

Ask HN:  what do you think of idea for startup - andrewtbham

my idea for a start up is a platform where users ask opened ended questions and then ask their friends and others to respond... then users can respond and other users can vote up the responses. the results will be shown in a style similar to reddit/hacker news/youtube/fml, etc.  a mixture of upvotes and newly submitted are near the top.. plus if there are enough submissions a best of today, last week, all time, etc.<p>it would be similar to FML, or texts from last night, or http://notanewyorker.com/.  Except users can generate their own open ended statments questions and spread them virally.<p>This phenomena already happens on twitter.  #geekpickuplines #3wordsaftersex<p>The open ended statements would be mostly funny...or philisophical...<p>the main difference between this and what happens on twitter is that you can see a best of... that just doesn't exist the way it happens on twitter.<p>please let me know if you think this is a good idea, and how you would implement it. how it would ever make money (ads?)  and general thoughts...
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andrewcamel
Truthfully, I think the idea has potential, but not as anything too serious.
As I see it, you would really just be reinventing the wheel by creating
another social platform and then just adding one little function to the much
larger machine. Here is where I think you should go with it:

Create a system that will track these types of questions, but do not create a
new social platform beneath it. Essentially, the success that I see in this
idea would be in bringing together all of these existing questions to one
site, so if someone wants to use your functionality of seeing "the best"
responses to questions, they can visit your site. From that point, they can
upvote the responses and comment further on them.

If I were to label the site as I described it, I would call it an aggregator,
which I think is where it's success really lies.

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oscilloscope
This would be a great side project for learning how to setup and manage a
social Q/A site.

I don't think it's a good business/startup idea though. It doesn't seem much
different than Reddit, in particular.

How about playing with the Reddit, Twitter, etc APIs to create pages devoted
each devoted to an open-ended question? For instance, a user could ask the
question, "Is marriage worth it?". You could use Natural Language Processing
and other techniques to pull answers from all the web's wacky sources. Still
have a submission system for your own users to submit answers-- but
prepopulating with existing content on the web might help solve some chicken-
egg problems for you.

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andrewtbham
the idea of interfacing with the twitter apis is an interesting one...

can you show me an example link of an open ended statement on reddit?

here are some examples on twitter:
<http://twitter.com/#!/search/%233wordsaftersex>

<http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23wordsthatleadtotrouble>

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oscilloscope
There are lots. Check the AskReddit subreddit (reddit.com/r/AskReddit) A
recent thread I really enjoyed reading was:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/related/ddwcl/hey_reddit_h...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/related/ddwcl/hey_reddit_how_do_i_explain_death_to_my_4_year_old/)

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andrewtbham
Here are more examples on twitter... yet there is no best of.

i laugh every time... <http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23ilaugheverytime>

annoying question... <http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23annoyingquestion>

when i was little... <http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23wheniwaslittle>

