Wiselike, a knowledge sharing platform that aims to connect users with professionals from all walks of life, beta launches today with Q&A pages from scientists, actors, and other experts in their field.
y now, much of the drama that plagued Reddit’s AMA feature has blown over. That’s good news for AMA junkies, but may be disappointing to those hoping the incident would inspire Reddit’s team to restore the Ask Me Anything sessions to their perceived former glory. Those glory days included real, probing questions directed at participants, in contrast to the relatively softball-style interviews that make up most /r/IAMA threads today.
Those seeking in-depth answers to interesting questions would do well to check out Wiselike, a knowledge sharing platform that takes a similar “ask me anything” approach, but with a heavy focus on education. “On Reddit, people gravitate toward AMAs because they’re so interested in the person,” said Wiselike co-founder and CEO Kyu Lee, in a phone interview conducted on Friday. “Like who doesn’t want to know ‘What does Barack Obama do before he sleeps?’, or ‘What kind of movies does my favorite celebrity watch?’ And while that’s all very interesting, I don’t think that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re obviously very interested in the person, but we’re really interested in the knowledge behind the person.”
Wiselike allows anybody to create a page, kind of like a permanent /r/AMA thread, where other users can pose questions. The site is primarily concerned with sharing professional knowledge and unique insight from a wide variety of backgrounds. “We’re not just for celebrities,” Lee said. “We truly believe everybody has knowledge. It doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO or a college student, everybody has some knowledge that could help somebody.”
Lee told me the inspiration for the project grew out of a lifelong hobby of asking people about their work. “The idea for Wiselike originated from a childhood passion of mine. As a kid, I had this weird hobby. I took an interest in understanding how people got into the careers they wanted to pursue. And I say it was a hobby because I literally spent hours a day, just um — ‘What do doctors do? How do you become a nurse? How do you become an air traffic controller?’ — all that stuff.”
Lee spent some time in college as a career councilor, and says he realized most people weren’t realizing their professional aspirations. “After looking more deeply into why people weren’t developing their careers, I concluded it was really an issue of people lacking the knowledge, information to make their professional goal a reality. It had nothing to do with intelligence or ambition. And as a result I decide to build this platform, Wiselike, where people could easily share their knowledge with one another.”
The site has been in beta but launches today with pages from Susan Bennett (voice of Apple’s Siri), Aaron O’Connell (creator of the world’s first quantum machine), Josh Wurman (American weather researcher), and others.
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