Ideas are just ideas. Actually solving problems requires a different skillset that can't be accomplished with the "magic" of crowdsourcing. Calling this a "problem solving website" is incredibly misleading.
Maybe so, but the first step of problem solving is identifying the problem. And problems come from people.
(from that comment you referenced) > So maybe if this were to be adjusted so that it was more of a place to talk about problems you wish people would solve. > Why not structure it as a place for people to complain about inefficiencies.
This is what "Issues" on Thinkerous are. We'll make it more clear. Thanks!
What? Ranking by the number of likes/upvotes (which is the method I see when looking at the Hot view) is not "ranking ideas based on the importance of the issues they solve."
I know CMU teaches actual algorithms for this type of ranking, because I went there. :P
Nothing on the site seems to force people to implement solutions to the problems - which means it's an option not a requirement of the service and definitely doesn't "come first."
I think there is power in a "pain-point" ranking service, if that is what you guys are going for. Definitely needs to be redesigned to make that clear if that is the case.
Here are some thoughts:
- Flagging can be good. Some things just don't fit, so they must be put out.
- Maybe you could make it easier to give negative feedback. Some buttons (customizable?) to just click: "I don't see this as a real problem" or "This is more a dream of yours than a problem". Could also help with flagging.
- For ideas, there could be an option to quickly point the potential common problems an idea can suffer of (and also count the "votes" to these), such as: insufficient market; network effect; solution looking for a problem; this already exists; this has been tried.
- Pull requests. Let people at least try to modify others' ideas, add information etc. Maybe this will help people feel like their feedback is valuable.
Regarding Pull Requests - we're in the process of adding a "team" functionality, but maybe an intermediate level of involvement (between joining the team and just commenting) would be useful. Thanks again!
For this reason if a user submits an issue they have a solution for we encourage them to submit the problem and solution separately so other people can contribute other related submissions.
Except ideas don't solve impactful issues, groups of people applying time and resources to a problem solves impactful issues.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the service is for "sharing ideas for how to have an impact on complex issues."
I'm still not really sure what it is supposed to do.
By filtering out some of the noise, the ideas that could solve widespread issues can get more resources put behind them and hopefully a greater chance of succeeding.
This might make more sense in the enterprise software realm, but we saw some interest in the startup community as well so we wanted to test it out.
Almost all innovation management and feature-request platforms are like this.
For example: http://www.ideastorm.com/ https://ideas.sap.com/ https://success.salesforce.com/ideaSearch http://engagetacoma.mindmixer.com/activity
Issues are a bit simpler in that they mostly are based on activity related to them. However doesn't it make sense that an issue that's popular would reflect the magnitude of it's importance?
Not exactly. You're confusing correlation with causation.
On sites with Reddit-like rankings, the number of votes which a submission receives is one of the primary causes for the subsequent number of comments/activity of those respective submissions. And "importance" is not necessarily causal to submission ranking (aggregators are weird).