Hey Askville,
As many of you know, over a month ago we launched a controversial feature called Bonus Questions in an alpha lab (feature is only available to a select number of Askville users to get their feedback). Today, I want to clarify what they are, why we have them on Askville, why they are still in alpha lab, and what we plan on doing with them in the future.
What are Bonus Questions and why do we have them on Askville?
There actually are two features tied to Bonus Questions:
A) the Bonus Question Box; and
B) Bonus Questions
A) Bonus Question Box – is currently available to alpha lab users only. This is an experimental feature (hence, it is still in alpha lab) that we launched over a month ago. The original concept of the Bonus Question Box is to give each user questions that we wanted to highlight based on a user’s interests, recent activity, preferences, and other factors (e.g. your friend asked a question that is on page 45, we wanted to highlight that question for you). In effect, the Bonus Question Box would act as a personalization filter for each user. The more you use Askville, the more relevant the Bonus Question Box would get. We felt this would help users discover more interesting questions, faster. However, due to limited resources and re-prioritization of projects, we haven’t been able to implement the personalization features for the Bonus Question Box (we hope to do this in the coming months), which is why it is still in alpha lab.
B) Bonus Questions – Absent the personalization features for the Bonus Question Box, we wanted to create other types of questions that could potentially be interesting for Askville members to answer. Many newbies (as well as many veteran Askvillers) who stumble upon Askville have difficulty finding a question to answer, making their first experience on Askville a frustrating one. Moreover, certain types of questions that would be interesting to find answers to (e.g. sports, entertainment news, trivia, etc…) are rarely asked on Askville, but we realize would generate interesting answers by our community. Consequently, with the help of another Amazon business model (mturk.com), we started to create Bonus Questions (henceforth called mturk Bonus Questions). Knowing that the quality of questions created by mturk.com would range from good to really bad, we decided that mturk Bonus Questions would originally be only visible via the Bonus Question Box (for alpha lab users to see only) and only those that had at least one answer submitted by the community are the only ones that would be displayed to the rest of the community on all the major question lists on Askville (i.e. roughly 80% of mturk Bonus Questions are hidden). Our hypothesis was that if someone from the Askville community decided to submit an answer to a mturk Bonus Question, the question most likely would be good enough for other Askville members to see, for better or for worse. Furthermore, since we knew that we would get some poorly written mturk Bonus Questions, we allowed our community to edit any mturk Bonus Question to improve the quality of the question. Eventually, there will be other types of Bonus Questions once we have built the personalization features for the Bonus Question Box. Until then, the only types of Bonus Questions available will be mturk Bonus Questions.
Why are the Bonus Question Box and mturk Bonus Questions still in alpha lab and what are their future plans?
Both features are still a work in progress, which is why they both are considered Alpha Lab features. That said, mturk Bonus Questions that were answered by at least one Askville member does show up on all the main question lists on Askville. We realize that there is still a lot of work ahead of us to build the personalization features of the Bonus Question Box and improve the quality of mturk Bonus Questions. We still believe that once we have implemented personalization on the former and improved the quality of the latter, coupled with adding additional types of Bonus Questions, the Askville experience will improve dramatically. In the interim, we kindly ask for everyone’s patience as we continue to make strides in both features.
Are there any guidelines with respect to Bonus Questions and editing mturk Bonus Questions in particular?
So long as the edited mturk Bonus Questions are related to the same topics that were originally submitted, users are able to make whatever changes they want to the questions. If a mturk Bonus Question is too hard to answer, go ahead and edit it to make it easier for you and others to answer. We realize that there has been controversy over this issue. We apologize for not being clearer about this. We also are okay with users answering mturk Bonus Questions that they themselves have edited. We enabled this feature by design to make it even easier to submit answers to these questions. Keep in mind that the primary purpose of mturk Bonus Questions is to encourage Askville users to submit answers to a wider range of questions. That being said, all other community guidelines, including voting abuse, apply to these questions.
Voting Abuse Update
We are working on some major changes to our voting system, some of which will be released shortly, based on some of the feedback we have received recently. We also have banned several accounts due to voting abuse/collusion between members. Gaming the voting system is a clear cut violation of our guidelines and we will continue to immediately ban members who are colluding with each other with the intent of gaming Askville's ecosystem. In addition, we have warned/taken action on over 30 other Askvillers who have been negatively voting against certain members of the community. With our new Community Manager, we hope to stay on top of voting abuse. That said, please refer to our blog post in March 2007 on Voting 101 to get a better understanding of our voting abuse guidelines:
http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2007/03/voting-101.html
Moreover, users who are negatively voting down appealed Bonus Questions (or voting negatively on any appeals based on who the answerer is and not on the quality of the content) are violating our community guidelines.
Christian, our Community Manager, will be posting an Open Forum question that will allow users to give us feedback on the Alpha Lab Bonus Question Box and mturk Bonus Questions. Thanks again for your patience and feedback as we work to improve these Alpha Lab features.
Sincerely,
AskvilleMayor
