Hello everyone, So about 5 months ago I posted here about my app kno., a social network where you get honest answers without needing followers (original post). At the time there were zero active users and I told you I would probably be the first person to answer your questions. If you join, I'll probably still be the first to answer your questions but I did pick up a few users here and there. I want to share my experience and what I've learned during this time. A few of you gave me feedback that stuck with me, so here's what I did with it. "It's pretty empty right now." The very first person who joined from Reddit said this and they were right. The app was way too empty. So I decided to create official kno. accounts that post questions about what is happening in the news, and new questions go up every day. "How do you keep quality high when it scales?" Asking still costs credits (CC), so you can't just spam. The bigger change is that you now earn more CC for a thoughtful answer. Putting effort into your response pays the user more CC. I achieved this by integrating Jev, which is an AI model from TypeSafe, into how answers are scored. When you write an answer, Jev reads it against a rubric and judges the effort. Did you actually engage with the question, how valuable would this response actually be to the asker, etc. It isn't just counting words anymore. So there are cases in which a one-word response could be regarded as valuable and rewarded as such. A real answer earns at minimum 5 CC, a reasoned, personal one can earn up to 20, and a "dsfsfsfsdfshfsh" nonsensical answer earns nothing at all. If the asker likes your response, you also get a bonus on top. Jev also flags hate speech and harassment. Right now it flags without blocking while I tune it on real answers, and once it's dialed in it'll block the clearly hateful stuff without touching spicy opinions or controversial takes. Honest status: v2 is live on the App Store and Google Play as of this week. About 60 people have answered around 1,500 times so far. Small, but it's not zero anymore. During the time before v2, I picked up a couple of power users, which was really exciting. To see someone join and answer every single question on the platform made me think I cracked the code. However, they didn't stick around long. The previous version of kno. had nothing to offer in the way of retention. The only reward a user received for answering questions was CC, which they could spend to ask their own question. To my surprise, my power users enjoyed answering far more than they enjoyed asking. Some never posted their own question at all. I did have the opportunity to ask them what they liked and disliked, which helped me refine the experience. So since there was no real incentive to answer, I created a more engaging stack (what I call the feed). Now when you answer a question you can see how others answered, which I didn't allow before. Because users didn't feel a sense of community on kno., I added reactions. Now you can react to answers posted on questions that you have answered yourself. I'm also thinking of implementing discussions on questions for deeper engagement. We'll see. I think the most exciting feature that I added is the "You" tab. Every answer you give says a little about you, so the You tab turns your answers into a kind of personal magazine about yourself. It's three pages you swipe through. The cover changes as you ask and answer questions. The middle page is a portrait which contains a few short passages about how you tend to answer, built from your own answers. The third page is your insights. Insights are short write-ups about patterns in your answers, things that you may not notice about yourself. Things like how your advice centers around a theme of protecting your peace, or how you go with the crowd on small things but never on questions involving personal morals. Every insight shows the answers it came from, so you can check it yourself. Jev assists in this as well. An insight has to rest on at least four of your answers, and if it overreaches, gets too personal, or could describe just about anyone, it won't get published. Users can mark if it sounds like them or not quite like them. This helps us shape the insights that follow. We also update insights the more you answer and check in to see if things have changed with you. And this is the part I'm most proud of. Some insights can only show up once enough people are on kno. Right now your insights come mostly from your own answers. But the more people answer the same questions, the more the You tab can tell you about where you fit. Like which country's answers line up with yours the most, how your thinking compares with people your age and other demographics, or which way you lean when two good things are pulling at you, like security over adventure or honesty over kindness. All of it is built from groups, never from any one person's answers, and it only shows once there are enough people behind it to actually mean something. So every new person who joins and answers makes everyone's You tab a little smarter. The idea is that answering questions should give you something back. Now every answer adds to a picture of you. I wanted to create an experience that you can only get here. It's still in the early stages, so I'm actively working to improve the quality of the insights. In kno. 2.5 I plan to launch "Us," which will allow two kno. users to compare their answer history and generate a shared insight/breakdown within the You tab. You'll see where you align, where you differ, etc. I also learned that I truly suck at marketing. So I built tools to help. I call it kno. studio, which is a suite that allows me to create short videos and carousels from questions and answers on the platform. I used it to create all my App Store and Play Store promotional materials as well. That's where kno. is five months later. Still small, still early, just not as empty, and every answer makes it a little better for the next person. Thanks for reading.   submitted by   /u/toforeverbloom [link]   [comments]