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Show HN: QABounty – Make money answering questions (qabounty.com)

31 points by bbarrows ↗ HN
I recently finished my site QABounty.

I would get annoyed when I could not get anyone to answer my questions on sites like Stack Overflow so I created this site, https://qabounty.com/. It is basically your standard QA site but you attach a USD $$ bounty to questions. For example I have a question up at:

https://qabounty.com/questions/what-kind-of-database-should-i-use-when-trying-to-store-10-to-15-million-rows-a-day/

The best answer for that question will award that user 3 coins (which can be withdrawn for about $3). I plan on adding my own questions of the day for a while, basically giving money away for a while hoping people use it for their own questions eventually. If you want to make a quick $3 though and check out my idea please go to the site and try to answer the question!

Let me know what you think! I am also looking for a designer as well after I see if people like the idea.. I used Stripe's new withdraw to debit card feature so you don't have to use bank account info to withdraw your "bounty" (money you get for answering questions)... Please give me some feedback on the site/idea!

25 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 78.1 ms ] thread
bbarrows
I recently finished my site QABounty.

I would get annoyed when I could not get anyone to answer my questions on sites like Stack Overflow so I created this site, https://qabounty.com/. It is basically your standard QA site but you attach a USD $$ bounty to questions. For example I have a question up at:

https://qabounty.com/questions/what-kind-of-database-should-...

The best answer for that question will award that user 3 coins (which can be withdrawn for about $3). I plan on adding my own questions of the day for a while, basically giving money away for a while hoping people use it for their own questions eventually. If you want to make a quick $3 though and check out my idea please go to the site and try to answer the question!

Let me know what you think! I am also looking for a designer as well after I see if people like the idea.. I used Stripe's new withdraw to debit card feature so you don't have to use bank account info to withdraw your "bounty" (money you get for answering questions)... Please give me some feedback on the site/idea!

TylerE
I'm not quite sure the financial incentives really align for anyone who's time is worth anything (e.g. doesn't live in a third world country). For instance, even at rather modest rate, your $3 buys about 8 minutes of my time, which isn't going to get much of an answer.
jzwinck
That's right. Joel Spolsky (co-founder of StackOverflow) and others said long ago that offering people cash incentives can work against you. Some people will do quality work for free if they receive a non-monetary incentive like recognition. But when you reduce it to dollars, they can easily do the math and decide it's not worth helping you.

The above-linked question about databases is a great example: it basically asks the reader to solve a fairly tricky database design/administration problem for the princely sum of US $3. And this is a question posted by the site's creator?

Almost no one will be your part-time DBA for $3. And anyone who will should be treated with suspicion.

If you want to pay me money to solve your IT problems, great, let's talk about that, but it's going to be more expensive than an ice cream cone.

bbarrows
I put this up too soon.. so I am trying to deal with scaling and some other issues right now but to briefly try to answer those questions/points..

The point is not to get anyone to be your "part time DBA" that was just some example question I came up with, hopefully to spark some kind of debate or just usage of the site. I am basically just giving someone $3 for their 2 cents on a scaling question. I think asking for someones opinion on scaling is a little different then asking them to be your part-time DBA.

About the financial incentives, the creator of the question can set the "Bounty" for whatever price they want. And if it is not worth someone's time to answer the question for that price then they can just ignore it right?

Really I am just trying to create an environment where people can offer "something" for help if they are not getting it elsewhere. It is not meant to be a source of employment but just a nice reward for someone willing to lend their time and knowledge.

I have a hand full of friends still in college who would pay a few dollars someone to walk them through a math proofs problem for example..

sdrothrock
I think that what people are trying to say is that if you do something for free, you don't really think about the time going into the answer or what kind of "service" you're providing the original commenter.

But once you incentivize it with money, you start thinking:

1. Hmm, how much am I making per hour here? How does that compare to my normal job?

2. Man, X dollars is kind of low. Do I really want to go find links and write a lot of stuff for just X?

3. I wrote a lot for Y dollars before, but this guy has a more difficult question for only X... guess I'll skip it.

4. This guy's question is something I can answer as a person who does Job Y, but if I'm doing Job Y for him, I want way more than X dollars!

toomuchtodo
> The point is not to get anyone to be your "part time DBA" that was just some example question I came up with, hopefully to spark some kind of debate or just usage of the site. I am basically just giving someone $3 for their 2 cents on a scaling question. I think asking for someones opinion on scaling is a little different then asking them to be your part-time DBA.

I have ~13 years of experience. I would rather answer someone's question for free on Stackoverflow or on a Reddit subreddit than get paid.

Networking/Repuation > Beer Money.

Please don't let this take the wind out of your sales, it may work, but I'd rather give my knowledge away for free in the right forum vs a couple of bucks.

sb23
Maybe the site should have a "cash out for rep" feature?
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ryanjshaw
There are 2 problems with your comment. First, I live in a 3rd world country and my time is worth something, as is my knowledge. That unnecessarily disparaging comment aside, it's quite possible there are plenty of people who have useful knowledge and whose time isn't worth all that much to them. Whether or not there's enough of them, or enough interest from them or potential buyers, are separate questions.
edwhitesell
"More Questions" link goes to localhost
bbarrows
Embarrassing.. and fixed. Thank you
hsx
What happens if someone doesn't mark an answer as answered or choose the best answer?
bbarrows
Moderator goes through and does his best to ascertain whether or not the question was answered and who answered it best/first.

If no suitable answer is available coins are refunded. Otherwise an appropriate answer is chosen after 5 days from question post.

thedufer
That's a short timeline and a perverse incentive. One of the clever parts of SO bounties is that they're taken from you whether you award them or not, so the incentive is to be a nice person and do so. Here the incentive is to never award and hope you get it back.

I understand you don't want people potentially throwing away money - its a problem where you need a high volume of answerers for the no-refund model to work. Just something to think about.

r_ms
Can't create an account
bbarrows
Should be fixed. Was that due to a "Unreadable CAPTCHA token file" error? That was a permissions issue with my deployment..
Leftium
Often money is not the best motivator. Dan Ariely's research shows people who were asked to volunteer consistently put in more effort than those who were compensated with money or gifts. There's a whole chapter about social norms vs. market norms in his book: Predictably Irrational. There's a decent summary of the chapter here: [1].

[1] http://robertnielsen21.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/predictably-...

bbarrows
I am hearing some very interesting points about how money could be a poor motivator or even a deterrent (it sounds like some people are saying, because it makes them evaluate the time they are spending on the question and therefore how much their time is worth)?

However in creating this I imagined a poor college kid that was stoked to get a few dollars helping another kid solve his homework.. We will see if that actually happens though..

[deleted]
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frankydp
Logins are not processing. Accepts login but does not change page or permissions level. Recieve "Nonce error: It looks like you don't have permission to do that." on login interactions.

Edit: Refresh x3 negated above.

bbarrows
Caching issue.. Just disabled caching.. Site might get overloaded again now due to HN traffic but im bringing up another large instance as I type this.. (facepalm) should have prepared..
bildung
Nice work bbarrows! Don't let the numerous comments pointing out the motivational problems monetary rewards can create discourage you. This phenomenon (the overjustification effect, researched by Deci, Lepper and quite a few others) certainly exists, but certain preconditons have to be met for it to become a problem. Most importantly, the person doing the work has to be highly intrinsically motivated. If that person then gets rewareded monetarily (extrinsical motication), the intrinsic motivation gets reduced. The consequence is an increase in quantity and decreasing quality of the productive output of the person.

But there are many situations where people already start with no or only extrinsical motivation: They do it for the reputation (reputation is an extrinsical motivator), they are college students who have to learn the topic anyway (so would profit from a second extrinsical motivator besides passing the test) etc. - basically every case where the person is not motivated doing the writeup because it enjoys that exact moment.

tl;dr: the overjustification effect exists, but will only affect your project marginally. Good luck!

onli
Looks nice.

I like that you thought at the RSS feed. However, the question feed is throwing a syntax error (in FF, and digg reader can't subscribe to it as well):

  XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
  Location: https://qabounty.com/questions/feed/
  Line Number 25, Column 1: