

Approachio – Wisdom of the Crowds - thomasfromcdnjs
https://approachio.com

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dbenhur
If you think you're going to harvest the "Wisdom of the Crowds", please go
read James Surowiecki's book of the same name. [http://www.amazon.com/The-
Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-
Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706)

If that's too hard, at least understand the summary on Wikipedia:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Four_eleme...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Four_elements_required_to_form_a_wise_crowd)

A quick look at your site and it's clear you don't get point #2 Independence
as you're showing people the prior avg _before_ they submit their answer. I'll
bet your site will suffer from a lack of #1 Diversity of opinion as well, as
most websites tend to gather abnormally high concentrations of like minded
people just through the natural ways they acquire and accrete audience.

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thomasfromcdnjs
This was just an MVP so didn't bother to put too much effort into tackling
Information Cascading.[1]

I was hoping that because there are many answers above the folder, it might
negate information cascading.

Lack of diversity will be definitely be a problem =D

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade)

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zeratul
To Ryan Kirkman and Thomas Davis: could you make some of the data freely
available to the Natural Language Processing community?

If this is something that interests people, then it will be worth the time to
automate this process. I suspect that there are blog entries, twitts, facebook
updates that already answer these questions. Now we have to mine them. "Gold
standard" set of Q/A would make it easier.

EDIT: But I hope there will be a way of getting Q/A in a bulk, right? Thanks

NOTE TO SELF: This could be a data mining or text mining web app. Check if the
interest grows in time.

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thomasfromcdnjs
So I just added minimal json export functionality, if you add .json at the end
of questions you should get a response.

e.g.

[https://approachio.com/question/7/how-long-should-the-
averag...](https://approachio.com/question/7/how-long-should-the-average-
adult-working-week-be-\(in-hours\).json)

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goblin89
Quite tangential, but I wonder—what’s the general attitude these days towards
[websites having installed] AddThis?

I recall it has somewhat sketchy privacy record (made the news this year with
canvas fingerprinting). This website uses AddThis so I thought I’d ask.

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etiennead
Try my app voicepolls.com, we are very much based on the theory of crowds. If
you intend to pursue this further you should give us a call and try our API.
We do predictive analysis and have a very large active community!

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SnacksOnAPlane
I'm getting oauth errors on your site when trying to log in with Facebook. I
wanted to say that 30 hours is a decent workweek.

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harish_batla
How will the quality of your results be different from Wolfram alpha who do it
without crowd sourcing of course but are quite good?

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Nullabillity
This seems to be more about subjective-but-quantifiable questions [like
this]([https://approachio.com/question/7/a](https://approachio.com/question/7/a)),
whereas WA only does objective questions.

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unclesaamm
Just a thought- putting the login screen after the user submits an answer
would increase overall participation

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thomasfromcdnjs
Might just be me but I generally feel deceived when a site does that,
especially if the sign up form is huge.

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secoif
Is your sign up form huge?

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DiabloD3
No Google login, pass.

