

Ask HN:  Are there any meta question answering sites on the web? - amichail

Such a service would forward your question to appropriate web forums and bring back the answers to you all in one place.
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sundeep
I don't know of any but this is ,IMO , a _very_ good idea.

(Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me Amichail,and it turns out,that by
reading HN , I _have_ subscribed to your newsletter. :) )

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Olivero
I'm not sure if this is entirely what you are searching for, but would Mahalo
meet the criteria of what you're looking for?

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amichail
The idea is to leverage the best expertise on the net... not just what is
available in any particular forum/site.

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ScottWhigham
So wait - you would submit to various forums lots of crossposts and then send
it back to me? A spammer's dream!

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amichail
I suppose you could limit the number of forums that it sends questions to at
any one time to say 3 or so.

If the user doesn't get satisfactory replies, then it could post to 3 more and
so on.

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Mz
As a guess: Not likely to work. Different forums are different little
cultures. Data-mining a culture tends to be viewed as a hostile act by the
members. "One post wonders" and similar tend to be viewed with suspicion. Even
if you could get past that, such queries sent to multiple forums would
practically be guaranteed to violate cultural expectations of one or more of
the forums to which it was forwarded. The only way this would work would be if
you had a staff who made it their business to belong to a bunch of different
forums, be in good standing in those forums, and know how to rephrase any
questions sent them so it meets cultural expectations of the various forums.
This is already done informally when someone like me says "Hey, if you want, I
can ask around and let you know what I find out, if anything."

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DanielBMarkham
A few HNers had a phone conversation with Philip Greenspun along these lines a
few weeks ago.

We looked into it for a while. The problem, as other posters have pointed out,
is that this is a spammer's dream.

The general tool -- Social Media Monitoring and Interaction -- has been done
in several different fashions, mostly in a one-way format, but done.

There is some interesting potential here, but it gets tricky once you move
past the initial rush of "Wouldn't it be cool...."

