Show HN: QABounty – Make money answering questions (opens in new tab)

I recently finished my site QABounty.

I would get annoyed when I could not get anyone to answer my questions on sites like Stack Overflow so I created this site, https://qabounty.com/. It is basically your standard QA site but you attach a USD $$ bounty to questions. For example I have a question up at:

https://qabounty.com/questions/what-kind-of-database-should-...

The best answer for that question will award that user 3 coins (which can be withdrawn for about $3). I plan on adding my own questions of the day for a while, basically giving money away for a while hoping people use it for their own questions eventually. If you want to make a quick $3 though and check out my idea please go to the site and try to answer the question!

Let me know what you think! I am also looking for a designer as well after I see if people like the idea.. I used Stripe's new withdraw to debit card feature so you don't have to use bank account info to withdraw your "bounty" (money you get for answering questions)... Please give me some feedback on the site/idea!

Nice work bbarrows! Don't let the numerous comments pointing out the motivational problems monetary rewards can create discourage you. This phenomenon (the overjustification effect, researched by Deci, Lepper and quite a few others) certainly exists, but certain preconditons have to be met for it to become a problem. Most importantly, the person doing the work has to be highly intrinsically motivated. If that person then gets rewareded monetarily (extrinsical motication), the intrinsic motivation gets reduced. The consequence is an increase in quantity and decreasing quality of the productive output of the person.

But there are many situations where people already start with no or only extrinsical motivation: They do it for the reputation (reputation is an extrinsical motivator), they are college students who have to learn the topic anyway (so would profit from a second extrinsical motivator besides passing the test) etc. - basically every case where the person is not motivated doing the writeup because it enjoys that exact moment.

tl;dr: the overjustification effect exists, but will only affect your project marginally. Good luck!

Often money is not the best motivator. Dan Ariely's research shows people who were asked to volunteer consistently put in more effort than those who were compensated with money or gifts. There's a whole chapter about social norms vs. market norms in his book: Predictably Irrational. There's a decent summary of the chapter here: [1].

[1] http://robertnielsen21.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/predictably-...

Looks nice.

I like that you thought at the RSS feed. However, the question feed is throwing a syntax error (in FF, and digg reader can't subscribe to it as well):

  XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
  Location: https://qabounty.com/questions/feed/
  Line Number 25, Column 1:

Logins are not processing. Accepts login but does not change page or permissions level. Recieve "Nonce error: It looks like you don't have permission to do that." on login interactions.

Edit: Refresh x3 negated above.

What happens if someone doesn't mark an answer as answered or choose the best answer?

google answers hey?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers

Can't create an account

"More Questions" link goes to localhost