Answerbag

Note: I interpreted the instructions as "get the required amount of points by Sunday" and "write your blog by Tuesday"??? I interpreted that as needing one blog, then read it again today and was confused. >_<

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This is me.

From lurking the site I figured that the questions that garner the most interest in points and comments are:
1) about sex and relationships or;
2) very general ("Did your parents teach you to cook?")

It makes sense that more people would be interested in more general questions, since more people can answer those and be interested in them. My problem is that I'm generally interested in niche or helpful answers (a current issue is "how do I get these black marks out of my white counter?"). So I began by answering and asking questions about fashion and cosmetics and Japan and Hawaii and garnered a few points, but not really enough.

Then I started giving relationship advice. Since I tend to read relationship advice for fun, I know the most common tenets of that and manage to sound like I know what I'm talking about so I got even more points there. But it still wasn't good enough; I started feeling frustrated.

Surprisingly, the answer that gained me over 40 points was an annoyed one-off to someone who clearly doesn't want to give the new President a chance at all. I guess this surprised me because it wasn't a "helpful" answer to the question, but the way Answerbag is in practice it doesn't seem that the answer has to answer the question - it just has to be a response that people like.

Finally, I changed my strategy to start asking generic questions. My next best result was the question "Have you ever obsessed over something silly?", which gained 7 answers (one short, I know). This was one of my attempts at a more general question and didn't get as much activity as I had hoped for but at least got a little response.

I found the assignment very difficult, as I'm generally interested in niche or easy answers and those are the sort of questions that might get answered but won't have a lot of activity. It almost felt like I was in high school again and competing in some sort of popularity contest that I wasn't going to win, so I was overall surprised that one of my comments managed to get the required number of points.

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Relating Answerbag to the readings:

In terms of Tedjamulia et al's article, Answerbag is a direct knowledge-sharing site where people ask questions and give answers about anything. So, unless there are other issues involving usability, marketing, or community relations, the site would have a difficult time not being a successful community. Forums based around questions of a single topic would have a more difficult time simply because they had less material to work with.

It is likely that Answerbag's community extends far outside the number of registered users, as one does not have to be registered to browse the site. Tedjamulia et al says that 80-90% of a community population are lurkers. We all were in that category as we studied the community and prepared for the assignment. It also made me ponder how many times I've been a silent member of a community as I looked up information on the web. Google took me to many places and communities I've never joined - Yahoo Answers, music forums, and blogs, among others.

It seems that many frequent users of Answerbag use it as a source of entertainment for themselves, which explains most of the outside the bag category. Answerbag encourages users to stay on the site by doing what Tedjamulia et al described: setting goals. On every member's profile page is a reminder of their level and how many points they have left to go before they reach a new level, as well as their number of points and comments. Basically, moving up a level is both a goal and a reward. And, users get institutional recognition when they reach level 100.

I ran across an example of Ling et al's paper in a comparison of my question "Why is "feminist" such a bad word in a lot of circles?" and my answer that garnered a lot of points. Ling et al's paper finds that there are far fewer comments when members have similar opinions (in this case about movies) than when members have different opinions. Of course I was tempted to argue with the people who gave inflammatory responses to my feminism response, and did, and they argued back. It seemed the vast majority of people just agreed with my response to the question "How [many] people who voted for Obama wish they could take their vote back?", and gave points rather than leave an agreeing opinion because they couldn't add anything to my answer.

Java et al's article I felt was really focused on twitter and didn't have much that was applicable to Answerbag. The question that article brought up in reference to user intention though was fascinating. It seems that Answerbag does have a place for idle chatter, as personified by the "Outside the Bag" category, but mostly the site's purpose is for information seeking. The user's information need could be about relationships, the best place to hike on Oahu, etcetera, etcetera.

I felt like I didn't have enough psychological background to understand what Schrock et al was discussing, but I agreed that any/all/the information is going to be freed in the de-massification, and it certainly is on sites like Answerbag where anyone can be your expert. (Standard disclaimer about validity of information that "expert" gives applies.) We've seen information in the form of mp3s and videos become free - whether you agree with it or not - and I think one could argue that through social networking our personalities, or representations of them, have become massified. And pseudonymously, there is no such thing as too much information on the internet, so even the parts of us that are normally private have become public. Look at the number of people posting questions about sex on Answerbag.

Finally, harkening back to my last paragraph in the first section, I completely disagree with Ridings and Gefen saying that using the internet for computer mediated discussion is like watching television. Television is a much more passive activity - the television is not going to give my question points. The television is not going to argue with me. Most of all, I've been involved in several online communities and the time one must spend to become a trusted voice if everyone is under pseudonyms is usually enormous. I linked earlier to Dr. Gazan's post congratulating a user for reaching level 100, and the first thing I could think of when I saw that was "How long did THAT take?" Online communities, if you participate actively in them, involve much time and energy, as they are inherently social. Not television at all.