Could this time be the charm?
There is a new application that is coming to Hive that could help to attract a ton of new users. It is something that was tried before on Steem without much success. Hopefully, this time we will see different results.
Quello is a question and answer application. The idea is modeled after the highly successful Quora which is the largest question and answer site on the web.
According to some reports, the site crossed 300 million users a month in 2018, which puts it in the league of Twitter in terms of users.
Obviously, this is a huge market to penetrate.
According to Alexa, the site is ranked 240th.
The market is there so the challenge is penetrating it. In the past, Musing.io tried it without a great deal of success. I do not know what took place with that application but we must remember there are many reasons why projects fail, even if the idea is good.
Hopefully the Quello team avoids some of the same pitfalls.
The premise of getting rewarded for posting and answering questions is a simple yet effective concept. In my mind, it makes a lot of sense and something like this should take off. Often, the simplest ideas are the most successful.
Posting a question and people voting on the best answer is a part of Quora. It was a part of a number of other sites throughout the years also. The concept is valid since it is proven to work. Now, the key is to figure out if that can be monetized in a way that is attractive to people.
This is the challenge before the team behind this project.
In reading the announcement post, there is one thing that caught my attention. It could really make a different in the direction of this application.
Ability to post to blog or as comment held outside of your blog
This seems like a major benefit. One of the biggest challenges in the past on Steem (Steemit) was that everything one did ended upon being posted to the blog. This had a tendency to mess things up, especially for those who were serious bloggers. Thus, either the application was overlooked or another account set up. Of course, anyone who knows branding understands the difficulty in running a number of accounts.
It looks like they team is going to start with a MVP and take it from there. From the announcement post, the team exhibited the desire to take the feedback from the community in the development of future features.
Here is what they say the immediate future looks like.
The initial phase of development on Quello is focussed on giving you the tools you need to create and answer questions, following this initial release the aim will be to bring a number of features that will separate Quello from its competitors and provide a unique proposition to attract content creators. A few areas we see important include:
- Easy sign up to Quello
- Engagement through gamification
- Attracting content creators
- Enabling community-driven development and feedback
Overall, we hope to develop Quello hand in hand with the community, taking your feedback on board, and creating a platform that becomes a staple of your Hive experience.
The full announcement can be read here:
It is always good to see new projects, especially ones that are exclusive to Hive to start. We are in a phase where there is a lot of experimentation taking place. Failures are what we learn from. The experience of Musings left behind some lessons for those that follow.
The ideal aspect of a community concept is that the ideas can come from anywhere. There were many who were part of Musings and, hopefully, will submit their ideas/experiences to the team behind Quello.
As always, I love seeing new projects appearing. My belief is that this only increases the chances of success for Hive. It is akin to lottery tickets, it only takes one to breakthrough and the more that one has, the better the chances.
The major barometer is whether this team can reach outside the Hive ecosystem and bring users to the application. As stated, the question and answer market is enormous. People like to exhibit their knowledge while helping others. Soon, there will be a way to monetize it.
Check out their blog for further updates.
If you found this article informative, please give an upvote and rehive.
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Posted Using LeoFinance
This was my main hesitation in the past. Different interface, with keychain integration, curation and posting rewards, and no impact on my blog; I'd definitely engage.
It was wildly successful at attracting users from within the Hive ecosystem. The rewards were pretty good. At a time when the reward pool was dominated by bid bots and a few whales Musing was like a breath of fresh air.
But the success of the platform relied solely on its 1 million SP delegation from Steemit, Inc. When Ned to it away, the Musing fell apart. The team was powering down constantly and was incapable of compensating for the loss of Steemit's delegation with large upvotes of their own.
The worst part of it was that all the top-level answers were stored on a centralized proprietary database controlled by Musing. Only links to the answers were stored on chain. Musing.io was thus the only front end with access to the content and only the comments to answers were immutable. It was clearly an attempt at exploiting the reward pool.
They are giving the users the option of making their answers visible in their blogs, so I guess that will be covered.
The premise of getting rewarded for posting and answering questions is a simple yet effective concept. In my mind, it makes a lot of sense and something like this should take off. Often, the simplest ideas are the most successful.
Breath of fresh air? More like a breath of fresh pig diarrhea.
It was probably the cringiest thing to have ever existed in the internet. People were asking and answering the dumbest things ever in an effort to chunk out as much content they could in order to leech that sweet steem delegation.
Honestly I tried too leech too but my answers were well thought (most of the time), honest and often humorous. Yet, I never got a nice vote. All votes went to spammers shitposting thousands of nonsensical answers that seemed like they were written by kindergarteners. Even bid bots brought more value then the joke called Musing.
Musing was literally cancer
You know what was cancerous on Steem? Bid bots controlling the majority of the reward pool. Back in 2018, Steem was a shit show content-wise anyway.
For the distribution of Steem Power, Musing was fantastic. And I hope most people have grokked the difference distribution makes for DPoS chains.
I saw a lot of good answers getting great rewards.
Thanks for additional insight on some of the issues they had, as well as providing an insight into what you didn't like about their implementation. Enjoy reading your comments.
Apologies for some duplication in previous comments to yourself, but think other readers may find value in this reply too 👍
I think the road to building a platform that users love can be bumpy and in the past delegation has been easy to blame. Before any kind of delegation and curation by Quello, it's important to have a solid foundation that users can enjoy using without just the rewards (from a Quello delegation). Let's face it, enough people use Quora and they don't receive anything, it's because they find the content valuable.
As mentioned, I'm sure there will be problems, issues to solves, but as my background is largely leading product teams I'm a firm believer in iteration and by listening and working this community, anything is possible.
In Quello, we'll be doing the opposite, all posts (comments or root) will be stored with enough information for them to stand on their own on the blockchain, and within our internal database, we'll be storing references simply to allow for flexibility into how we rank the questions and answers.
Your comment yesterday did make me think further into how more could be stored on-chain and think I have some improvements I'd be able to post MVP to extend that.
Once again thanks for your feedback 👍
@tobias-g
Thanks for the detailed coverage of what happened with Musings.
It does seem like the lessons of the past are being learned and new ideas implemented.
This is an application to watch closely since I do believe it could reach outside the ecosystem rather easily.
Posted Using LeoFinance
I certainly hope it will reach the outside of the ecosystem easily.
I believe it will be easier to accomplish now than, say, three years ago. Crypto is not such a boogeyman to Joe Average as it used to be. But we have our work cut out for us. It won't happen just like that. I think Twitter is key, again. If we can convince a lot of Quorans that getting paid for answering questions is better than not getting paid, then we will succeed, however unbelievable it might be that that would be an object - in my experience it has been. The lockdowns are seriously hurting a lot of people, which is why answering questions online and getting paid for it even in these mysterious and a little suspicious cryptocurrencies is certainly better than going hungry and without power. Besides, it should dawn on the philanthropists on Quora than they can still donate their earnings instead of them being cashed out by millionaire venture capitalists who buy dreamboats and mansions with them. A lot of needy people using Hive may not be good for the price in the short term but it can help grow the ecosystem tremendously leading to massive long-term gains.
Hope the project works out great.
Exciting times for all
Hopefully will be a success here and bring in more people
hive gone wild
This is great news
Thanks for coverage @taskmaster4450, really appreciate it. The feedback so far has been awesome, the aim was to get some coverage and build a small following prior to release, but the number of positive comments are really motivating.
Excited to see that our desire to work through problems with the community comes through strong, we're under no illusion that there will be problems to solve and things to tweak to make a platform such as this work, but as mentioned in a few places before, this community is strong and always come through with great feedback. Looking forward to the journey.
Thanks again for your post 👍
Hello dear friend @ taskmaster4450 I very much appreciate the information you provide us, the arrival of new applications on the platform causes great expectations, without a doubt, it could bring many users, now much more than the value is starting to skyrocket. I have high hopes for Hive, I would love for this to work
I wish you a great week
Hey hope this concept takes off, I have a couple of friends who work on Q and A and this would be a tremendous upgrade.