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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."
Yes Helpful Not helpful Total waste of photons
This message was done on 100% recycled electrons.
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 thought that the newsgroups had pretty much deteriorated into porn images and a way to download all the spam and trojans you ever wanted...
I thought that the newsgroups had pretty much deteriorated into porn images and a way to download all the spam and trojans you ever wanted...
No, that's the World Wide Web. Newsgroups are where technical stuff gets done. Very little spam, mostly on-topic posts, people who know what they're talking about, and no advertising.
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.
Surprises me too.
However, a few years ago there was someone who was talking about an "imminent Usenet renaissance." Not sure that's actually occurred but their theory was that most ISPs no longer make it easy to get on Usenet, so the users who actually participate in discussions there are usually fairly interested / experts. In other words, most of the AOL users / script kiddies / etc. are busy trolling PHPBB sites, because they're easier to get into than Usenet.
Unfortunately because of the spam problems, there's really no point in reading unmoderated groups IMO.
From an architectural standpoint I really like Usenet. It's just unfortunate that upgrades to it that would have curtailed spam and kept it alive and more mainstream never caught on. It's certainly a better way of having a global discussion system than discrete, centralized web forums, where a single server crash (or rogue admin, or hacking) can eliminate thousands or millions of discussions in an instant. Usenet is the collective memory of the internet, thanks to caching services; very few web forums can compete with that. (Actually I'd say that Slashdot is one of the few that does, because Slashdot has been consistently good about preserving old content and not deleting stuff; most database-driven web sites aren't like that, though.)
Almost makes me want to fire up my newsreader and see if there's anything there to see. Almost.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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
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.
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, comp.ai.neural-nets, comp.ai.philosophy, comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.prolog, comp.object and a few others. <shrug
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
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.
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"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?
Having said that. Usenet News absolutely rocks in a controlled setting like a private/corporate LAN. If you can make it part of the culture at all there's an order of magnitude improvement in communication over email for group discussions. For some reason, people seem to feel inhibited about sending emails to 100 recipients, but less so about posting to a newsgroup.
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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.
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Here is a short comment: The summary, which you did read, uses the word brief. The research paper (which you might not have actually read) does not measure comment length. It does measure # of messages in threads, and whether a person replies to others or initiates, as well as patterns in network ties. Those attributes predict answering behavior. But you bring up a good point. The length of a post does not necessarily have anything to do with its quality or insightfullness.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I'm glad I could be of help.
Even now, when usent usage has greatly decreased, I still find Google Groups - the usenet archive* - much more helpful for answering specific questions than web search. ...
While there are probably a hundred web forums out there with the answer, they don't get indexed in time by Google, or get indexed but the thread/post can't be referenced anymore, or there is just too much cruft and Google can't find the content, or
I've been thinking maybe Google should make a "forum search"...
* Google's own "not usenet" groups never seem to contain much of interest.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
I was thinking about this the other day... and finding that I miss CompuServe (even though it was expensive, slow, and proprietary).
What's annoying today is that nobody has managed to come up with a messaging / discussion system that truly "works" (in both online and offline modes). USENET is great... except that very few people go there (and Thunderbird's USENET support is sucky, at best). Lots of folks like to use Web Forums, which have their advantages (e-mail notification of replies, ability to mark up text or insert images). Other folks like to use mailing lists (threaded message support in most e-mail clients, easy to reply off-list, easy to take on the road).
What I'd like to see in a messaging system:
- Moderation capability (all 3 systems do offer this).
- Offline ability (USENET and e-mail lists). Now if we could just get the phpBB systems of the world to figure out how to offer offline capabilities.
- The ability to join a community and read the archives. E-mail lists fall short on this, very rarely do they allow you to download past messages into your e-mail client. So you have two time frames - "before you joined" which usually requires dealing with a crappy web interface to the e-mail archives, or maybe a USENET group if you're lucky. And the "after you joined" where all of the messages are in your e-mail reader and you have all of the e-mail reader tools at your disposal.
- Notification of replies. E-Mail lists and web forums offer this, USENET doesn't. It was nice with CompuServe that I could login and know that I had replies to messages.
There's an awful lot of e-mail lists that I subscribe to, even though I don't read them regularly. Just so that I don't have to deal with the before/after issue - that and it gives me a searchable offline knowledgebase.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I'm an "answer person". But most of the Usenet groups I used to read regularly and love have been taken over by sociopathic trolls with lots of time on their hands.
Indeed ... I would add the web forums primary benefit is that because they are just web pages, they are very easy to find for most people, compared to usenet groups (which have a kind of ambiguous identity).
There's no reason that Usenet clients couldn't remember which forums you have posted to and give you a nice notification list of replies to read - it has always annoyed me that they don't. With a lot of mucking around with rules, you can sometimes get them to highlight replies to you in a particular group, and on ProNews/2 (OS/2 client) this could be extended to highlighting groups in the groups list. But this has always been a second-class feature that is not active out of the box.
Of course it's not pushed from the server managing the list and would therefore requiring downloading new headers on every group on every server. Usenet servers could potentially be modified to push notifications, sending "reply notification" emails to members who posted via them (thus retaining the distributed nature).
I guess the single biggest problem with web forums is that they don't separate content from presentation, so presentation is totally dependent on what the server chooses to do. I guess this is where RSS in theory comes in?
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
...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