If answering the question takes weeks or months of work, won’t the question have fallen off the frontpage by the time the research is done?
What motivates me is making an impact and getting quality feedback on my thinking. These both scale with the number of readers. If no one will read my answer, I’m not feeling very motivated.
I’m currently exploring a possible feature wherein question-authors, and moderators, can flag answers as “Top Answers”, which trigger the question moving to the top of the home page, and adding the most recent “top answer” author as a co-author of the post.
Not 100% sure on the implementation details. Does that sound like that would help with this problem?
Well, the question asker will always see it (they’ll receive a notification). The act of answering it will also:
a) put it on the recent discussion section
b) it’ll also appear in on the slightly revamped Questions page, where both “Top Questions” and “Recent Activity” are sorted by which questions were most recently commented on. (“Top Questions” are “questions with 40 or more karma, sorted by recently commented/answered”).
We’ll be putting some work into figuring out how to keep questions take up “the correct amount of attention” (i.e. enough so old, important questions aren’t lost track of, but without cluttering the frontpage). If an answer is good, we will likely also curate the question along with the answer.
This could motivate me to spend minutes or hours answering a question, but I think it would be insufficient to motivate me to spend weeks or months. Maybe if there was an option to also submit my question answer as a regular post.
I do think that when you’re tackling something that’ll take weeks or months, it’s quite likely you’ll end up with multiple posts worth of content. In that case I think the “Answer” part would look more like linking to a separate post (or sequence) and summarizing it, than writing the whole thing in the answer section.
(I’ve also been thinking about having high-quality answers getting displayed as part of the question’s post item, so rather than the “primary author” being the person who asked the question, the top answer author is given prominent billing)
If answering the question takes weeks or months of work, won’t the question have fallen off the frontpage by the time the research is done?
What motivates me is making an impact and getting quality feedback on my thinking. These both scale with the number of readers. If no one will read my answer, I’m not feeling very motivated.
I’m currently exploring a possible feature wherein question-authors, and moderators, can flag answers as “Top Answers”, which trigger the question moving to the top of the home page, and adding the most recent “top answer” author as a co-author of the post.
Not 100% sure on the implementation details. Does that sound like that would help with this problem?
Well, the question asker will always see it (they’ll receive a notification). The act of answering it will also:
a) put it on the recent discussion section
b) it’ll also appear in on the slightly revamped Questions page, where both “Top Questions” and “Recent Activity” are sorted by which questions were most recently commented on. (“Top Questions” are “questions with 40 or more karma, sorted by recently commented/answered”).
We’ll be putting some work into figuring out how to keep questions take up “the correct amount of attention” (i.e. enough so old, important questions aren’t lost track of, but without cluttering the frontpage). If an answer is good, we will likely also curate the question along with the answer.
This could motivate me to spend minutes or hours answering a question, but I think it would be insufficient to motivate me to spend weeks or months. Maybe if there was an option to also submit my question answer as a regular post.
I do think that when you’re tackling something that’ll take weeks or months, it’s quite likely you’ll end up with multiple posts worth of content. In that case I think the “Answer” part would look more like linking to a separate post (or sequence) and summarizing it, than writing the whole thing in the answer section.
(I’ve also been thinking about having high-quality answers getting displayed as part of the question’s post item, so rather than the “primary author” being the person who asked the question, the top answer author is given prominent billing)