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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."
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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 "
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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.
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
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.
Its been my observation that "trying to be useful", regardless of its economic rewards, seems to be inbred in some of us. Maybe its some sort of genetic thing. I cite the entire concept of open-source as my evidence. Some of the best minds in the industry literally give themselves to the public - a "Mother Teresa" type thing, meant in the best of hopes of sharing in the hopes of providing public display of a concept that should work. The Bible is full of it.
Payments attract the capitalists, not the philanthropists.
Capitalists are some of the greediest, self-centered, hated people on Earth. And for good reason.
Much of us who are of an unselfish "giving" nature are of the idea that everyone who has a gift of doing whatever shares, there will be more than enough to go around.
We tend to give to religions, although I personally want to give to the public-at-large - sharing what I have as my way of saying "thank you" to the people who shared with me. It doesn't have to be, and likely isn't, the same people.
As the saying goes: "What goes around, comes around", which to me is a biblical paraphrase of "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.".
If I was in a position of hiring others, I would make it my prime priority to have people of this ilk on my team.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Some Usenet groups have degraded into nothing but spam havens, and some have just died from lack of traffic. But there are a few that continue to be valuable sources of info. I personally find value in following comp.ai, comp.ai.genetic ...
The entire comp. hierarchy is valuable. For those interested in programming, for example, comp.lang.c, comp.lang.perl.misc, comp.unix.shell are additional groups that alive and kicking and more valuable to just about anyone than most of the rubbish found on the web. For Windows users, the microsoft.public* hierarchy is similarly valuable. So much so that Microsoft themselves offer it as a "service" (LOL) for their users, albeit with a specially designed web front-end.
Spam has always been a problem on USENET, but for those groups where there's lots of activity, it's a minor nuisance. For other groups, the denizens just move on to another empty group.
As for the original deteriorated into porn images, complaint, well, that's a plus for some, right? There's terrabytes of binary data flowing through usenet on a daily basis, so everyone is free to download as much or as little as they want. IMHO, it puts P2P sharing to shame. Then, again, it could be the OP is using their ISP's NNTP servers, so he doesn't get the groups or the binaries or the retention that the rest of us do for a few bucks a month.
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 will have a sig when the market demands it.