

Ask HN: Arima – Quora for Polls. How should we promote our website? - winstonl

We recently launched our site, http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arima.io. Basically, we are similar to traditional Q&amp;A sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers in the sense that users can ask, answer and browse questions curated by other participants. What makes us unique is that we focus on multiple choices questions and we aggregate data from users all around the globe and display data visualizations in a personalized way.<p>We launched 3 weeks ago, and our traction so far has been mediocre. We get about 500 visitors person, with around 1000-2000 answers submitted. Our primary strategy has been posting polls on Reddit, and that has been inconsistent (some days we get close to 2000 visitors, some days 200). Does anyone have any good suggestions for us? What should we do to increase traffic?<p>Thanks in advance.
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anigbrowl
Get rid of the question ranking. I see that number first and it looks like
hardly anyone answered, whereas the actual # of people who answered (which
might be hundreds) is displayed in a less prominent position. Rank by
popularity or growth in popularity (1st derivative of # of answers).

The graphic presentation is great. The stats side is poor; for example if I
look at a question about the big boxing match tonight, opinion is divided but
in my neighborhood it's 100% for one boxer. Unusual...but I looka t a few
other countries where this fight is not a big deal and many answers are 100%,
so my conclusion is only 1 or 2 people form those places answered the survey.

Mae it embeddable as well as shareable. Set up rolling questions about things
like economic sentiment and update them cyclically, eg every month, then graph
changes over time. OK your polls are unscientific so that won't mean much, but
you might as well start somewhere, and you could expand into scientific
polling later.

It's a neat site but I think the traction should come from making it handy for
other providers like bloggers and so on. Just browsing people's opinions on
random topics isn't that interesting to me.

~~~
winstonl
Thanks for the comments!

\- Question ranking - good point, will consider.

\- Stats - there are plans for additional visualization (like a heatmap), and
that will come in a few days. Yes, you are right, stats are only meaningful
when you have a lot of answers, and when you have a lot of answers, you can
certainly do lots of creative things (like compare by gender, by interest,
etc), but it will take time to get there.

\- Embeddable - yes this is important (but will take time). Shareable - can
you be a bit more specific about this one? Right now, you can share on
twitter, facebook and reddit easily, what else should we be adding?

\- About browsing random questions. If things were organized (e.g. tags, sub-
categories, etc) where questions of similar topics were grouped together,
would that be something that makes you want to browse more?

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phantom_oracle
When I click on a question, I'd like to see a visualized graph of what others
have chosen as an answer.

Not everyone wants to answer the question to see the opinion of everyone else
(it's kind of like the person browsing for a new laptop based on other
opinions, who first needs to give his/her opinion before he can see others).

You have a lot of space below the question, so get creative with graphs and
visualizations, as that might keep eyes on the site longer).

Also, I agree with anigbrowl about the "upvote" thing. When you see few
upvotes, you start to think not many people are using the site.

If you want to adjust that, make the "80 people answered" more prominent. Use
things like colours for trending questions.

Eg. 50 people answered = green (question is building)

500 people answered = red (question is "hot"/trending)

TBCH, your app kind of seems like a feature for other products. As I
understand, you can poll people on reddit as well, so you should look at the
bigger picture from that POV about what your app is/does.

Oh and the bottom, I don't see why people would comment on a site like this,
but who knows, the user may start commenting for discussion-like purposes.

~~~
winstonl
\- Report without having to answer - we are doing this right now, and should
have it ready in the next week or so.

\- More visualizations is coming as well.

\- You are right, right now, this probably isn't any different from other
polls sites you may have encountered. But the bigger picture, hopefully, is to
create something that combines data collection and data visualization
together. With Reddit, for example, you could collect data easily (because of
its traffic), but you won't be able to see detailed visualizations (unless if
you create your own), and with visualization tools/websites, one often
struggles to find good datasets. This is, at least ideally, the longer term
plan.

\- Comments - understand. We have few comments atm. Do you think this is
because of the nature of the site, or because there is no traffic, and hence
nobody commenting?

