[pigbucket]

I like the concept but I think it's missing something to get the user interested in the first place. HN has content I like from people I don't know. Twitter has random soundbites from people I can choose to follow. It looks like your app drops the interesting content part of the social-networking thing and the interesting tweeter part of the twitter soundbite machine so I end up being asked to be interested in completely random soundbites from completely random people. The example of the leaderboard on your post would be an unfortunately accurate prediction of the kind of content I'd expect. You really should try to get more interesting content on your sample leaderboard.

1. Maybe I'd be more interested if I knew or in some way could identify with the people sharing quotes. So what about names being visible. Or:

2. Maybe I'd be more interested still if there was a way to filter by group. Christians might be interested in random quotes from other self-styled Christians. Atheists might be interested in god-debunking soundbites. Technophiles might be interested in "android v. apple" slugfests. And so on.

3. Maybe I'd also be interested if event-specific or news-specific quote voting were possible. E.g., I'm at a baseball game and I can follow people from all over the park sharing observations about players and hotdogs. Or there's an earthquake, and I can follow stuff about that. In this respect, you'd be doing something that makes Twitter interesting rather than just the thing that makes it boring, and the voting would be a real addition.

Caveat: complete novice here, in awe of people who can so readily conceive and execute an idea like this.

[chuinard]

Thanks, this was definitely really good feedback. I am going to mull over on where to go with this. I do agree some sort of user engagement is necessary, being 100% anonymous is not interesting.

[zokier]

If you track voting history then you could show quotes that have been upvoted by people that have similar voting history. The actual algorithm probably will end up being rather complex, especially if you want to avoid too strong segmentation. Basically you want to show the users a mix of fresh quotes, "aligned" quotes, and "random" popular quotes.