What Makes Question and Answer Sites Popular? - Sharing Your Knowledge
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Most question and answer sites, by definition, are social sites. This is truer for some sites than for others. For example, the New Scientist isn't really a social site at all; it's a news site that focuses on science, with comments enabled on nearly every article and blog. While visitors can read most of its content for free, New Scientist reserves certain articles for those who have paid a subscription fee, reflecting its printed roots. But one of its most popular features, The Last Word, scratches the same itch as many question and answer sites.
The Last Word lets users ask science-related questions of the New Scientist's readership. Askers can even upload a picture when it's relevant to the question. Editors at The New Scientist may choose a best answer for questions; sometimes they even choose more than one, and sometimes they edit an answer for clarity. This long-running feature (started in 1994) has already spawned at least one book – Does Anything Eat Wasps? – and both enlightened and entertained millions of readers. Those who ask questions, and those who answer them, get nothing for their effort beyond general recognition on the site – and you can even remain anonymous when you answer, though you do have to answer a captcha challenge.
Yahoo! Answers is more typical. While it can be thought of as one of the Yahoo properties, and therefore simply part of a larger web presence, it is a standalone site in a way that The Last Word is not. And at three years of age, it's not only alive, it's thriving, with questions and answers in languages other than English and a presence in more than 25 countries.
Yahoo! Answers offers users incentives to participate. Once you register to use the service, you get a one-time award of 100 points. Asking a question costs five points; choosing a best answer for the question you asked earns you three points. Answering a question earns you two points, which you lose if you delete your answer. You can gain a point by voting for a Best Answer on someone else's question. If your answer is selected as a Best Answer, you receive 10 points. Furthermore, other users can give a “thumbs-up” to an answer you gave, which also earns you points, up to a certain limit.
What do these points mean? Well, other than encouraging participation, as you earn more points, you earn more levels, which indicates your expertise to other users. It also gives you increased abilities to do certain things on the site, aside from asking questions. The formula seems to work; it has attracted more than 90 million users worldwide. One wonders if gamers of various sorts, from the pen-and-paper role players to their kindred spirits playing World of Warcraft and other online games, respond particularly well to these kinds of incentives, or if both Yahoo's system and the gaming systems tap into something basic in human nature.
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