

Ask HN: How to grow user submitted content based site? - sigfrid

As a fun side project I built a site which lets users make and take quizzes. I've now hit a wall where users seem to be happy to take quizzes but no one has made any. I tried seeding the site using MTurk; the results were hilarious but not very useful. Does anyone have any suggestions for motivating users to create quizzes? Should I raffle off gift certificates maybe? The site is at www.quizfiz.com for reference.
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foulmouthboy
It's useful to think about your use case. Why would anybody ever make a quiz?

It's much more fun to take the quizzes. The payoff for somebody to take a quiz
is to learn something about themselves even if it's meaningless. In
comparison, it looks very very difficult to make a quiz with little payoff.
Why do I REALLY care about quizzing random people I don't know? I have to come
up with clever titles, clever questions, clever answers, etc? I think I'd
rather just take another quiz or go do something else.

That said, the main thing I'd do is come up with some interim calls to action
between making a full quiz and taking a quiz. Maybe give people the ability to
modify existing quizzes. Maybe give people the ability to make a question and
give other people the ability to come up with fake answers. Anything at all to
give the site some sort of learning curve towards making full quizzes.

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JangoSteve
I guess my first question is, how will the site make money? It's only useful
to give away gift certificates as an incentive to create quizzes if quiz
creation leads to making money.

I'm guessing you plan to make money from ads, which is why you're trying to
get more quizzes (so that it will attract more users to take the quizzes). If
that's the case, then you also need to account for advertising to actually
inform users of newly created quizzes, etc., before figuring out how much to
give away for creating quizzes.

As for other ideas to get users to create quizzes, maybe more prominently
asking quiz-takers to create quizzes. Adding in more of a narcissism factor
for people who create quizzes (I notice you don't even put the creator's name
for popular quizzes on the front page).

Another possiblity: get a hold of Ben Huh at Pet Holdings, Inc (of lolcatz,
loldogs, and failblog fame), as they seem to be interested in this sort of
thing, as shown by their most recent site, <http://graphjam.com>.

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og1
How much did you try with mechanical turk? My experience is that when
describing a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) it takes a few tries to get the
results you want. I suspect that if you asked for an entire quiz you'd get bad
results. If I were setting up a HIT I would give the user three sample quiz
topics and only have them create a single question for the quiz. I would then
only use the top percentage of questions answered yet still accept people's
responses even if they were not used but still within the HIT's requirements.

Also, I think you can still benefit from seeding some more on your own.

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jacquesm
Make them make quizzes one question at a time instead of multiple ? (lower
barrier to entry)

Give them an incentive ?

Make it seem like the ability to make a quizz is a privilege awarded only to
special users ?

Attach their username to quiz questions that they've added ?

Offer to send them results on how well people scored in their quizzes.

Hope there is anything useful for you in there!

greetings,

Jacques

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DanielStraight
It can't hurt to make the call to action to make quizzes more prominent.
"Make" listed among other plain text menu options hardly screams for action.
Perhaps put some sort of call to make a quiz along with the list of quizzes.
Or put a big "Make your own" at the end of the list of quizzes. I also really
like the idea JangoSteve suggested of creating incentive (in the form of
bragging rights) for making popular quizzes.

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petervandijck
Check out how <http://hunch.com> gets people involved, there are some good
lessons there.

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ScottWhigham
Well, I suppose your first step is to market to people who need to make
quizzes. Who are you marketing to?

