
Ask HN: Would you answer Yes or No questions for 5 cents a pop? Why or why not? - hsikka
I was thinking of starting a project where people can ask you simple yes or no questions and you get paid 5 cents! Just to see what people think!
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stevekemp
I suspect the hard part would be finding people to pay to get their questions
answered.

Sure I could spend £10 and ask a bunch of random people "Do you like cake?",
but without more detail such questions will be simplistic.

If the answerers are being paid to respond it's only a matter of time until
they get replaced by bots. I'd spend a few hours writing something to scrape
an email, SMS, or web-page and just reply "yes, yes, no, no, yes, yes" if I
was going to earn money from it.

In short it's a cute idea, a kind of crowd-sourced yahoo-answers, but "Yes/No"
feels like too easy a reply. Forcing users to respond "properly" with actual
detail doesn't help much either, if you get a question like "Why is the sky
blue?". 50% of people will copy&paste from wikipedia, 25% of the people will
think "That's too hard, I'll wait for another question", and the remaining 25%
will say "God", "It just is", or "The answer doesn't matter, if it weren't
blue you'd just ask why is it red".

In short:

* Simple questions are too simple.

* Complex questions will probably go to the wrong people, but they'll reply anyway to earn their money.

* You need to be able to "Judge" answerers on different metrics to stop bots.

* I suspect many answers would benefit from direct conversation between poster and replier; for example you might say "Your answer was interesting, but why did you say XX?" (i.e. Allow answers to be interactively refined.)

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zhte415
To extrapolate this a bit... it could be effective to ask a credit card
provider a well phrased question 'how many people buy cake at 8am' and use
their data-set which is probably being put into phase for this type of
question now, but this feel a tangent from the original premise.

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cool_shit
Ironically, the people that said "No" just answered a binary question for
$0.00. So, does that mean their answer is "yes"?

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bbcbasic
Dont be so quick to draw the QED tombstone!

The OP is asking about answering questions plural as a low paid freelance gig.

Someone who cuts their grandmas lawn isn't saying they want to cut everyone's
lawn for $5 each.

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Guest98123
You're asking the wrong question. Everyone will agree to answer yes or no
questions for 5 cents. As another user mentioned, people get excited and think
they could be earning $90 per hour, so you'll hear lots of people supporting
your idea.

In reality you're going to have a difficult time finding people willing to pay
for those answers, and that's where you'll succeed or fail. People answering
questions will certainly not be earning $90 per hour, but they''ll be lucky to
earn 10 cents per week, because I guarantee you'll be short on questions.

There are also countless reward services that pay people for answering
questions or surveys, watching videos, signing up for offers, etc. As someone
mentioned on Reddit, Google even has one
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.paidtasks&hl=en)).

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hsikka
Folks on Reddit seem enthused!
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5x7evy/people_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5x7evy/people_of_reddit_would_you_answer_yes_or_no/)

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nnn1234
Depends on the person's financial state at the time. The contradiction this
question gets to is ,if the question is worth a throw away amount, then no.
But if the questioner research s the questionees expertise and pays to access
it then yes.

Basically a long way to say no

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anigbrowl
No. The questions I'm likely to be interested in answering are worth more than
that. I fill out a survey for fun or to move the needle on some pet issue
occasionally, but doing it for pennies seems neither fun nor profitable.

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zhte415
You'd need some kind of captcha to stop bots, which would probable be
prohibitive.

Or human bots, as @ 2 seconds per question, that would be $90 dollars per
hour.

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hsikka
Right. The platform I was thinking about was mobile, so bots may be prevented
there? Also the human bots would probably be bottlenecked by the fact that
there would need to be askers asking the questions. Essentially, I am thinking
of charging 8 cents to the askers per person.

~~~
Styn
I think you will find more then enough people willing to answer questions. Not
necessarily hn readers though... Your bottleneck will be the question askers,
people who want to ask (random) people questions. You would at least need to
have some audience selection, e.g. only ask this question to asian females
aged 28-48 interested in crocheting. That way the question askers maybe get
some value out of it.

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wayn3
no, because thats a shitty use of my time. but i know lots of people who would
happily sit in front of a computer clicking yes or no all day.

at ten questions per minute, thats a decent salary for a lot of folks.

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bbcbasic
No, it seems like a dead end way to make money.

