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AMA with Professor Steve Brusatte on mammalian evolution
8 points by magicturnip 1460 days ago
I'm running an AMA with Professor Steve Brusatte (Paleontology, Edinburgh Uni) on his new book the Rise and Reign of the Mammals.

The AMA is on Quda, an audio app I've built for knowledge-sharing.

The Q&As are in audio and asynchronous, so you record a question and Steve answers in his own time.

If you have a question for Steve on any aspect of mammalian evolution or paleontology in general, please ask before Tuesday:

https://askquda.com/page/stevebrusatte

One lucky participant will also receive a signed copy of the book.

2 comments

Some feedback, gating asking questions to users who've logged in is good for your platform but perhaps while you're still in bootstrapping mode and trying to amass some example AMAs to point to as prior successes, you could open the question asking to just users willing to fill out a form without a login, and then you can manually filter out the spam. Then once you've proven the value prop, people will be more willing to onboard.
appreciate that. It's something I've thought about. For this one, I received 16 questions so got a good response for one AMA. The upside of gating questions is you get to see who has asked (profile pic and name) which I feel makes it a bit more human. Agree though I'm losing a few folks who land and don't like the friction of signing up. Gus' point below is a good suggestion so that people landing can at least see questions asked rather than blank page. Thanks for your feedback.
Wikipedia page of him for the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_L._Brusatte

There are no questions yet. Do you have a few fake questions just in case? They may help to encourage people to ask.

thanks Gus. At the moment all the questions come in and go to Steve privately to answer at the same time. The Q&As go live on the page once he answers, that's why it's empty. Will publish all the Q&As in about a week. Good suggestion about making questions public from the beginning to encourage more participation.
Perhaps add a timeline, explaining when he will start answering the questions and when the answers will be published.
yes, needs to be clearer, thanks