
Show HN: Ask X anything – AMA shouldn't be a one time thing - wang2bo2
https://askxanything.com/
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nxsynonym
The main difference between this and a traditional AMA is that the AMA host
agrees to answer questions beforehand.

There is no such guarantee in this product - how do you plan on combating
questions that just sit idle? If questions just sit unanswered this is
basically a twitter aggregate.

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noxToken
Yeah I don't understand the value in this as a platform to ask/answer
questions. If I want to ask someone something at their twitter handle, why go
through this when I can mention them directly?

The only value would be that this has a centralized placed to view questions
that were answered or are waiting to be answered. Even then, AMA threads don't
just vanish. You can always go back an view them or visit the tabled[0]
subreddit to read the AMA without the extra comments.

[0]: tabled.reddit.com

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anindha
If 1000's of people are asking the same question then its more likely to be
answered.

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randomsearch
I think this is a reasonable idea.

However, you have a two sided market with a classic chicken and egg conundrum.

There are two solutions to this problem. The correct one is to provide value
to one side of your market without requiring a match on the other.

You could offer celebrities a standard AMA hosting facility, if you can make
your product somehow better than the alternatives. This seems hard.

Better is to focus on the kind of people who will visit to ask questions.
Collect together links and content (preferably syndicate it) that relate to
their heroes. So find all the AMA for a celebrity and throw together interview
links and the best videos you can find into a fanpage. Then share your
collection with fans on reddit etc. Once you have traffic, you collect
questions, then contact your celebrity and ask them to do an AMA.

Focus on niches with dedicated fans without obvious destinations for this
material. Promote. Rinse. Repeat.

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j_s
People have setup Github repos with issues as ongoing AMA's. I think a lot are
forked from here:

[https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama](https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama)

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wang2bo2
Wow! Thanks! It's great to know there're DIY solutions. I will try to approach
them and see what they have to say.

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kahlonel
Doesn't ask.fm achieve the same purpose?

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gtt
And there is also a curiouscat.me I wonder, is market that big for such number
of clones?

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wang2bo2
and @justinkan tried Whale

1) I want to facilitate dialogue between influencers and followers, not
dialogue between friends. You don't need thumb-ups/downs for the later:
there's not enough interest to justify that.

2) I don't want to create another social network, and there's little chance
influencers sign up here anyway. Hopefully letting influencers engage through
their established channels make things easier for them.

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DeltaCoast
Is this different from Quora because it relies on twitter so those who answer
don't need to be on the site?

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wang2bo2
Yes, and this also brings other benefits. 1) They don't need to provide proof,
as they tweet the answer from their official account. 2) They keep the
engagement with their audiences in their established channels (I plan to add
youtube in future too).

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anindha
This is well done but the struggle is going to be getting a critical mass. If
you can get one or two well known people to commit to answering questions
regularly then that will attract users. A lot of people used Whale initially
to ask Justin Kan questions [1].

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/justin-kan-launches-
video-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/justin-kan-launches-video-qa-app-
whale/)

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rajacombinator
I see what you’re trying to do here and like it conceptually. (Although I’m
not sure how it compares to existing venues such as Quora, etc.) Very long way
to go in making it interesting/useful from a product perspective and
attracting an audience though, basically just a splash page currently.

~~~
wang2bo2
That's also what I thought when I started developing it: I can imagine myself
reading such a site when it's established and active, but building one up
would be quite challenging. Someone has to try though.

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forkLding
Your biggest competition is more Quora instead of AMAs in my opinion

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boyce
Minor correction: that "whom" should lose the M

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wang2bo2
Thanks, it's corrected.

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patwalls
You should add a $$ aspect on this to incentivize the Twitter users to answer
for cash. YouTube does this kind of, and there's another app that does this
too I forget what it's called though.

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justboxing
Answers will quickly lose credibility the moment an asker finds out that the
answerer was monetarily compensated to answer their question.

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jpk
I would think the money would come from the asker as a bounty for the answer.
Where do you envision the money coming from?

