Yahoo Answers dominates its category, but there are a lot of complaints about spam and other useless content. Yahoo made a simple change to the product today that could help fight that spam. Users can now track others who tend to provide excellent answers.
This won’t reduce the amount of spam on the site, but it will help highlight the better content and allow users to create social networks within Answers. To use this, users simply mouse over the avatar of a user they like and click “Add to My Contact.” Recent content from contacts appears in a user’s home page and profile page.
This won’t directly help users who are searching for content or asking questions, but it will certainly bring better content to the foot of users who simply browse the site.
i like the concept of this “referral integrity”
but i’m not sure it’ll work, at least in this scenario
people want answers, they learn it - and leave.
simple, make it work - and keep it simple.
i don’t see why they’d want to still ‘hangout’ there with those social features after they have gotten what they want already
This feature CAN help to reduce the amount of spam. What Yahoo! need is to track down individuals who tend to spam or intentionally provide faulty answer.
Good to know that Yahoo Answers is listening to its users and coming up with features that made sense intuitively in the first place. Since our pilot (http://answeru.com) on Jan 15th in about 10 US campuses, we have had these very features on AnswerU.com.
The whole idea is to reveal who the top “authorities” are on various categories and sub-categories, subscribe to their content and connect with them. Again, its more interesting when you are at a specific location (US campus in our case) where there is a real possibility to connect and hangout with these “experts” offline.
We are using the same ‘contact/fans’ social feature at our site. It was a great boost is terms of user interaction, so I would guess the same thing could happen at yahoo answers. I say yahoo made the right move with this.
This is a great feature, as I know there are a number of guerilla marketing companies out there that are using Yahoo Answers to drive traffic to their website, but sitting on certain RSS feeds (which Yahoo Answers provides for free) and when a question comes up with the terms they want, they rush to answer it. Once they answer it, and go over a Level 2, they can then vote for best answer and promote their own answers, or create a mob scenario using multiple accounts to vote their answer to the top and vote others down. Well done Yahoo.
We realized a while ago (about a year and a half ago, actually, around the time Yahoo Answers was launching) that you need some social elements alongside an “answers” model to make it really stick with people.
While our site, http://www.funadvice.com/ isn’t nearly as big as Yahoo Answers, Yedda, or Answerbag, our social networking features are the most evolved of all the “answers” sites. From looking at Quantcast & compete, it’s also clear that users have been liking the new feature set. This month, we’re on track to generate about a quarter million unique visitors, with more than 600,000 pageviews.
Regrettably, Y!A was, and is, unable to prevent the elimination of intelligent, well conceived, and clearly written content if it is the least bit controversial. By failing to provide an even minimally effective review process for flagged questions and answers (Is there even an actual person who does this? Even one ? ) by default the site ultimately only appeals to the lowest common denominator. A way to track individuals? Kudos. I’m sure it’s a programming tweak to be proud of. But Y!A has much more important issues to address before it rises above the level of being just a toy, albit one with attractive packaging.
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I do not even know where to begin on this one. Yahoo Answers is one of the worst conceived ideas to hit the internet in years. If they really want to improve this, they need to remove the ridiculous thumbs don and up feature, the “top contributor feature” and some sort of forum where the anecdotal, often un scientific, sometimes harmful advice can be challenged. I can say in all modesty I am an authority in my field (Aquarium keeping), however the answers that get picked as best and the top contributor in this area is nothing more than a poser.
This new feature may help a little, but doubt much as Yahoo rewards people here who have hours a day to bang away on their keyboards pretending to know what they are talking about.