Tag: question

Thoughts on New Whale Q&A App

Whale is a new app from Twitch (previously JustinTV) creator Justin Kan. The app attempts to connect tech influences with users that can ask direct questions. Influences then record videos that are up to one minute in length answering the question. Questions are locked and users must pay eight coins to unlock each questions. Influences charge a small fee to be asked and question askers get small monetary rewards when other viewers unlock the questions.

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I view Whale as mostly doing two things: (1) reducing search costs and (2) increasing access.

Reducing Search Costs

Many of the questions on Whale have already been answered in other forms. How many times have I heard Justin Kan recommend a trial period before startups hire key employees (especially potential co-founders)? (A lot). Likewise much of what Nir Eyal answers can be found on his blog.

However, even if a particular influencer has answered your question in a particular forum, finding that answer can be expensive. You may have to watch hours of interviews, read numerous articles, or begin following them on Snahpchat and try to reach out.

Whale reduces search costs since you can reach out directly to influencers and get an answer. The tradeoff for shorter search costs is higher monetary costs (you have to pay to ask questions).

Increasing Access

There are two aspects of increased access. The first is elevated status. Some users may view it as a measure of status to be able to have direct access to key influencers.

The other aspect of access is being able to ask a specific question to a particular influencer even if a similar question (but not the exact same question) has already been asked or if the same question has been answered by a similar influencer.

Implications

-The monetary cost of asking a question needs to be lower than the search cost of looking for a pre-existing answer.

-To truly act as a platform that reduces search costs discoverability needs to be improved. Qoura does a good job in this arena (when you type in your question a list of possible duplicate questions appears with good accuracy). This may include surfacing not only questions that have been asked, but the content of the answers.

-Whale should find ways to better let users find new influencers (if you liked a large portion of questions by Influencer X you may also like Influencer Y).

-Whale should find more ways to increase the status of question askers and improve interaction between influencers and question askers.

-Access is more valuable the more influencers that are on Whale.

-Access is more valuable if answers are longer.

-Answer quality needs to remain high. Some users are good at rifing and answering quite well off the cuff. Others go a minute and seem to say virtually nothing. Whale should go the AirBnB route and ensure the quality of answers early on remains high (and give instruction/tutoring/suggestions to ensure answer quality remains high).

I know from following the company closely that many of these improvements are in the work.

Things I worry About

-The platform becoming a forum for users to ask favors instead of questions (“Can you review our proposal?” or “Can you fund us?”) or ask aggressive questions (“Why did you donate X million dollars to racist/communist candidate Y”)  which will drive away influencers.

-Growth stalls which leads to quick abandonment.

-The mixed incentives between influencers weeding out duplicate questions and influencers answering duplicate questions to get paid leads to duplicate questions which reduces discoverability even given good search.

-Influencers getting asked so many questions they can’t answer all of them. This will either mean askers pay, but don’t get their question answered (reducing access) or the price of a question gets driven to, say $20-$50 a question, so that the average user is dissuaded from asking a question especially given the risk of low quality (the response could be a one-minute answer that isn’t helpful).

-Navigation/search/discoverability won’t improve (I view this as a really hard — probably impossible in many respects — problem that no one has really come close to solving).

-People in fact like longer form answers.

-People in fact like medium length, meandering conversations rather than specific short-form content.

-Asking influencers questions isn’t as interesting as we think or it is only interesting to a small group or it is only interesting for a short time before the fun wears off.

-Even given search costs there are so many existing resources online that Whale won’t catch on.

-Influencers are too busy to join Whale or sustain a high level of involvement (think about how many influencers started Snapchats and have since quit). This will lead to less influential, “regular people” most available to answer questions, but users will not be willing to pay this type of “influencer” to answer questions.

-Whale will fail to catch on for complex, not fully understood reasons.

-Whale will remain a niche for the tech community rather than expand to other types of content (which I actually view as fine).

Google Interview Question 4

In this series I will be attempting to answer current and retried Google interview questions. As outlined in the books How Google Works and Work Rules! Google has found that “boring,” non-riddle questions are best at predicting future performance, but some of the older questions I’ll be answering are riddles.

Question:

“Explain a database in three sentences to your 8-year-old nephew.”

Possible Answers:

(1) That’s my niece (awkward).

(2) The files are IN the computer.

(3) “Listen pal my nephew isn’t the one being interviewed here. He’s only 8, let’s wait until he’s 11 before we get him a full-time gig.”

(4) I would just show him this diagram. Isn’t it obvious what’s going on?

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(5) Imagine we write down all of the titles of your favorite Disney movies on one sheet of paper, all of the different characters in the movies on another sheet of paper, and all of the different adventures the characters have on a third sheet of paper. That way if you ever decide you want to watch a movie about your characters going on a road trip we’ll already know all of the movies with that kind of adventure and we can just go over to the bookshelf and grab all of those movies. So the movies are the database and the sheets of paper are the special way we decided to organize the movies.

Google Interview Question 3

In this series I will be attempting to answer current and retried Google interview questions. As outlined in the books How Google Works and Work Rules! Google has found that “boring,” non-riddle questions are best at predicting future performance, but some of the older questions I’ll be answering are riddles.

Question:

“Tell me a joke.”

Possible Answers:

(1) I like your face. (Not recommended).

(2) What did Sushi A say to Sushi B? Wasa-B!

(3) The image Business Insider choose to accompany this question was a screenshot from Broad City (see below). So in honor of that wonderful show I will present this NSFW joke that was actually told by my friend Ron in the presence of my dad while four of us were at dinner:

What do you call nuts on a wall? Walnuts. What do you call nuts on your chest? Chestnuts. What do you call nuts on your chin? A dick in your mouth.

Yes that really happened IN FRONT OF MY FATHER. Thanks Ron.

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Google Interview Question 2

In this series I will be attempting to answer current and retried Google interview questions. As outlined in the books How Google Works and Work Rules! Google has found that “boring,” non-riddle questions are best at predicting future performance, but some of the older questions I’ll be answering are riddles.

Question:

“If you wanted to bring your dog to work but one of your team members was allergic to dogs what would you do?” This was apparently asked of an Associate Account Strategist in December of 2014.

Possible Solutions:

(a) How about just don’t be an asshole and keep your dog at home.

(b) This is probably one of those questions where you’re suppose to be creative:

  1. You go out and exchange your dog for a hypoallergenic version. What’s more important your dog or free lunch everyday?
  2. You work the night shift so you and your coworker aren’t in the office at the same time.
  3. You buy your coworker a year supply of Benadryl or other Coasian bargaining solutions. I mean who is really allergic to whom?
  4. You come in through the backdoor with your dog wrapped in a blanket of sterile Clorox disinfecting wipes and keep it in a plexiglass cage.
  5. You get your coworker fired, problem solved.
  6. You talk Bridget into bringing her three dogs in everyday so she looks like the real asshole.
  7. You demand to work from home everyday because mochi (this is what you named your dog for some reason) gets anxious without you.
  8. You quit your job and work for Amazon instead. No one there is allergic to dogs.

(c) The real answer is the Coasian bargaining one. But of course we need an initial allocation of property rights, otherwise I could argue my coworker is the one imposing the cost on me (which of course is true in one sense). However, common courtesy and a long history of workplace culture dictate that it is humans not dogs that “own” the workplace space. Therefore, it is you imposing the cost on your teammate and the solution is to internalize the negative externality you’re causing his or her allergies with some sort of creative compensation.

But the really real answer is that in many ways life is about restraint and fortitude in the face of things you don’t want to do (like being away from your dog); that in America the majority of workplaces do not allow dogs and you should anticipate this when buying a dog; that having a dog is a lot of responsibility and keeping your dog happy may include paying for doggy daycare; and that even in a we’re-both-better-off efficient solution allergies can be extremely unpleasant for people. So yea, don’t be an asshole and keep your dog away from the office.