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Participation declining?
I was curious as to how much people seem to be participating. I wonder if Hubdub can update us on how many hits the site is getting on a daily basis, how much hubdub cash is being wagered. I know I seem to be struggling to find questions to wager on. It seems 90% of the new questions are sports related, and I am sports fan, but don't think how many points a team scores in a particular quarter is really news worthy. It is easy to wager on, there is definite outcome, which I think is one reason so many seem to be wanting to wager on questions where the outcome can be measured and is not subjective.
I brought up a question in one of the comments about what is Hubdub. Is it a news forecasting site, or a site to wager on outcome of events. Now on first read they would seem one in the same, but as a person who has seen alot of controversy on this site about questions and settling markets, I believe there is a distinct difference. I think some input about this from the admins would be greatly appreciated. Lets take a simple quesiton and use as an example, the question is Will Hillary drop out of race before April 30th. Now if we are a news forecasting site, then we should be wagering on what will the news report. So if CNN, MSNBC, FOX, the official campaign announces, and other major media outlets report she is not dropping out of race before the convention, then shouldn't that trigger a settlement? The question has in its settlement details, as reported by a main stream news agency. However if Hubdub is about predicting the outcome of events, then we would leave the question open, and then after the date has passed settle market based on actual events. In which case, the settlement details should say something about regardless of what news media reports, this will not be settled before the listed date. Now many of you have seen how questions get ripped apart and each word is defined in its own context. As of now, John Edwards is still in the race, and so is Mitt Romney, as they both suspended thier campaigns, so couldn't it be argued, and won't it be, that they didn't drop out of race.
My point I am hoping to get others to comment on is rather this has led to a decline in participation on the website, maybe there is no decline, but it just seems that I get a feeling there is. Maybe it is something else, I would love to hear what others think. I know for me when I read a question, my first thought before wagering on it, is can this question be settled, and how many people will try to rip it apart and attempt to get it voided.
I brought up a question in one of the comments about what is Hubdub. Is it a news forecasting site, or a site to wager on outcome of events. Now on first read they would seem one in the same, but as a person who has seen alot of controversy on this site about questions and settling markets, I believe there is a distinct difference. I think some input about this from the admins would be greatly appreciated. Lets take a simple quesiton and use as an example, the question is Will Hillary drop out of race before April 30th. Now if we are a news forecasting site, then we should be wagering on what will the news report. So if CNN, MSNBC, FOX, the official campaign announces, and other major media outlets report she is not dropping out of race before the convention, then shouldn't that trigger a settlement? The question has in its settlement details, as reported by a main stream news agency. However if Hubdub is about predicting the outcome of events, then we would leave the question open, and then after the date has passed settle market based on actual events. In which case, the settlement details should say something about regardless of what news media reports, this will not be settled before the listed date. Now many of you have seen how questions get ripped apart and each word is defined in its own context. As of now, John Edwards is still in the race, and so is Mitt Romney, as they both suspended thier campaigns, so couldn't it be argued, and won't it be, that they didn't drop out of race.
My point I am hoping to get others to comment on is rather this has led to a decline in participation on the website, maybe there is no decline, but it just seems that I get a feeling there is. Maybe it is something else, I would love to hear what others think. I know for me when I read a question, my first thought before wagering on it, is can this question be settled, and how many people will try to rip it apart and attempt to get it voided.
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Inappropriate?On the first part, participation was down last week. I think there seemed to be a bit of an Easter holiday effect combined with a slow news week. Taking a quick look at the stats for today suggests that we've bounced back a bit this week. I expect we'll have some ebb and flow over the short term. Over the medium term we really want to ramp up the amount of activity on the site.
On settlement, the resounding message to date is that people want early settlement based on common sense decisions. Therefore Edwards is out as is Romney. Freakish things could happen but in that case we would just have to resettle but it is better to get it settled early 999 out of a 1,000 and wrong once than to wait to settle all 1,000 correctly. -
Inappropriate?Destry:
Good questions!
"I was curious as to how much people seem to be participating."
I was wondering the same thing.
"I know I seem to be struggling to find questions to wager on."
Apparently for the same reason.
I have a theory of my own to supplement your's:
I think, with the exception of thoroughly bogus questions, that the amount of exposure any given question gets on the login page is key to its activity level. What this means is that "high activity" questions tend to get additional exposure, and thus higher activity, at the expense of other questions that may have gotten knocked off the login page relatively quickly due to a number of factors including the time of day or day of week they were posted, the number of questions submissions that day, etc. It makes me wonder if the default sort order for the login page would best be set at "newest".
Another related problem I noticed that may be affecting behavior is that once a question loses its front page exposure the market tends to stagnate quickly. This leaves a non-fluid market that locks up people's money or forces a loss even when the member has the right answer. This can be especially problematic with long term or nonexistent suspend dates. After all, who wants to lock up H$1,000 for two years waiting for a settlement? I have learned the hard way to keep an eye on how much money is in a market before I wager. This has actually kept me from wagering on interesting questions that I would have otherwise wagered on if not for what appears to me to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in regard to activity levels.
I think the only solution will be to solve the exposure problem. Maybe the login page needs to just run a rotation of all questions. I know the tools are there for people to do it on their own but, let's face it, most people are just going to look at the login page and their personal stats and move on. In a perfect hubdub world I would like to be able to save my personal settings to customize my login page. I would drop a couple of categories I have little interest in, sort the category order from most to least favorite, and then set the sort order for each category as either "newest" or "random".
So that's my 2 H-cents worth.
Markov -
Inappropriate?One thing we currently not happy with is the ordering of questions on the home page. It currently gives too much emphasis to questions closing very soon and also has a tendancy to drop good questions into the nether regions from which they are never seen again.
An idea that I have had is to order questions based on their absolute increase in activity compared with the previous 24 hours. Therefore a question would gradually rise as some one picked it up, then it would go into a virtuous circle as more exposure would create more activity until the point where it maxes out and activity drops and it would fall back down the list. That would then create room for other questions to rise up. I thought 24 hours was the best time period because if it is shorter when everyone in the US wakes up they might find the site full of Indian and European news!
Any thoughts?
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?Let those questions on the front page be questions that are selected by the category admins. They are most familar with thier categories, and would be best suited for selecting questions. Leave them up for 24 hours, then select new questions.
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Inappropriate?I made this suggestion somewhere else, but figure I can bring it up again now... I've had the same difficulty paging through the 17 pages of politics questions to find interesting ones.
Generally the questions that get pulled to the front are the ones where users are "sure" of the answer. The markets that people are less sure about get 20-50$ bets on them (or 3$ in my case.. I'm poor) and thus don't ever get seen with a 'most active' metric.
What if we implement a digg or rating feature to bring interesting questions up higher. If we have some way of rating good questions seperate from the amount of $ we're willing to put on them, it may help elevate some of the good questions currently in oblivion and lower some of the stupid questions that are higher than they should be just because its easy to make money on them.
Also once you start having ratings you can then sort by questions you've highly rated (and probably want to keep checking up on) new questions with a high average user rating (and probably want to check out) and very low rated questions (which you will no longer have to waste your time reading through). -
Inappropriate?Hi jenniandboys, we like the idea of being able to 'digg' or rate a question, it's something we've been thinking about. We need to do it in such a way so as to not confuse new users with too many actions they can take on each question, but yeah, it certainly seems like something like this makes sense. Thanks for the suggestion.
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