[michaelq]

This article is PR at its most effective. An established founder snaps up a fancy domain name and his PR team convinces a reporter that Quora has somehow failed. I've found no such consensus of Quora having failed as a business (http://www.quora.com/Has-Quora-as-a-business-failed), nor as an expert question and answer site.

Anyway, the problem with Fountain is you still have to ask a question. And if you can formulate a good question to begin with, Google (which is fast and free) might very well provide a better answer than some random domain expert willing to answer random questions for small amounts of money.

[supjeff]

I'm working on a social graph of causality, which is meant to solve the problem of having to ask specific questions to find answers. I call it Causemap (http://causemap.org). Here's something I added today about the militarization of police (http://www.causemap.org/1033-program)

[michaelq]

This is an interesting approach. So the idea is basically amassing a bunch of people's subjective opinions about causality? Most of the ideas here are really high-level. Also, I tried to submit a "situation" without creating an account and got a 403 js error. You might want to hide that button for unauthenticated users.

[supjeff]

Thanks for the feedback! It still has some rough edges, but I'm really glad to see how people respond to it. It's a combination of a few really new concepts on the web (social news, wiki) and the relatively obscure concept of "causality", so figuring out the right UX/UI for it is my priority right now.

> So the idea is basically amassing a bunch of people's subjective opinions about causality?

Yes, that's the idea. There's also a mechanism to strengthen the strongest causal relationships through upvoting and downvoting. This way, hopefully the most reasonable links show up on top, but everyone's opinions can be represented.