Hey Askvillers,
Hope everyone had a great weekend and a fun April Fools Day!
Mturk
We realize there has been several questions and inquiries regarding how we are using Mturk to help the Askville community. The plan for Mturk was to help "bootstrap" the Askville community in the early days when we were still very small so that most, if not all, questions that are asked by an askviller will receive at least one good answer. Since launch, we have sent Mturk nearly every question that was asked on Askville. We feel that Mturk has been very helpful over the past few months in achieving our goals of providing a good, if not great, user experience for all Askvillers, especially newbies. Moreover, many Mturkers have become very valuable and vocal members of the Askville community as well, outside of Mturk. That being said, we now have a very healthy and vibrant Askville communnity, which is providing great questions and answers everyday. It is because of the great effort and care that each of you give to this community that has made Askville a very special place! Consequently, we have "dialed down" the Mturk involvement and will now only send a question to Mturk if the question has not received any answers 4 hours after it has been asked. This will dramatically reduce the number of questions that are sent to Mturk. We believe this is good for the long-term benefit of the Askville community and it is also a testament of how great our Askville community is today. We also hope all Mturkers who have helped us launch Askville will continue to be active community members on Askville. As our community grows and we continue to expand our knowledge base to an even broader set of topics, we will continue to ween ourselves off of Mturk.
Voting - A Labor of Love
As well all know, voting is an integral part of the Askville experience. Developing a fair and equitable voting system is difficult, especially when you have a very large community of users with different standards. We've addressed voting many times here on this blog. This is because we *really* care about the voting system. We realize that we have not developed the ideal voting system yet; however, we are working hard to develop a better voting system/process in the future. Although most sites rely upon the "wisdom of crowds" to determine the best answer, we believe that there are fundamental flaws with this approach. Our philosophy is more aligned with the "wisdom of qualified crowds", where we rely on users who have demonstrated a certain level of expertise to be the "judge" of all questions in a particular topic. We have several ideas/plans that we believe will help facilitate this process. For those who feel that answers you've given in the past were not rated fairly, rest assure that we will eventually allow ways for users to get their ratings changed. Lets not forget what the 2000 elections proved to all of us - i.e. there is potentially a hanging chad on every vote and recounts are okay. In the interim, continue to send us report abuse reports on voting abuse. We will look at each report - although please be patient.
Thanks
-The Askville Team
