Social Website Fail - A Look At Yahoo! Answers
Posted in Misc on March 1st, 2010 by helloworlder – Be the first to commentAnyone who has ever used the programming Q&A site Stack Overflow knows that it has an extremely low noise to information ratio, resulting in extremely high quality answers most of the time. I think part of the reason is that the community rewards users based on high quality answers, not simply the quantity of answers, although that matters too of course. Furthermore, at Stack Overflow you can lose points for crappy questions and crappy answers. And when your question gets deleted for some reason, you will be told why. However, it depends on users being mature and reasonable about voting answers up or down, and no one is mature and reasonable 100% of the time. But over all, it works very well.
So it comes as a shock that Yahoo! Answers rewards very low quality answers. A massive problem is that you get points simply by answering questions! So it’s not surprising then that some people answer with just 1 word, or with some answer that has absolutely nothing to do with your question. Basically, you can level up purely based on the quantity of your answers and not on the quality. You can just sit there typing rubbish answers all day. Someone can become a “Top Contributer” with only a tiny % of their answers being chosen as “Best Answer”, as long as they post a massive quantity of answers. Another problem is that when Yahoo! Answers deletes questions, they don’t give you a reason, which really is just rude, lazy or both. Yahoo! Answers also seems to remove questions arbitrarily. I made a policy mistake by posting a question in German asking for a German equivalent of an English phrase (I speak enough German to have asked the question in German). I did this because in the past when I asked in English I’d get huge spam from non-German speakers using an electronic translator! W..T…? Anyway my question got deleted presumably because half of it was in German, which is fine because it’s against policy. But this begs the question - why aren’t the thousands of other plain offensive/nonsense/in the completely wrong category questions removed as well? Like I said, arbitrary.
Yahoo! Answers has expressed desire to improve its quality for a long time now but it hasn’t happened. It would be good if they take some lesson from Stack Overflow and apply it there, but not entirely because simply applying a new system to a completely different audience won’t work. I guess it would be as fruitless as trying to apply the blueprint of Western democracy to a non-democratic country. But try to do something to start rewarding people who put time and effort for free into their answers rather than simply allowing progression based on quantity, and start deleting poor questions and spam answers … in a non-arbitrary way
End Rant.




