Yahoo Answers is part of the Yahoo online group where people can post questions, answer other people’s, and read the results. It’s supposed to be a friendly learning and support resource with community guidelines. I already shared my thoughts on internet community in my article on Wikipedia on this site – it is more true of Yahoo, as I’ll explain. You need to sign in to join in but not simply to read. You gain points up to level 7. You lose 5 for asking a question; you gain 2 for answering, and 10 if yours is chosen as the best answer. At level 1, where everyone starts, you are pretty limited with an allowance of only 5 questions per day and answering 10. At level 2, you can now pick your own best answers, vote on other people’s and give a thumbs up or down sign on answers. The other levels have huge point gaps between them – around 600. You don’t earn more in higher levels; you are simply given higher limits of how many you can ask and answer.
Frankly I wonder what regular users do with their days. If I see a top contributor who has thousands of points, I ask myself why they’ve nowhere better to go, as the points are only meaningful on Yahoo answers and even then they amount to very little. Which is why I am perplexed by Yahoo’s limitations on offering links to your own work such as your website or MySpace page. Or here. Surely that makes the site useful and becomes a real community.
Yahoo answers is disabused of the notion that this is a site to gain knowledge, as its community guidelines expect. But how often do the users of this site really know what they are talking about? Many of them writer abusive or silly answers, Many of them can’t structure a proper sentence. Considering the point system is meaningless outside (and really inside) Yahoo Answers, there is little incentive of genuine answerers to use it. It really sounds like a place to procrastinate, not a site for genuine knowledge.
A respondent to the question on Glasgow’s rail network said her source was that she lived next door to a station, which sounds good – isn’t experiential and local knowledge is better than citation? Well not here, as the asker would’ve been sent to the wrong station. This is an example of how I doubt that this site is generally able to provide valid answers. Why not check on the rail network sites or ask a travel agent rather than chose a random member of the public?
The only value is a vox pop survey.
There are some helpful answers but as the best answers are picked by consensus (which can be one person) best answers with 10 points don’t always mean much.The ‘community’ – how I shrink from that word – chose this best answer to my query about the film, Quills:
My Qu:
Do people feel that Quills is immoral – or brilliant? Are Christians offended by it?
Reply:
I liked it
It’s got Kate Winslet in it naked
She’s hot
For the one vote, this got 100% rating as best answer
This was a travesty of my question which is meant to incite debate, like the film does and my article on Cinemaroll – not denigrate a serious actress to a sex object.
Many of my questions were removed without warning, like the automated booming voice at railway stations about unattended luggage. While I admit that they were generally designed to advertise my writing, I was not told that this was in breach, or of the reason. If I was aware that this was not acceptable, then I would stop. I checked the community guidelines before setting up an account and saw that whilst I couldn’t post a link on everything I wrote, that it was acceptable some of the time if it was relevant. We are encouraged to cite our sources – and if the best I can write, or my back up is my own article, why not? Someone answered one of my questions by quoting an Amazon review I could have found for myself – this would disqualify you in an educational setting. So isn’t my own review better than that?
I actually gleaned the idea of using Yahoo Answers from doing a search on ways to promote one’s work on sites like these. The article writer said that she uses Yahoo answers but in a way that I thought was abusive. She also linked her work to popular sites such as US elections even though her work is unrelated. I have only ever posted where is it relevant. I tried to balance my answers between those that were potentially links to my work here and on Triond, and general answers.
I won several Best Answers for helpful travel tips or advice, which I did genuinely. Like the email you get when your answer has been chosen, I do like to think that what I have said has made someone’s day; I took time and thought over these. But many answers on the site are rather silly, if not offensive. A young person shared a very real upset about their sexuality – the first answerer said: ‘Jesus hates you and so do I. Unless you’re a lipstick lesbian’. Now that is real abuse of the community, rather than a bit of understandable and quite resourceful bit of spreading of one’s words.
Other examples of silly answers: I asked has anyone seen the film White Heat:
‘Someone has’ replied a wised crack; he earned 2 points – for what? Time wasting!
Or: ‘How Do Pagans see Halloween?”
‘Through their eyes’, answered someone trying to be profound and clever [failing on both]; I wanted real pagans to tell me their understanding and how they celebrate Halloween, as the extension of my question made clear.
Few truly read questions: someone asked ‘Leaving the bible aside…’ and several Christians just couldn’t – even when the asker reposted DID YOU READ THIS? [she'd have received a message about Caps lock and being perceived as shouting when she typed that]
The next responder proudly said he would not keep off the bible, which as a source only credited by Chrsitians means that debate between different beliefs is futile.
Before I delve into that – a gripe on the automatic speech bubbles as you type your Q&As: I’ve just mentioned one but there’s also: ‘Hm, it seems like you’ve used a lot of punctuation.’ Clearly we’re in a text message age when we’re not expected to use those little squiggles that make our writing make sense. The spell checker is also very poor.
Let me complete my gripes: Despite the site’s own advice on making this accurate, my questions were often subjected to miscategorization. I asked a question on independent cafes – they put it in basketball! I tried to alter it but this was taken out of my points and question allowance that day, even though I did not press ‘submit’ and went back to change it several times. That wasn’t even posted in duplicate. I asked for bedsits in Bath, England: this got stuck in Japan – surprisingly no respondents.
Yahoo Support team never once got in touch about any query I asked them. I was given 2 questionnaires which I answered very negatively, but this didn’t result in any direct feedback from the team.
Back to the Bible and the religion corner. This is where things can get exiting – or vicious.
A Christian had a rant that she felt atheists were being hateful and disrespectful; and wondered why some people hung around the Spirituality area. Despite the community guidelines, I observed many unkindnesses in this section.
Some write wind up questions. One, which someone rightly called sick, posed a good Christian parent who is called cruel for stoning his children. Not even the most fundamental Christian I have ever met (and I have quite a few) would ever advocate stoning. It is ignorant of Christian understandings of how the New Testament part superseded the Old; and it conflates several Bible passages – I cannot think of whether this ‘troll’ (as they’re known on YA) got his idea from. This is one of several such questions I saw regularly.
If anyone is concerned that I have unethically reproduced questions here, the questions are freely viewable to the world without having to log in, and we all have user names so I have not revealed anyone’s identity.
Yahoo Answers is a limited resource as there are so many questions being posted every minute which means that you’re only on the first screen for an hour or less, so unless someone looks your subject up explicitly then yours might not be seen.
Although there are some careful answers, there is enough silliness and unkindness to make Yahoo Answers a very mixed bag. On balance, I would say that genuine quality answers are fewer than the reverse. I think I’ve already made my point about disallowing page per view raising through the site. Thanks to any that have viewed my work through Yahoo Answers – I hope you felt treated rather than tricked.
Yes I was Zelda, and yes I have resigned from Yahoo Answers. There are better ways to interact, learn, and sell my work online. Trial over.
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