Introducing Musing.io - A Decentralized Question and Answer Platform on Steem!
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 jon@musing.io
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.
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!