Webupon

Many sites provide an invaluable service, a place to host your content so that other people can find it. Magnatune, Triond, Dreamstime, Revostock, Jamendo, Delicious, Wordpress, StumbleUpon are all sites that depend on user generated content, but have mutual advantages to offer in turn.

StumbleUpon gives you the awesome facility to be taken anywhere on the web, delicious keeps your bookmarks for you so that you can access them from anywhere, Dreamstime lets you profit from your photos, Magnatune offers a place where musicians can reach new audiences and sell their music, likewise Jamendo is a platform for musicians to upload their content and reach new users. Even social networking sites have their place, and have mutual benefits such as keeping in touch with friends.

Wikipedia is worth highlighting here as a very fulfilling site to contribute to, even though it offers nothing in return except the satisfaction of providing information or editing entries, it is a project that grapples with the sum total of all human knowledge, and in that boundless scope any contribution towards it is satisfying in itself. The fact that it has no adverts makes it easy to see the value in it; free, no catch, access to knowledge in so far as the users of the internet are able to collectively provide it. A vision to be cherished.

But in some social sites there is no mutual benefit. Yahoo Answers, for example wants users to answer questions. To encourage this it has a points system. Points are awarded for answering questions, and this encourages people to answer as many questions as possible up to their daily limit. This might seem at first to be something as useful as Wikipedia, however it is not. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly there is no guarantee that the questions will be answered by anyone with any knowledge of the subject.

How many times have you found an old Yahoo Answers entry only to cringe at the selected best answer, knowing fine well it’s off the mark? Often the person who asked the question, is unable to select the answer that’s correct. Answers are also rated by the community, if the asker fails to select a best one, and again there is no guarantee that any of them know what they are talking about either. Yahoo Answers has been described as the only place on the internet where 120 million users can be wrong!

It has also attracted a lot of criticism for this very reason, with the critics highlighting that it is more about Social Networking than providing accurate answers. Pessimists among us will note plenty of adverts, so Yahoo are making a pretty penny, wasting people’s time by encouraging them to answer questions even if they don’t know the answer, and filling up search engines with useless pages.

Those old enough to remember the days before “answers” sites appeared will recall it used to be the case that you could type a question into a search engine and find a forum entry where someone knowledgeable had answered the question for the sake of being helpful. Nowadays you only find screeds of “answers” sites encouraging unhelpful answers given for the sake of gaining points.

With Yahoo Answers if a user demonstrates themslves to be sufficiently knowledgeable within a specific category the they might receive an orange badge under their avatar name marking them as a “Top Contributor”. This might have made it a satisfying pastime, but the user can lose this badge by not maintaining their level and quality of participation, rendering any benefits utterly pointless. Sounds more like a job than a rewarding hobby, and at least employers pay you money, and hobbies have model boats or stamps or physical fitness etc as side-effects of having fun. The rewards of participating in Yahoo Answers disappears as soon as you stop answering.

Some may say at this juncture, “but the reward is Answering the questions!” The only answer to this is; I hope the 120 million of you are pleased with yourselves, because any good answers that are out there are now obscured by a myriad of partially correct answers and plenty of plain wrong ones. To quote Jacob Leibenluft:

“The blockbuster success of Yahoo Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It’s every middle-school teacher’s worst nightmare about the Web. ”

from: Slate

So why is Yahoo Answers so popular? Perhaps it is to be helpful. But if that’s the case we would do well to remember the words of Socrates, “Wisest is he who knows that he does not know” or in other words, be mindful that what we think we know is a tiny fraction in comparison to all the knowledge that is out there. Gaining knowledge and truth from a large group of people only works if each of those people individually practices restraint. This is why Wikipedia has been so successful at delivering reliable information. Wikipedians are often criticised as being deletionists, but deleting unimportant entries and focusing on revising and improving relevant entries has worked. By comparison Yahoo Answers focus on quantity has been a failure, and it’s only redeeming feature is its popularity. But who profits from this popularity? The only answer is that Yahoo Answers takes without giving back.