Ask Anything Ethiopia Update

2020 will go down in many of our lives as one of the toughest years. As the year comes to a close, we look forward to a better year and a better platform for all of you to use. To that end, we will release a big update today. This update is based on the countless feedbacks that we have received from you all.

Invites

Our first feature is aimed at growing the channel while also rewarding our fellow users. From today on, you will be able to make money by helping grow our channel. For every member that joins using your invite link, you will gain 50 cents as long as they remain in the channel. When you collect 5 Birr or more, you will be able to cash out in the form of:

• Mobile card

You can choose to have mobile card sent to you in the amounts of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 100, 250, and 500 Birr!

• Bank Transfer

You can also choose to have money sent to you through a bank transfer if you can use CBE birr or Amole Wallet once you reach 200 Birr.

Note: if a member you invited leaves the channel, you will lose 50 cents per member. Once your balance goes into negative, you will have to get it positive to start earning again.

Anonymity

You can now choose to have your identity:

• Not shown to anyone,
• Shown to the asker of the question only or,
• Shown to everyone

You can also have nicknames to identify yourself in answers sections without giving away your identity if you choose to do so. Your username will not be seen and you can choose to have your name be anything you want in the profile section, which will be discussed next.

Profile

You can now set a name to be displayed to others, whether or not you choose to be anonymous. Think of it as a nickname, it can be related to your name, or it can be completely unrelated to it. The only limit is your creativity. You can also specify your gender if you choose to do so, if not, it will not be shown to anyone.

Replying

There are also options for setting the behavior of replies in your question. You can choose whether or not to have members reply to each other in your question, but as always, you can always reply to people in your own question.

We did this because some members complained about other members having completely unrelated conversations in the answers section. We hope this will help keep questions more relevant.

Improved Browsing

A common complaint that members had in the past was that when loading answers to a question, all the answers would be loaded all at once. 200 answers? 200 messages coming your way! This was an obvious thing we had to improve and so we have.

The bot will now load 10 answers at a time. We hope this will create a smoother browsing experience for all.

You can also now browse questions by #category.

• The bot now uses telegram's native way of replying to messages to show when members reply to answers, which looks cleaner and has the added utility of being able to take you to the replied-to answer when clicking.

Reputation

Every member on the channel will now have reputation assigned to them.

• What is reputation?

For every question that gets marked as right, you earn one reputation. Likewise, for every answer that gets marked as wrong or "X", you will lose reputation.

We introduced this change to increase the quality and relevance of answers in all questions.

Once you have -20 reputation, you will no longer be able to post questions until you have reputation greater than that amount.

With a better reputation, you will stand out among other answerers.

Note: Reputation will be updated once every day and not immediately.

Canceling Questions

You can now cancel your submitted questions before it gets approved and posted on the channel.

and finally, አማርኛ!

Surprise, surprise. Ask Anything Ethiopia now has the option of being in Amharic.

You might notice that some parts of the bot are still English. We are aware of this and will soon release an update translating them.

We hope you will enjoy these updates and we wish you a wonderful new year!

-The Ask Anything Ethiopia Team