One of the biggest strengths of Slant is that the information is written by people. As opposed to scraping data from other reviews and trying to wrangle it into something useful, a Slant question and it’s answers are written by people who care for people who want to be informed.
However given the collaborative and structured nature of our data as well as the current UI, the question pages on Slant don’t feel 100% human. A StackOverflow approach is obviously written by people as the answers all have a single identified author written in that persons style. It’s a little harder to look at a Slant question and immediately know:
- it’s written by a community
- it’s looked after by a community
- there are people in that community that are trustable
This has implications for the contributors too. We want people who contribute to Slant to feel:
- like they are empowered to drastically improve the content (like writing a new answer on Stack)
- that their contributions are appreciated and recognized
Before I take this discussion down a rabbit hole by suggesting a couple of my ideas, I’d love to hear everyones thoughts on this issue. Some concepts to consider:
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Our content is decoupled from the recommendations. Ie a expert/trusted user can come into a mature Slant question and share their experience with nothing but votes on the various options and their pros/cons.
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What are the signals you need to show people to enable them to trust a random on the internet?