What would YOU do with a Satisfaction API?

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  donnacha replied on September 19, 2007 00:45

  A lot, an awful lot, depends upon whether you choose to create a real platform that properly rewards participation or settle for a strapped down, boutique approach masquerading as a platform.
  
  The question is "What would you do with a Satisfaction API", so, I'll leave the discussion of the relative merits of the two above-mentioned approaches to another thread, and will presume that we are talking, here, about an honest-to-goodness platform.
  
  The answer to what I would do with a true platform: everything.
  
  Let me explain that.
  
  The key advantage of your interface is that is does all it can to encourage participation - I can see a couple of small ways in which the UI could be further improved but, even as it stands, it is probably the most alluring interface to information sharing that I have ever seen and has the potential to fill the space that a lot of us once thought small-scale wikis would occupy.
  
  A few years ago, I was managing a highly active, medium-sized forum, about 15,000 members, focused on a subject of intense interest and our members tended to stick around for years, so, there was an astonishing amount of collective knowledge, experience and expertise on tap. This was great for any newbies who happened by but, of course, they all tended to ask the same questions and, predictably, this annoyed the Hell out of the established members. A universal response to almost every question became "Search It", delivered in varying degrees of politeness and they were quite right: a simple search would throw up thoughtful, well-written answers to almost any question imaginable.
  
  I did everything I could to highlight and underline the usefulness of search, even modifying the forum templates to make it a more alluring option and posting alerts in the posting page but, even so, it became clear that normal users were simply not comfortable with the search facility.
  
  It depressed me to see great posts being contributed only to watch them slip down the front index and into obscurity, often pushed out by less worthy or accurate posts. I realized that forums are not a great way to retain collective knowledge and began looking at alternatives, eventually deciding that wikis were the perfect solution.
  
  With great fanfare, we launched our wiki. This, I assured our old hands, was the solution to disappearing content and endlessly repeated questions; your hard work will remain in place forever, easily found by those who need it, improved upon and added to over time but never forgotten or lost. If a question comes up on the forum, simply whack the best previous answers to that question into shape, stick them onto the wiki and point the questioner to the relevant page.
  
  It was a nice theory. In reality, and despite our best efforts to port over as much knowledge as possible, our forum members simply never took to the idea and stuck with what they knew. To this day, they complain bitterly about newbies asking the same old questions and the wiki is long forgotten.
  
  I believe what the wiki lacked was the forum's addictive social aspect - people who have much more important things to do with their time get sucked in and end up making the perceptual mistake of thinking that their position or standing within their virtual community is of any importance whatsoever. For the most part, forums are just a heavily disguised form of procrastination, and it is that social illusion that keeps people there, sharing knowledge, generating content.
  
  The wiki is a much more logical way to share information but people prefer forums. Likewise, broccoli is better for you than crack but there are very few broccoli whores.
  
  What is great about Satisfaction is that it retains the social element of forums while cutting down on both the frustration of duplicate questions and the loss of posts over time by automatically conducting a search based on the user's question before the user can write the body of his post. Smart, smart, smart.
  
  When I said, above, that I would use a true platform for everything, what I meant was that there is a universe of perfectly useful information out there that has drifted down into the darkness of forums archives, occasionally thrown up by Google but, for the most part, dormant.
  
  Given the more effective front-end that Satisfaction provides, I would focus on certain subject areas and start excavating that dormant wisdom, re-editing the best posts to create FAQ sites full of brilliant, concise answers to questions that have not yet been asked. The aim of each site would be to create a core that was sufficiently useful for a real community to start gathering around it, challenging the monopoly of the entrenched forums in each subject area. This could be done without Satisfaction but I suspect that the added edge of usability could make all the difference in jump-starting each site into a real community. The lack of a normal forum's frustrations would then make it easier for that community to remain active.
  
  I'm not talking here about Web-scraping or plagiarism but, rather, taking general knowledge that has already been freely shared, rewording it and repositioning it so that it may be found more easily. As I say, there is a universe of information out there that should be available but, due to the structural limitations of existing forums, is not. The Satisfaction platform could, just possibly, rewrite the rules and the rewards for getting that right will be huge.
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