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Show HN: Ask X anything – AMA shouldn't be a one time thing

askxanything.com

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Re: Show HN: Ask X anything – AMA shouldn't be a one time thing

#13

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.

It has some benefits for influencers to adopt it. On twitter, instagram, and youtube, the comment section is quite messy. If you're a big name, you'll be overwhelmed by questions, and same questions are asked over and over again. Going through all those questions to pick out important ones is tedious. This is basically a zendesk for them (if they want to engage with their followers). So you're right, like AMA, going from influencers' side probably has a better chance to bring the community up.

On the other hand, the fact that an important questions getting large number of thumb-ups is a statement by itself. Imagine a question for POTUS with 10k thumb-ups but got no answer from him/her. It's a headline material.

Re: Show HN: Ask X anything – AMA shouldn't be a one time thing

#14
post #12
post #5

Doesn't ask.fm achieve the same purpose?

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

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.

Re: Show HN: Ask X anything – AMA shouldn't be a one time thing

#16
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.

Re: Show HN: Ask X anything – AMA shouldn't be a one time thing

#17
post #9

People have setup Github repos with issues as ongoing AMA's. I think a lot are forked from here: https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama

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

Re: Show HN: Ask X anything – AMA shouldn't be a one time thing

#18

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.

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

Re: Show HN: Ask X anything – AMA shouldn't be a one time thing

#19

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.

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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