
Apply HN: Agora – social network for debates on local and other issues - SherlockeHolmes
<i>What</i> – Agora is an online site for discussions about issues in real time. Main UI will show “debate topics” selected using user’s location, profession, and preferences. Any topic starting posts require: “initiator” (image, link, keyword references to set topic), minimum word-count text, and at least two “evidences” (image, link, keyword references). Responses only require text, but allow all. User profiles are sparse and private.<p><i>Why</i> – We often see socially motivated posts across news sites and on social networks, showing the need for a dedicated site for these conversations among citizens. We foresee Agora expanding the existing news media within 3 years. Agora will host solution-oriented discussions to help improve lives.<p><i>Competition</i> – Agora’s UI will be visibly different from forums. Medium is a similarly open platform for public to speak, but it doesn’t encourage P2P conversations. Quora’s Q&amp;A format is sufficiently dissimilar.<p><i>Business Model</i> - Premium posters can pay to advertise themselves in an isolated section. If needed, sufficient local distributions of same premium thread can be created for ease of providing individual attention. As it currently stands, we will only allow news media (in all forms), government bodies, and socio-politically registered organizations to advertise on Agora.<p><i>Challenges</i> – Agora only has one founder. I agree that start-ups grow too fast for one person to manage. I am not currently looking for a co-founder. If I am to be funded, I will pay ramen salary and offer considerable equity to a determined and ambitious programmer to come on board for at least three months. Our goal would be to launch the product and secure funding for next phase before this funding runs out.<p><i>Domain expertise of founder</i> – Finishing PhD in Electrical Engineering from UCR. I have medium proficiency in programming, but I am a resourceful learner. I am also an active debater online, with posts on many sites.
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Pils
This seems really similar to Jürgen Habermas's Public Sphere idea (in a good
way). One thing I would suggest is to make sure to stand on the shoulder of
giants. There is a lot of academic work written on what worked and what didn't
work in communities like Slashdot, kuro5hin, various bbForums, 4chan, Usenet,
etc.

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SherlockeHolmes
Best comment! Agora/Dais, as you said, is _really_ similar to the new
philosophical concepts you've introduced me to. I was not aware of him before,
but how I see this company agrees exactly with what I've read so far. Thank
you for sharing this. This has not only sparked my intellectual curiosity, but
also has become a learning responsibility as a founding member of a company
working in the area of public discourse.

I also agree with your latter points, which are no less important. All early
members including myself are investing significant amount of time to research
now, and will continue to do so long into the company's lifetime. We will also
establish a company culture that emphasizes learning among employees.

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pjlegato
How will you acquire your first batch of enough users to reach critical mass,
where the site becomes an interesting destination rather than a ghost town?
This will be your biggest challenge by far.

Your competition is not only existing blogs, newspaper comment sections, and
discussion forums that already host socially-oriented debate, but also any
other place where people spend their free time: Netflix and XBox.

How will you reach the people who would be interested in participating in such
a forum?

When you do reach them, how will you overcome the initial "ghost town"
chicken-and-egg problem, where nobody will want to use the forum unless lots
of other people are using it already?

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SherlockeHolmes
Thank you for bringing up more highly relevant questions for our company! Our
idea does indeed face a chicken-and-egg problem. The following strategies will
be implemented to address concerns mentioned above -

i) We will aggressively market toward a niched group to find early power
users. This group can be college students. A higher proportion of all college
students are likely to resonate to Agora/Dais. This will be enormously
valuable for the company during the early stage to a) fight off "ghost town"
issues, b) gain feedback for iteration.

ii) Early employees, all with equity stake in the company, will be encouraged
to regularly participate in the social network. We hope to make debating a
part of company culture. This will also fight off "ghost town" problem.

iii) We aim to funnel the constructive and creative energies currently visibly
abundant yet mostly wasted across social sites, blogs, comment sections, and
discussion forums. We are similar to hacker news in this sense, that it is the
first and _most uniquely designed_ forum for hackers (in the broader meaning
of the word). Agora/Dais aims to be such a thing for debaters of
sociopolitoeconomic issues.

iv) Effective marketing of our values will help us find users who share the
spirit of debating. Our challenge is to show that Agora/Dais can add value to
the user's life by being able to talk about issues that affect them directly,
and by being able to share in each other's knowledge on specific topics. Our
"north star", the thing that gives value to our users, is each time a user
gets a response. This is our _metric of interest_.

~~~
SherlockeHolmes
I wish to take the liberty to clarify myself, since the down vote is worrying.

My post, at its surface, appears full of "marketingspeak" and cliched
language. But in essence, each of the points are directly implementable
solutions that address the challenges raised by HN user in parent comment.

i) I provide a viable (albeit well known, but this doesn't make our strategy
weaker) early growth strategy that targets a specific user group.

ii) Another well known but nevertheless essential custom for early startups. I
understand that mentioning such basics may take away from my credibility, but
we must realize that startups often fail because they forget the basics.

iii) I suspect this comment can be deemed too vague. It is encompassing the
uniqueness of Agora/Dais, and expressing it by invoking comparisons to hacker
news. My purpose is not to cozy up to the user base here, but to state the
truth. Hacker news is highly unique in how well its content is organized and
displayed. HN is also unique in how its user base interacts (content-oriented
as opposed to profile-oriented). Agora/Dais respects HN and will learn from
her best points. But we are not direct competitors. Targeted social capital of
our product, its UI, and the targeted user base are all differentiated
substantially.

iv) This point states a fundamental company operating principle. The vision of
Agora/Dais is to dramatically improve the quality and quantity of debates held
online and offline on relevant topics, and to see our platform become a
facilitator for improved quality of life among our users. This is a very
important point that will be highly featured in all of our presentations to
VCs.

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pjlegato
This is indeed pretty vauge. The question was, "how will you acquire users?"
and the reply was "We have a way to acquire users."

OK, what is that growth strategy?

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bestattack
OK, I need you to give me a typical profile of a user (what they like to do,
etc.) to understand why the user would join the site and contribute.

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SherlockeHolmes
Thank you for the question. A typical user would belong to one of following
groups - professional/blue-collar family men and women, housewives and
househusbands, and youth in their twenties. Users belonging to such groups are
most situationally motivated to talk about issues directly or indirectly
affecting them.

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Kinnard
I really like this idea. Have you checked out the Economist's debates:
[http://debates.economist.com/](http://debates.economist.com/)

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SherlockeHolmes
Thank you for sharing this. What I loved most about the debates held at the
Economist was the participation on the part of the users. Although the focus
was on the selected panel of moderator and the two experts, there were 29
comments made by users that were largely well thought-out. I believe the
Economist is going in the right direction by holding debates on critical
issues on the web that are open to public. But we will take it further by
significantly moving the platform toward the public. In Agora/Dais, the
center-stage of the debate definitively belongs to the general public.

~~~
SherlockeHolmes
I want to clarify that the 29 comments were on the particular debate I visited
while answering this question. I don't have access to their user statistics at
the moment. This number likely doesn't tell us about average user
participation in their site.

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SherlockeHolmes
Dear moderators, I've made a mess of things while naming my company. I failed
to thoroughly search the name before having decided for it. Please either - i)
delete this so I may rename my company and start another thread, or ii)
replace all mentions of "Agora" in above post with "Dais".

I am happy with this second name. It refers to a platform or a podium, which
goes with the purpose of our company. I have decided to not keep the previous
name due to the extent of its affiliation with another entity.

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vit05
That s look cool. I thought Brigade app was trying to do something similar.
But appears it is more restrict to political debates.

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SherlockeHolmes
Thank you for bringing this up. There are a significant number of apps already
in the debate space, as listed below. The presence of competition in this
space means that the potential market size these startups are trying to tap
into is large. However, none of the startups have been able to capitalize on
the idea. As a result, most people still meet their "debating needs" by making
long comments on ESPN or Huffington Post or Facebook. Dais/Agora is confident
it can capture this market in a manner Google did with search engines, or
Facebook did with networks for friends.

 _Brigade_ \- User scrolls through topics and scrolls through multiple one-
line statements within said topics. Then user chooses between "Agree",
"Disagree", and "Unsure". User bonds with others who share similar percentage
agreement on various issues as decided. Dais/Agora is at least 70% different.
Even though Brigade has an active blog section and claims that it "is a free
app that lets you express your opinions on news and politics", it does not
give voice to the issues the way Dais/Agora will.

 _DebateMe_ \- Last updated 10.6.2015. There were 4 total debates going on
worldwide. They are one- or two-liners, with ability to include images.
Dais/Agora is at least 40% different, and will work hard to be a more vibrant
community.

 _Debate.com_ \- Has about 30 total "debates" and "polls" in database -
ranging from super bowl ads, death penalty, gun control, math vs. english,
Abraham Lincoln vs. FDR, Deadpool vs Starwars, etc. Few votes and views, very
few comments. We are 60-70% different.

 _State_ \- Established app in this space. Shows "opinion mixes" that are one-
liners and gives user following choices to act in response - i) pick up to 3
words, ii) search, iii) pick from words featured. Dais/Agora is 65% different.

 _Lighthouse_ \- One of the more similar ones. Hosts conversations on local
and national issues. User feed and profile are adjusted by gaining
agree/disagree/neutral feedback on one-line issues. Users participate in
conversations via texts ranging 2 or more sentences.

A point to note is that most of the apps have gone for instant gratification
methods because they followed the success of Facebook and Twitter. These
companies are not providing the debating population with what they want (which
is why they haven't succeeded). Dais/Agora realizes it is a radically
different company from the existing successful social networks, and has a
vision for itself.

Dais/Agora has the task of using technology to bring back conversations that
used to exist in a village, but has been systematically alienated due to
urbanization. In Dais/Agora, issues such as an incompetent teacher in some
neighborhood school will be able to reach a larger number of people more
frequently, thus gaining momentum in the community more often and being
addressed as such. We only hear one or two such cases on nationally televised
media every month, and perhaps the number increases to three or five - in
local media. However, well-ingrained and systematically-inbred transparency in
such a massive civic society as ours remains a major hurdle for human
civilization to overcome.

edit: cut text "(which is desired)"

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kumarski
Online debate is a really tough space. Sam Altman had a very famous recent
tweet about the productivity lost to online debate.

~~~
SherlockeHolmes
I'm not aware of Sam's tweet. This being a tough space is an encouraging sign
for a start-up. It was a founder of YC who encouraged start-ups to not avoid
"schlep" business.

Edit: I realized that your reference to a tweet was in effect a questioning of
the validity/purpose of Dais/Agora. I'd like to answer this. Unorganized
debating and commenting is inefficient due to their delocalized nature. Dais
allows the true values of debating to shine by creating appropriate space, and
via structured guidance (see differentiated visuals compared to competitors).

By creating the first proper online space for debates, Dais gives birth to the
possibility of entire cities, states, and nations being involved in issues
(from temporary and local to far-reaching and international) at a level not
observed since urbanization began, thus allowing unparalleled civic activism
to flourish. This is the vision of Dais/Agora.

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Goalie27
Overall I like the idea. My main question would be how do you keep it from
becoming an echo chamber or an all out brawl?

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SherlockeHolmes
Thank you for two very relevant questions! We will develop an algorithm that
will compare "debate topics" by analyzing their "initiators", text content,
and "evidences". This algorithm will assign a correlation factor to all
possible one-to-one comparisons from domain of "debate topics". Any two
"debate topics" with factor exceeding a threshold may be integrated together.

Required minimum word counts for all responses, post flagging system at user-
end, and algorithms searching for abusive language will all be used to prevent
all-out brawls from breaking out.

These are among important parameters that will be under observation starting
in the development stage. We will learn from our experience and improve our
algorithms.

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bonbom1
You might want to change the name if you don't want to be associated with the
largest online drug marketplace.

~~~
SherlockeHolmes
Wow I wasn't aware of this! Just looked it up. In Ancient Greek city-states,
"agora" was the central square where they'd gather for important discussions.
I really like the name and would hate to give it up.

I will have to understand all of the implications of having the same name as
that of a major marketplace from the deep web. This is pretty shocking to me.

