We're excited to, at last, launch Musing.io to everyone in the Steem community today. Musing is a question and answer platform, built on Steem's blockchain, that rewards you with tokens for answering peoples' questions! Imagine Quora, but with the crucial distinction of being able to properly incentivize content contributors.
Any user who would join has the power to ask questions and provide answers. Any upvotes you receive on your answers are rewarded in the form of Steem's cryptocurrency. By providing accurate and thoughtful answers, you'll be sure to earn some money (we take a 0% cut).
Motivation
Since the dawn of the internet, it's been our great advantage to be able to ask a question and have the answer provided to us instantaneously. This ability underlies a core faculty of the web, and because there will always be more things to know in the world, it will help to have a platform that can provide better answers and do so in a way that runs more efficiently.
Sites like Quora, StackOverflow and Yahoo! Answers are all incredibly useful, but they don't reward the people that create their content. This affects the following features:
Answer Quality - Without proper incentives, it doesn't benefit people to put that extra 20% into writing something truly great.
Response Time - People won't feel the need to respond quickly or at all if there's no reason to.
Truth - You'll be reading an answer and find that at the bottom, it's connected to some self-promotion or advertisement for their company, website, etc... which makes you second-guess their truthfulness.
Implementation
We built Musing with decentralization as a central pillar to our technology stack. Great effort went into ensuring that all posts, comments, likes, etc... are recorded and used on Steem's blockchain, which makes the entire application almost entirely decentralized. The interactions should involve just your browser and the blockchain.
We plan to open-source the platform once there is clear developer interest. Open-source is the future of blockchain tech and is critical to true decentralization.
What's Next
Don't forget to check out our platform - Musing.io
We will be adding new features, like IPFS image support, and a Smart Media Token (when they launch). These features will enable us to empower users both individually and as a community.
Additionally, we'll be writing more posts on Steemit about technical matters and how we built Musing, as well as updates on the progress of our platform.
It's our mission to expand the reach of human knowledge and to create a collective intelligence that runs faster and more efficiently than any before it.
We're looking for developers and designers! If you're interested in working together, send an email to [email protected]
Hiya @musing - just a question, how safe is the system given we need to add our active keys here? Why is not doable with posting key only? Please elaborate if possible! Many people got scammed recently by giving out their active keys to certain DApps - also interested in the opinion of @jesta here! Thanks in advance!
Seems like they use SteemConnect.com to authenticate their users. I've recently created a discussion board integrated with steem and do also use SteemConnect. So basically you don't need to give away your keys and you can revoke access to certain apps. Still SteemConnect is a foreign provider with access to your keys, but as they are operated by Steemit and Busy, they have good reputation.
It's really good projects.
This is really an outstanding project. Soon I will ask my question here rather than Google. I am man who has many question even simple things I ask because I know someone know what I don't know or see. This is very exciting to hear, a very valuable project in the making. People with profession would definitely check this out, like physician, sportsman, doctor, gold miner, astronauts or even bank robber(lol) can answer some of the questions here.
Thanks for the kind words! It inspires us to work harder. I too think that one day this could be a better source for answers than anywhere else with the Steem community behind it. Just shows the power of proper incentives.
I love Quora for that reason! Because you hear true answers from different people and understand the way they think. It will be great to have the same on Steemit as well :)
Hi @musing!
Your post was just upvoted by @utopian-io. We invite you to join our developer community on the Steem blockchain to crowdsource your project development and promotion with Utopian.
Utopian supports the development of Open Source projects. Looking forward to your project becoming fully Open Source!
Contributing on Utopian
Learn how to contribute on our website or by watching this tutorial on Youtube.
Want to chat? Join us on Discord https://discord.gg/h52nFrV
Ty! We'll meet you guys on discord.
Looks like an awesome project and I am excited to hear / see more about this!!
Definitely will check it out, we need this kind of web for Steem
Awesome idea, I just tried it out! But dang, I wish questions didn't show up as a post on my Steem blog. What solutions are there to prevent that? Does Steemit have to change the way they present content? Do we have to wait for communities?
this is an external issue with steemit as a platform. the growth of steem is going to come through better frontend UIs than steemit, which is just a mishmash of all kinds of stuff with no organization.
There is some kind of organization, at least with having top tags listed in the menu on the left, but otherwise you are right. Some of the steem based sites already have much better UI/UX.
Which ones? I like Busy.org a bit, it's not bad.
I was thinking of Busy.org as being the best one, too. The others like D.tube, Steepshot.io, DLive.io and DMania.lol need some improvements as well.
Thanks for your insight. It seems like people don't quite want to flood their blogs with q&a content, understandably. For answers, it's possible to keep them as replies or comments. However, for the questions, it's a bit more difficult. While it's definitely feasible with a centralized database, I'm not entirely sure there's an option for doing this on Steem without creating a blog post. Otherwise, how would people reply to your question?
It is something we'll have to think about. Thank you for bringing it up. To centralize or decentralize...
How about creating a parent post where questions will be posted as comments inside rather than individual blog posts that clutter follower feeds? The same rewarding mechanics are used with parent posts and comments.
Tested your app with mobile, looks nice and has a similar feeling to Quora, which of course is only a good thing! Keep up the good work.
I'm glad this is something you guys are trying to solve, because this is a huge barrier for most people. I would personally not ask a question on musing with my main account, just because it would be weird for my followers to see a random question in their feed, when they normally see my blog posts. I hope you are able to find a good solution to this, and in the meantime I will stick to using an alt account ;)
Thanks for your insight. I'm amazed at how helpful our community is.
We are thinking of creating a daily thread where people can ask questions as replies to this daily thread and answer to those questions as sub-threads like in a normal Steemit post/thread if that makes sense. This way, neither questions or answers could flood peoples' blogs. The daily post would capture all the questions along with their answers in one neat thread, preventing anyone from cluttering their blogs.
This is great, and I'm looking forward to when this change goes live. Once it does I will definitely ask questions and answer those I'm knowledgeabout about, but right now it would create way too much spam for my followers, so I have to wait :)
Definitely keep the community updated in this regard. I would love to participate, but would prefer less clogging as a result.
Lol i caught by surprise just like @shenanigator and have converted my post into a suggestion post :)
This was an issue with @whatapp already too, and also with Zappl and Steepshot. Many have started using alt accounts exactly for that reason.
I fully agree with everyone saying that answers should be posted as comments btw. I normally only use my alt account to post on micro-post platforms. To avoid noise on the usual feed, even if that means some may not see my question/zapp/steemhunt/...
Whao
Here is how I'd solve that problem. You could create an account like @musing-questions on which all the questions are posted (with the data required to link them to the user who asked them). Then, the answers would be posted as comments on the corresponding post. Then you could keep reference of these questions permlinks along with their subject in a database.
You can make them a parent of null
I also noticed a small bug. The moment I posted a question, it said I asked the question 5 hours ago.
That's a problem that we see on the other Steem dapps as well. It would be great to be able to ask questions on using, post a picture on Steepshot or post a "tweet" on Zappl without cluttering my Steemit blog roll. But this seem like something Steemit Inc. would need to change, because right now Steemit.com is selected to show every type of post.
Ahhh, this is gonna be a problem
Yeah, I'm done answering anymore questions until this is fixed. I don't really want to flood my followers with bunch of random answers.
This will be a great platform like quora
I love to answer questions too.
Finally, my name can be applied to something lol
thanks for the resteem haha
I haven't asked any questions, but can an answer be "Accepted" by the question asker? That would be nice (and may also serve as a good target for some sort of voting bot, though would still need policing).
Some other random thoughts/feedback for ya:
⌘ + enterto submit posts. I try it on pretty much every site I use, and the more places it works the happier I am.Interested in your thoughts on safety using this given people have to use their active key - why not posting key enough? Think you are a guru in that steemconnect space @jesta - feedback appreciated.
I have major concerns with the SteemConnect security model and requiring users to use their active key to grant posting authorities like this. I actually created a new account (@jesta-sc) to specifically use for SteemConnect sites to reduce security concerns for myself.
I've made my concerns knows a number of times - but the accessibility SteemConnect provides has been deemed by those in charge to be of more importance.
Yeah I agree - however so many use Steemconnect you hardly have other options - i de-installed Vessel as i had issues - might be more secure.
Thanks for the sincere feedback @jesta
You're definitely right about the answers to questions thing. It's something that a lot of people complained about and required a large amount of code changes but is now ready to go live. Our solution was to have a daily thread to hold all questions and answers. People will be free to ask and answer as much as they like without spamming their blogs.
As for the UX, yeah I agree it's not as readable as it needs to be. We did something similar to Quora, which I found to be decent in terms of a user experience. We'll continue to work on it of course. I will say though that there will be a tab for just questions for people to answer very soon.
For resteemed answers, the thinking is that there will be some posts that would have enough depth and insight for someone to want to share with their followers.
Any other advice you might have would of course be appreciated!
I personally have been up all night the past few nights coding and designing. I'm sure you too have had the same motivation as a result of the community's support :)
It's like rocket fuel for productivity :)
Keep up the good work!
Great project i hope to see more projects like this on steem platform.
and just to make sure and to be transparant.. what is @musing 's cut on the reward for this? aka how many percentage of benefecial rewards are you going to take? Just because with dsound and dtube people get t know what they put in using thing ;) thnx
it is mentioned in the 2nd paragraph! zero percent :)
you have my full support then
I just posted a question asking for the same thing, & I found the answer here.. Thanks..
Awesome. I've seen a couple of Q&A Steem apps but yours looks the most polished. Looking forward to trying it out.
Great !
So now we can ask our question !
This is truly something useful. I ask a lot of questions on google and sometimes the answer from quora or from yahoo is listed at the top of the search result. Finally musing.io is something that I can use - hopefully in the future, it will be as good or better than yahoo and the like.
Welcome to Steemit platform, from all of us in promo-nigeria. Steemit is a beautiful place to be and we are sure you will be happy here. Get to know more by blogging consistently. Never be discouraged, seek for assistant when necessary. Cheers!
Interesting! Thanks for sharing!
Wow, looks good - it'll be steem's very own quora looks like.
Nice. At last! I've been thinking about this use-case for Steem for a long time.
A quirk is that right now, it's easier to find Musing questions on Steemit.com (just go to created/musing-question) than on Musing.io. Might be worth making it possible to browse questions more easily. But nice work!
Really Interesting project, I will look into it!
Great idea!
Ty! We've been working hard and will continue to :)
Is there only one person who can answer each question? It looks like spanking brand new site. And I think it has a lot of potential.
Do you have a FAQ?
You can still answer a question with a (better) answer even if someone else has already written an answer to the question :)
Cool implementation. A fine example of what can be done with the steem blockchain.
I know this has been said before. I don't really want to flood my feed with questions from @musing and also I noticed that even my answers are treated as posts and they also appear on my feed. Is there anything you can do to prevent my answers from displaying on my steemit /busy blog?
I just wanted to let you know that the have answered the same question you asked in another place, and they will make changes to prevent all the blogpost spam we are seeing right now.
i loved it ❤️❤️❤️
How the hell do you guys come up with such brilliant stuff?! I got one complain though, when one answers a question, the answer is posted as a blog post rather than a normal comment. Also might want to think about adding an edit option on the answers so that people can fix any typing errors and stuff. If you guys can change that I think @musing is good to go.
Actually there is a community named Zhihu in China, who has already used motivation strategies to encourage people to answer more responsively and truthfully. though it's not decentralized yet...
Can we delegate Steem Power (SP)?
Exactly what I needed since birth @musing..
Yes, yes yes and again yes. I use to love going on Quora or ask.com back in the day. It’s projects like these that keep steemit a bustling platform!
This is fantastic, beautifully executed. I just joined and answered a couple of questions using my Steem account, works flawlessly and I love the stripped down Quora look you went with.
Wow thank you. Awesome responses - you're one of the first people to participate in our new little community :D
No worries. Just a quick bit of feedback, I didn't realise it would post my answers as blog posts that show up on Steemit. If I were to go answering a few questions and become active, I fear that it would spam my feed and cause a few of my followers to be unhappy with the noise.
Is there an option where I can prevent my answers showing up on Steemit and clogging up the feed? I can see this being a concern for others as well. Other than that, fantastic work. Did you work off of the Busy.org codebase or build something from the ground up?
Thanks, this is helpful. A lot of thought actually went into the decision to create answers as blog posts. The reasoning was so that peoples' answers could get more exposure on the category pages, but naturally, it does make sense that they should exist as comments.
Also, we didn't foresee that people might not want to have their blogs flooded with posts. We'll look into the option that you suggested and will handle this. It'd be nice to see what other people think too.
I'm going to have to say the same thing. I would much prefer it if answers would show up as comments. I get autoupvotes on my posts and would prefer that it didn't happen to those answers.
Warning removed
I think your bot broke. I had no link in the comment.
Bot is not broken, but is very touchy. Avoid using some generic words used by scammers ;)
Testing.
So if I use the word
autoupvotes
Will I get a warning message...
You got it :p
Good news that is very happy to hear.
Excellent idea, I joined in as soon as I read the post. Looking forward to watching the community grow!
wow, Thank you so much. Such a great idea, and. I love to be part of musing, and love to QA. thanks again.
This is nice wow.
Really It good for us. Here We can get our best Q&A.
Well, looks like this is something I'm going to be using.
Me too.
This sound like a great project, and it seems like a natural fit here on the Steem blockchain! I hope this can potentially be something that even attracts new users to sign up to the blockchain, because who would not want to get some dollars for answering questions about stuff they are knowledgeable about?
I will definitely try out the platform today, but I don't have any other key than the Posting one attached to this computer, so it will have to be later.
Best regards from @valth
This sounds like a great idea with lots of potential. One thing i think would really help this be succesful is to include a lot more topics. The seven feeds that it offers at this moment feel limiting as to what types of questions should be asked.
For example, educational topics for students that have questions seems like a great idea, and could help many people.
This is a fantastic project! I love Quora. The idea of actually getting paid to ask and answer questions is the next level. Best of luck with your project.
Upvoted and resteemed
it seems that is a great project. eagerly waiting for see more about this
thanks
Outstanding Idea! Would love to see it grow as fast as steemit did 😊
Me parece sumamente interesante este proyecto, saludos desde venezuela @musing
it looks like a very nice project , and I really wish you success.
I am interested. Awesome.
Followed you because I think this is a great peoject idea with great potential. I look forward to possibly being able to participate and answer questions. Excellent idea!
Cool, clean, and works as intended! I'm impressed :D
I've bookmarked musing.io and would start using it once you've resolved @beggars inquiry about the answers creating steemit posts. Other than that, fantastic work and platform!
@robchen
Thanks for the feedback. Think we may have a good solution for it after thinking about the issue.
Basically Quora that pays. I love it.
I’ve always thought that Steem was the perfect location, system to host a solid QA platform. This is a gorgeous first release.
Keep up the good work, I truly believe that somebody will nail this niche rather soon. Ship often, ship fast. Keep improving the platform. There’s lots of awesome feedback in the comments already.
As additional suggestion I would bring it up that it’s worth considering capping the rewards on the question itself. This to keep things interesting and stimulate conversation in the replies.
I know this won’t be a popular view but does a question really deserve more than say STU 5? 2? While most people who answer are left with probably less than STU 1 for their answer.
This will also prevent that musing will be abused by bid bot users who just are interested in upvoting their question to the hilt. Whether for visibility or for profit.
There should be other ways than highest rewarded question to be trending. But they may require to also mirror everything. This may seem lots of work but it will allow you to easily show most replied, fresh and not replied, no answers within 24 hours, etc. etc.
Highest rewarded answers yesterday, last week is also something you could extract without that much effort if every x hours you pull the rewards for all comments.
Haha actually we do that already! I think maybe the UI wasn't clear enough on that. The upvotes are all for the answers. The questions can't be upvoted unless you went to it on Steemit and voted there. It was something we definitely had to think about a lot in the beginning and I'm glad we both agree :)
All the trending/hot/new stuff is based on the answer and not the question. A good amount of work was devoted to ensuring that we didn't base our content suggestion on questions but on answers instead.
Excellent work. Now I also understand why the answers post as posts as well. That makes sense (at least for an initial not-so MVP apparently release).
Now I’m not sure what should be the main curation focus (highlighting): the question or the answer? I think it needs to be a mix. Obviously questions drive the platform. Quality of answer keeps people asking. Popular questions may be the ones most want to see (until the rest ends up in Google - but that may require canonical links first before you can benefit from the SEO as a site).
Personally, considering this is Steem I wouldn’t totally limit rewards on questions. People like to (self) incentivize on this platform. You could make use of
max_accepted_payoutto cap the rewards on the question (during submission to the steem blockchain).Especially those who have long and hard worked to gain some autovoter following may see it as an additional to ask questions. But personally I would keep it low tho, all focus indeed has to be on the answers. A platform like Parley IMHO does it wrong, especially since they have creating conversation in their banner.
Anyway, I like what I’m seeing. I was a little sad to notice that whatapp had become pretty much wasteland but will gladly check musing regularly now. Initially from my alt due to the answers as stand-alone posts tho.