Hunch Ideas

@eb09 - What happened with your result name changing is that we ran an internet search for the name of the result you entered "Sailing vacation to the British Virgin Island." If our search results return the wikipedia page for the British Virgin Islands, and the user selects it, then the name of the result the user entered is overwritten with whatever wikipedia has titled that article. Since you picked out the wikipedia article from the search results, we wrote over your name for the result.
While still in the wizard, you can change the result name anytime you like. Or, now that it is submitted, you can go into your profile's contributions area and edit the result there.

Posted at: 11:40AM on April 12, 2009. [ permalink ]

For the workshop, you all did this fast!

It seems like it would be really good at removing things that should never be topics, using a vote-up/down kind of mechanic. Also, the extra visibility to the topic discussion page is nice, already people are using that more, and having conversations there. I love the link to topic info also!

The layout with voting though will probably lead to people voting for what topics they like rather than voting on whether they are good and complete. Especially now in the early stages, it's pretty much impossible to know whether they are good from that page, you'd have to click through to play it or see topic info, but then you can't vote.

I felt weird when I found topics that were good subjects, but had no questions or results. I don't want to vote that down, or up. I guess I should just leave it, but if so I'd like to come back to it later to see if it's updated. The vote up/down metaphor doesn't really seem suited for that. I think covs97's request above is related to that also. It doesn't seem like a workshop, as much as a judgment list.

It would also be useful to see if a topic is in the workshop from the topic info page maybe, this might be a good place to put the promotion ui also.

Look forward to hearing how people use this over the next few weeks etc, to me it seems better suited for removing bad topics than for keeping good-but-untrained topics out of the "corpus". Maybe that's a bigger problem though, in which case yay :)

Posted at: 2:57PM on April 12, 2009. [ permalink ]

I agree with judson. It would be great to cheer or jeer the progress of a topic and almost to be able to do the same with the questions asked within the topic.

I also wonder if it would be helpful to have items still in the workshop to be listed as "Workshop" instead of "Published" in the Your Contribution section of a person's list so that people KNOW these are really still in progress and need/hope/want more fine tuning.

Posted at: 4:36PM on April 12, 2009. [ permalink ]

@Jon: Thanks!

Posted at: 7:06PM on April 12, 2009. [ permalink ]

I agree that creating a topic should not be a requirement for training Hunch. I am good a critiquing, but not at coming up with topics. I should be able to help out where I can since I know how Hunch works.

Posted at: 8:01PM on April 13, 2009. [ permalink ]

Hazzey - we are fixing this. We are lowering requirements so you only have to do minimal things and not create a topic to be able to train.

Posted at: 8:16PM on April 13, 2009. [ permalink ]

If I rated everything that didn't have any questions or results thumbs down, with the intention that I would come back later to check it out again, and maybe rate it thumbs up, would that work? (or would it delete them maybe, I guess)

That seems like a pretty doable workflow. The biggest issue I have now is that I want to give things more time (good topic, but empty), but also not have to look at every one every time I make a run through the workshop. Am I thinking about it correctly?

Posted at: 5:13PM on April 17, 2009. [ permalink ]

@judson - Just speaking for myself, I try to use the thumbs buttons to really say if I think a topic is good for Hunch and/or Hunch's users. Sure, many topics are so narrow that they won't truly be "helpful" to a lot of people, but if it is a viable topic that could be helpful to some, I think it deserves a yes or at least no vote on my part. I really only vote topics down if I don't think they belong on Hunch or are abusive in some way.

The voting right now really only draws our attention to good topics - they float to the top of the list. This way the fast risers are considered for promotion out of the workshop. Thus far, this is really the only action we are taking against workshop topics.

In the near future, we will be rolling out a way to deal with those topics that are great ideas, but don't yet have any content in them. Kinda like Wikipedia's most requested articles. Also, if topics sit in the workshop for a very long time and are just stagnant at the bottom we will likely take some action here to keep it clean and prevent users from having to slog through them all.

Posted at: 5:26PM on April 17, 2009. [ permalink ]

Just following up on Jon's response, you don't really need to 'thumbs down' something just because it has a low number of questions & responses. That's sort of redundant information.

The Workshop voting guidelines I use are:
* 'thumbs down' to anything which misses the point of Hunch (conceptually), is juvenile or inappropriate, or so specific that probably only the creator would benefit from the topic
* 'thumbs up' to good ideas which also have enough questions & results to form a solid topic experience for most users
* 'no action' for a good idea which just needs more questions & results, with the idea being that we'll give it time to simmer a bit and have more users add some useful contributions.

Posted at: 6:05PM on April 17, 2009. [ permalink ]