Slashdot Mirror
Visualizing "Answer People" In Online Discussions
Marc Smith writes "'Answer people,' the folks who contribute much of the value in the Internet, are a small minority of all online users. According to a recent paper my co-authors and I have published in the Journal of Social Structure, less than 2% of authors in Usenet newsgroups are likely to be the helpful 'answer person' type — authors who reply to many other people with brief replies. The paper Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups contains social network visualizations of the ties created when authors reply to one another. These images highlight the difference between these helpful folks and other types of contributors. The findings may apply to other threaded discussions, maybe even here at Slashdot."
There are still discussions in Usenet newsgroups?
authors who reply to many other people with brief replies
Me too!
... RTFM a helpful answer? if so, i'm one of the 2%!
The findings may apply to other threaded discussions, maybe even here at Slashdot.
Won't apply to me. I use the "nested" view for comments.
This guy's the limit!
I've noticed when browsing for answers for specific problems I'm having, I'll find an answer I could post to some random web forum. Most of those however require registration, and I never bother. If I'm already a member I'll post it, but sometimes it's just not worth jumping through a dozen hoops to post a random answer. Especially considering they might never check that six month old post ever again.
I'm sure I'm not alone.
Error:
Answer people enjoy solving problems and helping people. I won't consider myself one, but I do get a sense of accomplishment when I can help someone solve a problem or further a discussion.
And yet, Yahoo and other online corporations are (imho) exploiting these people by establishing "Answer" areas that reward people for answering questions with useless points. Do they get compensation or a cut of the advertising profits that yahoo is making on them? No. They get honor points.
Yahoo makes a mint on the viewership of the site and the answer people get a warm feeling... maybe it breaks even. I stopped answering questions after reading the hundredth obvious "I don't want to do my homework, so I'll ask it here" question.
At least sites like ePinions.com rewards it's reviewers with a pittance of the revenue their reviews generate.
"More generally, an answer person's apparent altruism provides an important explanatory challenge for models of collective action raising the possibility that people may be contributing to public goods for social goods like status "
2 7
Well yes people like to be favorably for contributing positively. Is greater status wrong in the light of greater contribution? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/03/19472
We are all just people.
I'd be willing to bet that an effective universal micropayment system coupled with a decent reputation network would bring quite a few more of these people out of the (lurker) woodwork, especially the ones who otherwise would be more moved to do other things that actually pay the bills. Forums, Usenet groups, Wikis, etc., not only offer no payment, their feedback mechanisms are poor to non-existent. Even the best of the "super-contributors" can become burned out or discouraged. Even minimal payment would be enough for a great many people who just want to know in some solid way that their efforts are indeed appreciated.
:)
It's a hard social and business problem over which I've been ruminating for years.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
is to imagine a guy in his late 20s sitting in his parents basement sucking down Mountain Dew and inhaling cheetos.....
Oh wait, thats not what you meant by "visualizing" them, is it?
Monstar L
They don't.
There's a few places where I'm an "answer guy", there's a few places where I'm not.
It really has nothing to do with my personality, it has alot more to do with how the conversation area is setup.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
One doesn't have to write lots of brief replies to be useful.
... interesting.
Some of the most important and helpful - if less frequent - responses are ones that are longer explanations of complex problems or concepts. Disregarding these from consideration is
Back in the early 1980s, I used to read all of Usenet. It's changed a bit since then
And then there was the September that Never Ended, and there were still a few years of viability before the bandwidth expansion forced most ISPs to stop carrying it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I have no comment.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Message boards, email discussion lists, etc. are used by an awful lot of companies as a cheap substitute for providing real support for their products. Go to some company's Support web page: you have 3-4 basic options:
1. Buy a $upport contract or pay-per-incidence
2. Free email support! It only takes 3-5 business days to get an unhelpful reply.
3. Visit our support forums. There are plenty of suckers out there who have already bought our product and figured it out, no thanks to us. Get your answer from them because, hey, they supply the knowledge for free and it only costs us a few $ to maintain the support forum!
Of course if you really do have some sticky problem, or a valid complaint, well, the support forums are not an officially recognized means of communication to the company. Having said that, we'll still delete posts/threads and bar any whiners that make us look bad. So, back to #1 if you really do need technical support.
I used to be an "answer" guy on a couple of mail lists. Not anymore. Why? because I've moved beyond the products I used to know a lot about. Now I ask the questions for new products I'm learning. That, and the fact that I've realized how much I've "given away" and not gotten anything back from. If I'm going to waste my time, it might as well be on slashdot.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
Which ironically could be why it's so popular.
1: Most don't initiate a topic. Simply reading the latest cool stories.
2: Look at the social network diagram of an answer person. Few interconnections. It indicates introverted social behaviour, which is classic computer/science etc geek/nerd. It's not like we're short of those.
3: Hands up the system administrators and technical support analysts.
In fact, the way Slashdot is structured with the constant new topics may even attract "answer people" over other bulletin board cultures. It'd be interesting to see an analysis done here. It'd be interesting if different bulletin board systems encouraged different types of people to use them. Hmm, you could even track the types of interactions based on the age of the story and by UID to see if the general culture has changed.
Interesting social research.
Deleted
"Now I ask the questions for new products I'm learning. That, and the fact that I've realized how much I've "given away" and not gotten anything back from."
So no one's ever answered any of your questions then?
Hallelujah!
/me takes inhaler.
I don't mind lurkers. I don't mind question-askers (if they're read the FAQ). I love those who provide long, detailed, interestin responses to new questions or complex problems.
But the least helpful newsgroup poster is the asshole who thinks that the number of newsgroup posts you've responded to will be the heaviest weighted metric in determining your eligibility for eternal glory in Heaven. It's like the OCD friend everyone has who irons their underwear - this kind of unnecessary busywork does not increase the sum of human knowledge, it just takes up valuable space and drowns out the interesting responses, while building the guy's ego to the extent that he considers himself yet more entitled to nose in on every topic!
Steve Gibson (grc.com) is like the epitome of "IF I MAKE ENOUGH NOISE ABOUT SHIT, AND ENOUGH PEOPLE LISTEN AND TALK ABOUT ME, I MUST BE RIGHT". No, you fuckface, no you aren't. You just do exactly what this type of newsgroup poster does - you give simple, and usually fundamentally wrong explanations to every problem, and everyone listens to you, because most people are "too long; didn't read" types who think that the shortest, baby-word solution is the correct one, instead of the one requiring thought.
IBM said it in the 1930s (OK, there was that little helping the Nazis thing, but let's forget that for the moment), and I'm going to say it today - Think! You need to think to advance, and that means taking the time to read and absorb complex ideas.
Typical social scientist to measure quality in terms of quantity. It's like New Labour government targets.. guess what, fucking up 100 operations or inventing a new waiting list to take people off the old one does not count as progress in healthcare; making exams easier so more people pass is NOT improving education; and lots of small, smug, content-free posts does not make for a good contributor to Usenet!
http://lowery.tamu.edu/Teaming/Morgan1/sld023.htm
The bottom 90% "teach others" is a fabulous aid to learning yourself. If you're interested in a subject, someone asks a question and you answer it after a bit of research, you're going to understand and remember the stuff well.
Deleted
Of course it has nothing to do with your personality. They are not trying to guess/predict personalities, but roles. Obviously, people have different social roles in different settings. The role of father (to take their first example in the introduction) is not the same as that same person's role as husband/lover/son/employee/whatever. And when he has the father role with a kid he is playing with, it doesn't say anything about his personality. He could be funny or boring, calm or irritable, selfish or not, etc. It's irrelevant. And he doesn't even have to be the kid's father to be in that role. Maybe he is just spending a moment with the neighbor's kid, but he is still in the father's social role at that moment.
I hope the authors of "Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups," Howard T. Welser of Cornell, Eric Gleave of University of Washington, Danyel Fisher and Marc Smith would study Slashdot conversations (How many days until Google indexes this and another researcher reads it and scoops them?)
I'd be willing to bet that an effective universal micropayment system coupled with a decent reputation network would bring quite a few more of these people out of the (lurker) woodwork
The motivation for helping is not pay. It's not like work.
The motivation is helping people, and having other people understand you are helpful.
To draw in helper people, you need to understand how to make it more visible that people are helpful. When helper people see other helper people being recognized socailly, that makes that site more appealing. Not being able to get a free water-bottle after one hundred useful posts.
Some kind of cool gear related to sites though, would indeed be an incentive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most implementations of support forums are immature.
Some of the ideas I have seen for improving forum based support are basic... like paying your level 1 techs to hang out in the forums and elevate complex issues to L2 while resolving basic issues via the forum.
Other ideas are more complex and some require more active user involvement. One of the most intriguing ideas I have seen is the extension of in-program help files through integrating support forum threads. There is a lot of overhead involved in classifying the discussions, and some issues related to editing the discussions, but if you are going to answer questions for people it makes sense to make those answers available to everyone else... why maintain two different help knowledge bases (web forum/desktop help)? Why not combine.
In short, I like the potential behind forum support, it just needs more time to evolve.
Regards.
Yes, I still get answers, even if I'm a selfish, flaming prick! The answer people have their own motivation regardless of my contribution - the point of the article, no? If that basic social psychology collapses, I'm left out in the cold. In the meantime...
Karma is tangible within the confines of slashdot, but I see very little evidence that it exists in the real world.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
And then there was the September that Never Ended, and there were still a few years of viability before the bandwidth expansion forced most ISPs to stop carrying it.
Except what really killed Usenet was the world wide web. Note that the "Eternal september" which many consider to be the downfall as a discussion forum was also the same time Mosaic was released. Just removing the binary groups or install a binaries filter would have drastically reduced the bandwudth use. Most importantly, you could make web sites look fancy while newsgroup messages were practical yet boring. Everybody knew how to use a web browser, everyone had one, everyone had access to all web sites, none of which was true in general for newsgroups. Some didn't know how, some didn't have one with their ISP, some didn't carry the same groups. Despite the "Eternal september", I swear there's a lot more AOLers that never learned to use it at all.
Pretty soon someone would start asking questions about why these people should be on the same service as the newsgroup-using people. Eventually in the late 90s, with the dotcom boom and blue E == Internet, there was just no hope because web boards are available for everyone, newsgroups only to a small subsection. You couldn't do with just a newsgroup, everyone that wanted to be available to everyone had to have a web board as well. Newsgroups could have been saved by two things: 1) A good web-to-news interface freely available for all ISPs to install and 2) Google for newsgroups, on the server side and again free so every ISP would implement it. I remember in the bad old days when you'd download everything then search locally. WTF? It was such a huge waste of resources and made it incredibly impractical. Yes, I know there are "search engines" but the average newsgroup server didn't. That was the final nail in the coffin in my opinion, when you'd have everything you'd want from google before half the headers would have downloaded from newsgroups.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I had a MindSpring account in the 90s that had an incredible web interface to access Usenet. If more ISPs had implemented it, it might have caught on. But everyone was afraid of stockpiling the large amounts of porn that infiltrated.
My user number is prime. Is yours?
I was just at the conference where Marc Smith (incidentally, an author of the paper and author of the
What makes this cool is that traditional social network analysis has not done very much in differentiating types of relations between users. They just draw lines between users, and the resulting network diagram is an incomprehensible mess. These people differentiate between incoming and outgoing messages, initiations and replies, first visits and returns. Maybe social scientists should have figured this out sooner, but better now than never.
Wouldn't this depend on the topic? A topic like "MS-Access" would be where people ask and answer technical questions; but not politics forums, which are by their nature mostly philosphical debates. Thus, if you measure the political forum for quantity of questions like, "when was Lincoln born?", you will indeed find very little and I would expect it to be that way. They might be counting the wrong thing.
Table-ized A.I.
One of the problems of being an 'answer person' (I like trying to help people get the right & correct information, and yes I've often posted a question only to answer it myself later that week) is when things get technical to a point where the answer is over the head of the knowledge seeker, they'll often expect you to 'babysit' them through some technical problems you worked out yourself with a little dilligence.
If they're not prepared to put some time into using the initial information you've given them to learn what they have to do, I'm not really prepared to put my time into holding their hand through every step of the process involved., especially if the process is complicated and very involved.
Q: What's the difference between intelligence and stupidity?
A: There's a limit to intelligence.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
I modded at a 10,000 person forum. It's true a small group most often answers questions/posts. However this group can be genuinely informative/insightful or playing out roles that often flirt with being abusive. If the bullies, know-it-alls etc. aren't kept in check now and then, they gather little cliques that soon put pressures on groups and administration. A weak administration and a forum increasingly beset with stife and compulsive provacateurs soon sees its best relpiers dwindle down. The people who would normally ask the best questions also diminish. The informative "give and take" of good threads compresses into superficial expression. Too often forum webmasters think their forum has to serve "everyone" no matter how debilitating some members are. I have seen good forums flip, and the group of insightful posters get displaced by smaller more malignant group. This is usually due to weakness (being too nice) of administration.
What is the usenet thing? It sounds a bit like Google Groups. Where is their website?
No, I am not serious (sigh).
Most of the people on Slashdot are emotional juveniles who think that a clever put-down instead of a thoughtful answer is applauded, when in fact the applause is only coming from their peers - more emotional juveniles. Emotionally mature people shun such nonsense, preferring honest, thoughtful, intelligent answers.
90% of the replies to this post will no doubt prove my point.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
Personally, I sometimes scour a couple of popular questions-and-answers sites for white-hat SEO purposes. If I can take five minutes to help solve someone's problem, and get an inbound link (through my signature) from a high-quality site, then that's my compensation right there.
Hmm, for some reason, I thought I should post this as AC, though.
2. Free email support! It only takes 3-5 business days to get an unhelpful reply.
3. Visit our support forums. There are plenty of suckers out there who have already bought our product and figured it out, no thanks to us. Get your answer from them because, hey, they supply the knowledge for free and it only costs us a few $ to maintain the support forum! 4. IRC live support.
Helllllooooooooo Ubuntuuuuuuuuuu.
If not 2/3 of the BBS bulletin board community were sincere about helping people with real information... from their perspective at least.
Still, 2% is better than asking people on the street... where I find only 2% will actually even respond much less give any information, like street directions...
I'm glad I could be of help.
You're such an 'answer guy' that when you ask a question somewhere trying to find a solution and there are no useful replies (if any)... You then finally manage to sort through all the chaff/noise on Google some time period later to find a relevant answer and then post the most pertinent details of that as a reply to your own question.
Sure it may seem odd, but I suppose it makes using the search function at a web forum a lot more useful for the next schlubb down the line. *shrug*
I think a lot of answer guys are folks that hate wasting time to find answers themselves, but reluctantly do it if necessary. The real difference is that they're nice enough to save the next person in line the effort, since they empathize with what a PITA it is. You'll probably also find real answer guys hate generic "I have a question" subject posts (Don't waste my time if you're not going to be specific. Not to mention it can break later search functionality.) or finding repeated identical topics that have been clearly answered already. (Use search, damnit!)
0123456789`~!@#$%^&*()-_=+qwertyuiop[]\QWERTYUIOP{ }asdfghjkl;'ASDFGHJKL:"zxcvbnm,./ZXCVBNM?
s dfghjkléà$ASDFGHJKLöä£YXCVBNM;:_
1234567890'^+"*ç%&/()=?`qwertzuiopè"QWERTZUIOPü!a
...discuss.
Serious point though - teach a man to fish and all that.
I find I only answer the toughies (when I can) and leave picking off 50 easy answers to other people - so I guess that means I enjoy the challenge of answering tough questions.
Do you think answer people are the ones who ask the sensible questions when they do get stuck? If you filter out all the questions you can answer using Google in five minutes, those that remain are a different category; generated, I so stipulate, by a different class of question person.
Is that question person also our answer person?
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972