Show HN: Quetree – A Q&A site that is tree-based and hierarchical

The call to action to download the copyhackers book doesn't work for me. Any other way of getting it?

Community building is the most noble project on the Internet, and this is a unique attempt to organize it further. Communities, not software or commerce or entertainment, is what the Internet was motivated from in the 90's and will be the most remembered aspect in 50 years, so it is important to create experimental community harbors like these to possibly incubate future massive projects.

However, I am curious why you chose two features from which to derive your community software.

Voting: This has been demonstrated by major websites to form "mob opinions", hide individuality, and discourage of unpopular/unoriginal ideas. It is somewhat agreed by Hacker News members that voting should represent quality of comments. But as the size of a website approaches infinity (like Reddit, or Facebook comments with "liking"), this type of culture breaks down, so voting is eventually only used to game the system to promote comments that follow your personal opinion. Differing opinions are a beautiful aspect of humankind, and they are lost when a comment's score is used to make it visible in an unequal manner to other comments. Additionally, voting has little correlation with the effort that goes into a comment. A one-word reply is just as likely to have the same score as a wiki-like hand-typed article and will therefore be artificially promoted to the same level. I believe that if you're running an online news website, sure, absolutely promote "top" content. If it's a community forum, give people an equal voice.

Threading/hierarchy: Human conversation has not and will not change as a result of Internet community software. Hierarchy is unnatural, chronology is natural. If the goal of a community is to generate "answers" to "questions", sometimes this unnatural feature is necessary, but use caution and don't over-hierarchy-ize the organization. Having a "Support" and "Not support" feature like in your video demo adds to the paperwork of posting an answer while not offering much benefit, and it seems a bit O(n^2) to me.

All spot on, esp the niche and user-problem focus; but sounds more R&D innovation than market launch. e.g. bitkeeper not github; relational algebra not oracle; lisp not java.

The earliest of adopters ("enthusiasts" and "innovators") want cool technical features, not benefits.

I think you should be careful of “perfect is the enemy of the good”.

I’m sure a mobile app would be the perfect solution. Nevertheless, until that materializes, it would be worth investing a day or two to mobile CSS.

It won’t be as good, but for people wanting to use your product now, it will be sufficient, and will be the difference between them using it and not.

I think we need something like this, but I'm not sure if this is the answer. This type of tree-like Q&A would be good for problem solving, e.g. "How to save the oceans?" -> "How to save the oceans from plastics?" -> "How to harvest the plastics from the oceans?" -> "How to use AI to sort out different plastic types?" (obviously I can't sketch here the multitude of branches I'd like). You know, wiki for problem solving. There would be branches for whether we could burn the plastics, how much energy would it take to burn the plastics, and whether we should ship the plastics eventually to shore and how? Ideally we would have mechanism to reward the best answers, and in the end invite the whole of global community to solve these problems whether it is in terms of economics, chemistry or engineering. Dream on :).