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Ask HN: Help develop a site idea, would this be possible?

25 points by steerpike ↗ HN
How would one go about developing a site which offered suggestions to people who wanted to step outside their comfort zones?

Sort of an opposite of Aamazon suggest, where instead of 'you may also be interested in', it would suggest things which you would find challenging to your thinking.

(I got thinking about this as I tend to find that as I get older I tend to gravitate towards ideas and beliefs that reinforce what I already know to be true rather than challenge me).

(Does such a site already exist?)

15 comments

[ 37.4 ms ] story [ 389 ms ] thread
yan
This sounds like a great idea if implemented well, but I just see the potential for a gigantic amount of noise. I mean the set of all topics is mostly highly-specific and uninteresting.

If you would subdivide everything into clusters and nominate a small set to represent that cluster, and only then suggest things that are highly dissimilar (but not opposites), this might be extremely useful. If one already feels strongly about a topic (health, politics, religion, etc) I'm sure that person would know where to seek to get opposing points of view.

If I am interested in programming or math material online, getting recommendations about conflicting problems or programming methodologies would not be very useful. However, getting info about topics like flying gliders, rock climbing or philosophy would be great.. (I'm picking things I'm familiar with, but I would have loved to find out about similar interests and hobbies through suggestion)

steerpike
I totally agree with you about the potential for noise and I very much take on board your issues with getting competing philosophical entities, not simply conflicting things within the same sphere (you actually articulated the issue that was hazy but apparent in my head perfectly).

I guess the first step is probably to try and articulate a few appropriate 'spheres' for people to register an interest in and then try and figure out what opposing sphere would consist of.

jeromec
I had the same thought as yan: simply find the opposing side of whatever your belief/comfort. However, I guess you really want things that are dissimilar rather than opposite. That's tough, but I see what you mean. For example, I recently learned a great deal about economics, which can be fascinating to understand, and how it's connected to governance/politics. Yet few politicians truly know economics, as even President Obama admitted to knowing little about (but learning) in an interview. I guess for an algorithm my approach would be to start amassing pages on different topics like Google, then look for commonalities for alternative subject matter. It would still be tough to make certain connections, though, like the example of economics and politics (during times of non-crisis).
Tichy
It's called Hacker News :-)

Or maybe something like http://sf0.org/ - I guess it's a kind of game where people propose challenges for each other.

jasonlbaptiste
Definitely possible and I would use it (if executed right of course). Pick one niche/market to go after first.
DanielStraight
What field do you intend to apply this to? My thoughts on the issue are much different if it's music than if it's books and even more different if it's physical objects/gadgets.

I think books would be the place where it would be most interesting to me.

angelbob
Part of the challenge here is that you'd like to say to people, "people like you tried and liked X activity." So you'll need to collect a lot of data on what people tried and liked.

More specifically, you probably need people to enter that data for you. So you might want to combine this with some other business/site/something. For instance, travel ideas would go well with a travel web site, Amazon already does a bit of this for books and so on.

Though that's just basic recommendations. Part of the problem is that "out of their comfort zone" implies a significant likelihood of not liking the activity or object. Part of the problem is distinguishing risky attempts ("I didn't expect to like this, but it was awesome!") from plain old bad ideas ("yeah, this sucks. I kind of expected it to.")

It'd probably be hard to get people to keep coming back to an "expand your horizons" web site that did nothing but collect data and recommend stepping outside their comfort zone -- most people don't want to spend all their time outside their comfort zone, and most people only do a few things that are particularly hard for them, so they don't have a lot of data to give you offhand.

It seems like there must be somewhere that people are already collecting this data, I just don't know where it is, or what gimmick you could use to get it from people. I think just asking them will give you pretty noisy results, though.

steerpike
Maybe a possible solution would be to start with certain well known people (if I could convince them to share) and have them describe 'these things that formed who I am' which might give me a decent start on possible spheres of interest that are more likely to be useful rather than noise?
anotherpaulg
Here's a shameless plug for my startup Diddit, which sounds like it might do some of what you're asking about.

On Diddit, you check off a bunch of the things you've done before. There's an endless list of things from the mundane (play frisbee) to the adventurous (eat cow's tongue) and everything in between.

As check things off, the site builds up a profile of your interests. It will suggest other users who share your interests. You can talk to them or check out the things they've done for ideas about things you might wanna do.

After you've built up a profile, the site will also start recommending things it thinks you might like to try. Currently it has suggested that I should visit the grand canyon, so I'm going next weekend.

Anyway, check it out and let me know if you enjoy it.

http://www.diddit.com/

robg
I actually think this is one of the inadvertent things we're doing. We show how conjunct words differ between people using the same word. So something like 'recipe' or 'space' can vary widely in it's second-order associations - consider "spicy AND recipe" vs. "cake AND recipe" or "information AND space" vs. "astronaut AND space". People associate themselves with words based on what they write and then we display the clusters and divisions accordingly. Now consider something like 'politics' and 'sports'.
erikwiffin
This may not be exactly what you're going for, but it could be helpful in gathering data and encouraging people to follow through with it. If you were to make a book related "outside your comfort zone" website, what you could do is get recommendations from authors.

So for example, if I happen to like Stephen King, show me a list of books that Stephen King likes to read, but that are completely different from the kind of books that he writes. It might be a bit tricky to build up the database at first, especially considering authors might be a bit hesitant to recommend their competition, but I think it would be a really cool idea.

bmelton
That's a clever idea, but I think it paints the solution in broad strokes. I don't know how, for example, it solves for "I really like 'The Talisman' by Stephen King, but hate 'The Stand' (or almost anything else he's written" for example.
Alex3917
I've thought about doing something like this, since I only like to read counter-intuitive books and other things that challenge my beliefs. I think the best way to do this would be by asking a bunch of questions, and making recommendations based on the answers. The problem though is that you can't just recommend one book really, it has to be a combination of books, websites, podcasts, youtube videos, web forums, etc. Which basically means that you'd have to partner with a bunch of people with different sets of expertise, and get each of them to put together an entire experience for the person that could be completed in, say, 20-40 hours.

It's a cool project, but it's just an enormous amount of work for something that would probably be used by only a small handful of people.

RyanMcGreal
>I got thinking about this as I tend to find that as I get older I tend to gravitate towards ideas and beliefs that reinforce what I already know to be true rather than challenge me

Interesting - I seem to be experiencing the opposite. When I was younger, I was afraid of ideas that challenged my worldview. As I get older, I'm more willing to admit uncertainty about how the world works, which has the effect of making me more open to ideas that challenge my assumptions.

narag
This information could be extracted from historical data. "See what people that were like you (four or five years ago) like now".