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."
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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.
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.
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A: There's a limit to intelligence.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
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