
Fountain aims to turn the answers game into a Siri-like smartphone experience - ForHackernews
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/new-answers-app-aims-succeed-quora-failed/
======
codezero
(I used to work at Quora, my opinions your own)

It's a bit early to say, but I don't think this directly competes with Quora.
There have already been many peer-to-peer connecting Q&A services like
Aardvark and expert networks like Pearl, as well as lighter social
friend/friend of friend Q&A like Jelly.

What Quora purports to provide that these don't is a (mostly) permanent corpus
of knowledge that is available later. One to one Q&A is definitely great for
getting you an answer to a specific question now, but it doesn't give you a
broad picture for things that aren't as laser focused.

A lot of the "personal experience" content on Quora is pretty good, like what
it was like to be in the WTC when 9/11 happened. This is of course not the
kind of thing an individual needs to connect to another individual to find out
(though it's still interesting), so I think that Fountain (the app referred to
in the article) will have its own niche that is very distinct from Quora's.

Things like Fountain and Pearl are useful for individual experiences, and
experts will make decent money if the platforms are successful, but what you
end up with is the monetization of repetitive questions, rather than a
resource where you can access a variety of answers for questions. They tend to
be a place people go to ask specific legal and medical questions, as well as
things like home care/maintenance, but outside those fields they can be a lot
less useful.

~~~
onedev
I'm curious, why did you leave Quora?

~~~
codezero
For me, there were limited opportunities for growth since I wasn't an
engineer, but I'm happy to talk more in person about it :)

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michaelq
This article is PR at its most effective. An established founder snaps up a
fancy domain name and his PR team convinces a reporter that Quora has somehow
failed. I've found no such consensus of Quora having failed as a business
([http://www.quora.com/Has-Quora-as-a-business-
failed](http://www.quora.com/Has-Quora-as-a-business-failed)), nor as an
expert question and answer site.

Anyway, the problem with Fountain is you still have to ask a question. And if
you can formulate a good question to begin with, Google (which is fast and
free) might very well provide a better answer than some random domain expert
willing to answer random questions for small amounts of money.

~~~
supjeff
I'm working on a social graph of causality, which is meant to solve the
problem of having to ask specific questions to find answers. I call it
Causemap ([http://causemap.org](http://causemap.org)). Here's something I
added today about the militarization of police
([http://www.causemap.org/1033-program](http://www.causemap.org/1033-program))

~~~
michaelq
This is an interesting approach. So the idea is basically amassing a bunch of
people's subjective opinions about causality? Most of the ideas here are
really high-level. Also, I tried to submit a "situation" without creating an
account and got a 403 js error. You might want to hide that button for
unauthenticated users.

~~~
supjeff
Thanks for the feedback! It still has some rough edges, but I'm really glad to
see how people respond to it. It's a combination of a few really new concepts
on the web (social news, wiki) and the relatively obscure concept of
"causality", so figuring out the right UX/UI for it is my priority right now.

> So the idea is basically amassing a bunch of people's subjective opinions
> about causality?

Yes, that's the idea. There's also a mechanism to strengthen the strongest
causal relationships through upvoting and downvoting. This way, hopefully the
most reasonable links show up on top, but everyone's opinions can be
represented.

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mindcrime
I don't think it's fair to say Quora has failed. This sounds like something
different. Whether or not it will work remains TBD.

I do recall having an eerily similar idea for a mobile-based Q&A system at
least 6 years ago though, and decided not to try building it at the time, as I
just didn't think it would catch on. Things have changed a bit now - there are
more smartphones, more 4G and wifi, and people have grown accustomed to Siri
and Google whatever, so this might be more palatable now than it was then. But
I have to admit, even being someone who's _really_ interested in this _kind_
of app, I am a bit skeptical.

Still, this conversation has rekindled my interest in this area, and I now
find myself considering starting on an open-source version of something like
this, if there isn't one out there yet.

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nkozyra
Any new entrant into this field is going to have to _immediately_ convince me
it's better-designed than StackExchange.

NLP on verbal requests (isn't this already baked into Android and ios?), video
responses seem like decorative sugar to me.

~~~
supjeff
How about a crowdsourced social graph of causality?

I made something that can answer users' questions before they even formulate
them. If somebody were wondering what caused the Ebola outbreak, they could
start here: [http://www.causemap.org/ebola-
outbreak-2014](http://www.causemap.org/ebola-outbreak-2014)

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throwaway420
Quora has loads of great content, but is still failing for me because it's
constantly nagging for me to login. Annoying people to death and hiding
anything of value is not the way to entice people to come back again and
again.

~~~
Khao
It's gotten to the point that if I'm looking for something on google and have
to choose between a Quora link and any other website, I'm going to pick the
other website first.

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Geekette
It is odd (or maybe just linkbaity) for Wired to bill this as a replacement
for to "succeed where Quora failed".

Especially in light of the fact that Quora focuses on a much wider base of
users and topic areas, layered with interesting experiments like having
notable personalities (across different fields) answer questions and having
users' answers re-published elsewhere.

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justboxing
This idea is not new. There have been plenty of QA sites that implement NLP,
or have a series of pre-screened "Experts" who claim to answer all your
question.

Problem is, it will be difficult to get a user to pay for something when the
majority of internet users believe (rightly or not)that there are 1000s of Q&A
sites like Quora, StackExchange's family of site covering everything from
coding to cooking to physics and science, that are FREE and that do have
Quality answers in many instances that are also community curated and rated.

So why would any user pay?

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MrZongle2
I don't blame Quora (or Fountain) for trying to profit from being a
centralized Q&A site. But when I'm Googling for an answer to my technical
problem, I'll go to a Stack Exchange site first. As an end-user, I see Quora
as little more than a newer version of Experts-Exchange: there may be useful
information lurking behind the pop-up dialogs and intentional obfuscation, but
_it 's a pain in the ass_.

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jvagner
The internet is already completely and absolutely filled with places for
people to go and ask the same ol' FAQs over and over and over and over again.

Reddit and Quora are both completely intolerable to me because of the
constant, micro-scopic topical navel gazing.

If Fountain doesn't address this first and foremost in their technical plan,
there's no hope for the product.

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ilyaeck
There is money to be made in premium concierge services that actually get the
job done. Such services have so far relied (and will continue to rely) on
humans, but smart technology may be able to automate the service seamlessly
80% of the time and thereby lower costs.

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DigitalSea
In theory like all of its predecessors such as Yahoo Answers and indirect
competitors like Quora, Fountain is a great idea, in theory, but in practice
we all know that it will not go very far. And that is not a reflection of
Aaron Patzer's inability to act upon an idea, Mint.com obviously was a big
success, however, to me at least, Fountain will fail for one reason and one
reason only: people do not like to pay for things on the Internet like this.

It is a sad reality that the only thing that really makes money on the
internet is e-commerce (online stores), popular subscription based
services/games and advertisements. People have built up this image of the
Internet being for finding answers to your questions for free. I could be
wrong and who am I to say that Aaron can not make this succeed? He obviously
has a lot more experience, capital and connections to try and pull something
like this off.

Adding in the ability to have a chat with someone in many different ways is
quite cool, but I would not go as far as calling it groundbreaking or new. The
whole premise of a proper Q&A platform and accompanying application is
something that this article acknowledges has been done many times before.

I think it is a bit sensationalist to say that Quora failed, in my opinion it
is thriving. As a regular Quora user I can attest that it is not a Q&A website
in the sense of the terms we have come to know. When my dishwasher stops
working, I do not ask people on Quora nor do I seek out existing answers on
how to fix it. Quora in my opinion is for sharing interesting stories about
experiences. Most of my uses are reading interesting questions with
interesting answers ranging from drug dealer experiences to physics and more.

 __Some of my favourite Quora questions /answers include: __

What does it feel like to shoot someone in the line of
duty?[http://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-shoot-
someone...](http://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-shoot-someone-in-
the-line-of-duty)

If the world were a cube, how would gravity be different?
[http://www.quora.com/If-the-world-were-a-cube-how-would-
grav...](http://www.quora.com/If-the-world-were-a-cube-how-would-gravity-be-
different)

What is it like to be a drug dealer? [http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-
be-a-drug-dealer](http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-drug-dealer)

I wish Aaron the best of luck with this idea and if it succeeds, I will be the
first person here to admit that I was wrong about someone being able to
finally crack the big problem of a decent Q&A platform where answers are
credible and the consistency and quality of the platform can be maintained as
it grows in size.

~~~
ape4
Also the price. $5 is expensive to ask a question. But $5 is cheap to pay an
expert plumber for 10 minutes of time.

~~~
DigitalSea
Very true. I could warrant spending $5 for 10 minutes of a plumbers time to
save hundreds on a DIY job, I can see the value in something like that. When
you think of it that way, it actually makes a whole lot more sense, but I feel
like it goes outside of the realm of what most people would describe a Q&A
platform, it was more akin to a consultancy application.

Getting a plumber to offer up their time for such a small amount of cash? That
will be the difficult part. Getting anyone who's primary occupation does not
involving working at a desk like an electrician, mechanic, plumber or
carpenter to use this service for pennies will be very difficult.

I know a plumber and he runs his own business here in Australia, I think his
hourly rate is about $85 an hour. If you take his hourly rate and break it
down to a per 10 minute cost that is about $14 (rounded down). Presumably of
this $5, Fountain will take a cut and the result might be somewhere around the
$3 to $4 mark that an answerer will actually get.

If something like this does work, I will without-a-doubt use it and in turn,
try and make some money on the side answering programming related questions
and helping people stuck on coding related problems.

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dang
We changed the title to a more accurate and neutral sentence from the article
(adjusted to fit the 80-char limit).

Normally we'd be inclined to leave such a title intact, but this one is
particularly misleading. The article doesn't even mention Quora outside of one
perfunctory list of Q&A products.

