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A significant number of potentially helpful n00bs come to Yahoo! Answers every day, and most are gone within a few weeks, if not a few days.

Almost universally, they wage the same complaints as they leave, which are generally valid:

• The questions are stupid / can be easily answered with a search engine query
• Many answerers have no idea what they are talking about
• A significant amount of point gaming / cheating takes place
• Reporting Community Guidelines violations, even clear violations, often backfires, especially if you are a new user
• Answers staff is largely absentee, and on the rare occasions when they do show up, they are far more interested in protecting feelings than promoting worthwhile content

There are a number of reasons for these shortcomings, but the executive summary is this: When a fox raids your henhouse, you shouldn’t blame the fox for eating the chickens or the chickens for being eaten. You should blame yourself.

The fox and chickens did what they naturally do. But you chose the dog that failed to watch over the henhouse. You failed to build a henhouse that kept the fox out. You put the hens in harm’s way and provided the fox with the means to do harm.

If you want to avoid the same trouble again, you fix your mistakes. You get a better dog. You build a better henhouse. And if successful fox raids persist after all your best efforts to stop them, you get out of chicken farming, because you clearly cannot do it properly.

That’s the basic problem with Yahoo! Answers: It’s built wrong, the wrong people are watching over it, Yahoo! is taking advice on how to fix those problems from idiots, and given the realities of what it’s trying to accomplish and the realities of human nature, Yahoo! should probably quit Answers altogether.

The Structure of Yahoo! Answers: Why It Works The Way It Does

I’ll discuss specific areas of Answers’ failings over several entries. The first thing we need to make clear: Answers is little more than a glorified forum, and as a result, its problems are fundamental to every board out there. And lamers, flamers and spammers aren’t anything new to Web forums.

On the Answers forum, the questions are new topics and the answers are replies. Thumbs-up, thumbs-down and starred questions are just a rating mod; points are just a “board cash” mod; community moderation is about its only significant innovation on Answers, but even that has been done before. Anyone with a fair knowledge of PHP could modify phpBB to be Answers in relatively short order.

Yahoo! had the benefit, when it first started Answers about four years ago, of knowing what makes a forum successful: replies.

The best boards on the Internet aren’t the ones where the topics are strong; those boards have rightly been replaced by blogs. The best boards are the ones where the replies are strong; witness 4chan (in spite of its uptime issues).

Knowing this, Yahoo! intentionally structured Answers’ scoring system to reward replies. It does this by issuing credit for answering in the first place; rewarding the original poster for choosing a Best Answer; giving its top point award to the person who provided Best Answer; granting bonus points for each “Thumbs Up” rating of a Best Answer, and rewarding users for voting on Best Answers.

But Yahoo! also knew that most trolling — usually unintentional — is done by n00bs. So they linked board cash to user levels, which was pretty innovative at the time.

Most forum cash mods are straight credit. For example, to discourage lurking, cash mods usually charge you to look at a topic, and pay you for posting a new topic or replying. So long as you post often enough, you can view other people’s posts; but once you’ve lurked too much, you’re out of cash and must post content to continue using the board.

Answers determines your daily use of the system based on your user level, which is dictated by the number of points you have accumulated.

This has the effect of requiring users to remain committed to the board for an extended period before their permissions are elevated, and to elevate permissions in stages. And that has the effect of letting users learn how to use the system as they go, giving more use to people who have been around long enough to learn the ropes.

This methodology has been wildly successful; maybe, too much so.

The Breakdown In The Best Answer Methodology: By Design, There’s No Community

Because disproportionate weight is put on Best Answers ‘“ providing a Best Answer can be worth as much as 63 points, but asking a question can never be more than a wash — the incentive to have your answers named best is overwhelming.

The leaderboard demonstrates there are two ways to the top: Providing piles of answers, or having a high Best Answers percentage. This is exactly how Yahoo! wanted scoring to work.

Unfortunately, that methodology is corrupt thanks to a simple truth: Nobody votes for other people’s answers. And that, in large part, is due to the transient nature of the boards.

I will discuss how Yahoo! effectively discourages true communities on its boards in a later post.

For now, suffice it to say that few questioners elect a “Best Answer” to their questions, and practically no one votes for strangers’ answers to be Best Answer.

In the former case, it’s because there isn’t enough reward for a questioner to nominate a Best Answer: you only get three points, and it cost five to pose the question.

A fix to this might be to award the questioner 10 points for choosing a Best Answer, or not allow a questioner to ask additional questions if any of his old questions haven’t been awarded a Best Answer.

Yahoo! instead installed community voting as a way to overcome lazy questioners not choosing Best Answers. However, because there is no true community on Answers, there’s no incentive to vote for other people’s answers.

There’s certainly no practical benefit to voting for answers you didn’t provide.

You can look, again, at the scoring system to see the problem: As a Level 2 user, I could vote for 120 Best Answers over six days and collect 120 points. Or I could answer 10 questions myself on one day, vote for my own answers in five days and collect 130 points on the sixth day (assuming all my answers are named Best Answer).

Nor is there a moral compunction to rate the content on Answers, especially if your intent is to rate it poorly. In fact, as noted at the start of this article, pointing out bad content is fraught with peril. I’ll talk more about that in another post.

The Chickens Have No Bark Or Bite

The structure of Answers effectively requires that community members act in the broad interests of the greater good.

Yet there is no personal reward for doing so ‘“ at least, the rewards are a pittance versus paying attention to your own answers ‘“ and there are very clear, and very severe, penalties for trying to act in the community good but running afoul of the Answers staff’s obtuseness.

Worse, by embracing bankrupt theories of social structure that rightly should be entombed with Lenin, Answers effectively drives away the best potential users.

Again, Answers is more than its physical failings; I will try to address those later.

For now, suffice it to say the henhouse is built with the expectation that the chickens should also be the watchdog, but they shouldn’t bite or even bark.

As ludicrous as that sounds, it proves so in practice.

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