Today, Stackoverflow and Quora provide deep wells of advice and troubleshooting tips. Despite well-tuned moderation systems and large user bases, there remains a shortage of the right people willing to answer.
These forums have taken the traditional approach–earn revenue by placing ads, partnering with recruiters and by offering “talent solutions”. However, the ad-based approach seems to be fading with the rise of ad blocking, fake viewership, and increased competition from other media. It’s not just the business model that may be broken–any user asking on the site often finds it hard to get answers on niche and highly contextual questions. Those which can’t be answered by a simple Google search.
Often times solution seekers are looking for technical support or a consultant but don’t because their problem isn’t big enough to warrant a big commitment. If you have a question that needs to be answered with more detail and judgement than search but less than a hired consultant, today for the most part you’re out of luck. A market failure. Even new services like whenhub and fiverr may not fit the bill, you have to take time evaluating the right person, then take more time scheduling, etc.
On one extreme end we have traditional consultants that are slow and costly, but can be uniquely tailored to the problem. On the other end we have advanced search like google, fast and free, but doesn’t offer the detail specificity and judgement that might be needed. We are missing something in-between. One with on-demand and crowdsourcing benefits in addition to the liquidity forums; without the commitment and difficulty required in choosing the right consultants or advisors. I call this the “paid forum marketplace” as a very rough working title. It would have the interface of Quora, the tipping and staking of many crypto projects, and a marketplace of professional responders.
This hybrid system would involve tipping users money for questions answered. This helps to balance the surplus of questions with focused and motivated responders. Furthermore, demand can be throttled by paying more or less depending on how badly you need an answer. A staking system could be employed, to bootstrap users and keep them engaged. Dynamic surge pricing and incentives might also work well to get knowledgeable responders, just as Uber does with surge pricing. The business model would would also match uber, taking a cut of each transaction.
Devs have hacked together tipping functionality with things like the reddit tipbot and the new BAT functionality which is helpful, but lacks the dedicated design implications needed to make a robust paid forum marketplace.
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