1. It's 'Stack Overflow for the common (wo)man' with cash instead of reputation.
2. Alternative pitch: "99designs meets Yahoo Answers."
3. The top prize available at the moment awards $50.
4. The sign-up process could be a lot better. Prompting sign-up via twitter/Facebook, then prompting for a prizes.org-only username and password is an unusual approach.
5. 'Contest' creation is currently by invitation only.
6. Answers you give that are accepted become the IP of the person who awarded the prize. (http://prizes.org/faq )
7. I'm not yet convinced that there's a huge market for paid responses when the Stack Exchange network and Quora both offer large userbases who give their time to answer questions for free.
> 7. I'm not yet convinced that there's a huge market for paid responses when the Stack Exchange network and Quora both offer large userbases who give their time to answer questions for free.
Perhaps it is this model they are trying to defeat. If an answerer has the opportunity to earn real money for their time, it might be theorized that they would opt for that over the karma systems. It makes sense for a greater breadth of expertise, as respect loses its inherent value as you grow beyond the social circles or occupational circles.
There's also the risk that small amounts of money make it less likely for experts to offer their opinion. When I'm selling my time for $250+/hour, I'm not going to put any time into a contest with a $50 (or even $250) prize; but I'm more than happy to share it for free in the right community (like HN).
This is the same offline. I'll gladly give up an afternoon to help friends and family with their micro businesses, but when they offer to pay it becomes awkward - they can't afford what I charge (since my business model and pricing is designed for much larger clients), and I have no energy to sell myself cheaply. Just say thank you / buy me a six pack / click the little up arrow.
This will be interesting to watch as an experiment in intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations. Personally, I think this will become a Mechanical Turk style wasteland full of people charging < $1/hr and churning out dross.
re: 4, that is because of the namespace collision between fb and tw. ie. if I signin with my fb username and then somebody signs in with a tw account with the same username
But why not just use OAuth/Facebook Connect to both sign up and log in to the service (where username collision makes no difference)? Why require a username and password in addition?
It's really in case Facebook "screws them" -- in that scenario, nobody is tied to the Facebook login and can still access the site. Allowing them to Facebook Connect now lets them at least take advantage of viral "things" -- e.g. a wall post is posted when you sign up.
actually, I did not have to provide a username. I signed in with twitter using my email address. Perhaps the additional username was only required for Facebook connections? Between the two, Twitter is the only one with a true username identification.
I assume it will prompt you if there is a username collision. that is what I did when I recently implemented it. I wouldn't even show that step and assume that primary username is tw or fb username unless there was a collision
there was a security hole on a site not long ago that would let you login to another account if you had the same username on one of the other logins. can't remember which site
Initial thoughts and observations:
1. It's 'Stack Overflow for the common (wo)man' with cash instead of reputation.
2. Alternative pitch: "99designs meets Yahoo Answers."
3. The top prize available at the moment awards $50.
4. The sign-up process could be a lot better. Prompting sign-up via twitter/Facebook, then prompting for a prizes.org-only username and password is an unusual approach.
5. 'Contest' creation is currently by invitation only.
6. Answers you give that are accepted become the IP of the person who awarded the prize. (http://prizes.org/faq )
7. I'm not yet convinced that there's a huge market for paid responses when the Stack Exchange network and Quora both offer large userbases who give their time to answer questions for free.