DISQUS

Alison · 2 months ago

This was very interesting to read - I'm sorry that you decided to deactivate your account. We certainly want both asking and answering to feel valuable to our users. Currently we're trying to use social connections as a primary motivator - just like people are willing to help friends in real life, they're also willing to help them on Aardvark. That said, there are some interesting ideas for motivators both in the piece and in the comments. We explain why we haven't developed a scoring here (http://bit.ly/4oaY47), but we'll certainly take your comments to heart. I'd love to hear any other feedback you or your readers have - alison@aardvarkteam.com

aaronwhite · 2 months ago

Hi Alison... I did see the new social connections coming through (A friend of John has a question) and that is fantastic. My only comment here is that at the present time the volume of "3rd party" vs. "2nd party" questions seems to weigh heavily towards the former. Even still, that may motivate me to answer a few more questions, but eventually the burden returns. Evan had some interesting ideas of using it for self-promotion (perhaps not unlike LinkedIn's question/answer system)

I enjoyed reading the reasoning behind not adding a scoring system, and can get behind that.

Looking forward to hearing/seeing what Aardvark does next, as I said, I have tons of startup-respect for you guys!

Alison · 2 months ago

Thanks for following up - you do a great job of providing constructive criticism. We're constantly working on improving the service, so hopefully we can win you back soon :)

caseychesh · 4 weeks ago

Classy social representation never hurts.

Evan Leonard · 2 months ago

After I saw your tweet about this, I made a very simple adaptation: I put my name and a link to my blog in my responses.

So far I've gotten one reply from someone saying they followed the link and were interested to learn about the other things on my blog.

So I view aardvark as away to do advertising. Just put a link in your response.

aaronwhite · 2 months ago

Fair use... though why doesn't vark do that for me? It doesn't have to be 'hard' for them to fix the service, they just need to be aware it's broken :)

Evan Leonard · 2 months ago

Good point - the system would be *more* useful if this were built-in to take advantage of any potential network effects. For example, if it added my link for me, and automatically tracked who clicked on it for me - that'd be cool

caseychesh · 4 weeks ago

If they made that change would it completely solve their personal vs network issue?

caseychesh · 4 weeks ago

Clever!

caseychesh · 4 weeks ago

Brilliant! I had the same experience with Vark a while back and had never been able to rationalize why it didn't jive with me. Now I realize I was an answer slave!

aaronwhite · 3 weeks ago

I really do like the service (concept, execution) they are doing great stuff barring my 1 gripe. Vark seems to make changes very regularly, so I'll revisit in a few.