issue with the click volume. Only major concern I see is the financing issue - people will come to expect M$ on every question and when they don't get it - people will leave. It's a tricky point, do you charge for questions (and then people deflect to "free" sites like Yahoo) or do you eat the $1 a question and try and recover elsewhere.

Lots of great questions here, and some interesting and informative answers!

I have to say, I kind of liked it back when there was no money associated with some of the questions. It seems like the greater amount of money that is associated with a question the more cut and paste from Wikipedia we get. I want Answers to be truly unique and be a place that people visit to hear a REAL person's response, not the monotone Wikipedia monster.

The break even point would be $400 dollars a day. The tip is not enough. It needs to $10.At $10 a tip, the win would mean capturing 40 wins a day.

Even the Brown belts are reaching that level. It is a strong gesture. I'm hoping that corporations with serious questions will start entering the question and answer market.

Oh no, now I'll never get any work done! Thanks, I hope the test is successful.

Frankly I think you could get more traffic at less cost by making it easier to find open (new) questions about specific topics of interest to the reader (potential answerer). When I do a search, it finds loads of old questions for which answers are already closed. I would like you to offer a search that lets me search for ONLY questions that are new (within the past few days) and are still awaiting answers, so that I could then answer those questions about the topic I have searched for.In Yahoo Answers, I can click on "Advanced" and there it will even remember the list of keywords that I am interested in, and I can search for only open questions that contain only my favorite keywords.

I like the idea of the graduated tip and not offering it for easy/silly questions.

This should make for an interesting ten days. Do you expect a lot more traffic?

I look forward to see how people try to game the system - my "Fred factor," although M.A. Is reasonable Fred resistant.

Yes this will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Unless one is in the habit of tipping substantially more than a dollar on questions (by far the minority from what I've seen) this giving giving only untipped questions M$1 seems to discourage people from tipping on their own questions. Is the increased traffic/better answers worth that? I guess that's what this trial is about!

Adding M$1 to user-funded tips as well as untipped questions would feel more fair if one is in the habit of tipping M$1 for answers. And choosing to tip M25cents under this system would actually push a question to the bottom of the queue below all the questions to which the askers did not add a tip. This seems a little backwards.

But, again, maybe it's worth it to increase answers and traffic? I'll look forward to hearing results. And, for now, I will not be adding tips to my questions.

Could it be that $1 is added to all tips. If there is no tip, it means there is a $1. If the tip is $1 then the new tip would be $2.

Just wondering (and seeing there is no question, I thought I would ask one). Its not a bad idea if it is finacially viable. After all its really only 75 cents assuming it is ever taken out of the system.

It would surely bring more traffic to Mahalo. I have referred Mahalo to some people here but since in "non-paypal" countries these tips receiving is difficult, people in those countries might still not be evoked which will refrain Mahalo in competition with WikiAnswers and YahooAnswers. Being a loyal users, I wanted to highlight the opportunity Mahalo has in beating many popular communities.

If Mahalo could get a way for paying even in those countries whre Paypal isn't available, then surely it can beat WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers along with very popular communities like MySpace(at least here in Pakistan and many other "non-paypal" countries. I have seen Google Ads showing Pakistani webpages in questions I choose which means that Mahalo is getting noticed in Pakistan but If people note that they are ignored because of being "non-paypal" country, they might move very easily to other sites and being a loyal user I won't like Mahalo to loose. I hope CEO is listening.

Love ya all!

Good thing that! Even if I just discovered this website I already love it (hard these days) one thing: M$ is in our talks what we call Micro$oft, maybe that should be changed in the future :).

I think this is a great idea! Why not have incentives to bring in the best answers possible. The more people using the service, the better quality answers people will end up receiving.

I'm liking Mahalo Answers now since I sign up last month and testing how interactive it is...I even spread Mahalo widget on my blogs and I will tell more about it with or without tipping!

Thanks a bunch for all your hard work Mahalo. I really like how you have presented such a great offer to so many and I hope that we can all help this site grow and grow by following the guidelines that you have laid out for us. I am very happy to be a part of this ever growing site and I think that a human powered search is something that the web has needed for a very long time.

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.