I am relatively new to the site but I must say that there seems to be a major trend on the site to give glib one line answers that leave me with the uneasy feeling that people are doing so just for their own ego. Think about it who cares how many points you have except yourself. Big deal! So are we being used by marketing guru ploys?
There again it may just be an innate need of the masses to connect with others. And the marketing gurus know that.
Having said that there are some funny characters out there who break the monotony. Then there are the minority of sincere people who would like to convey their views in a intelligent manner, whether you agree with them or not.
Like lots of marketing today I think the backroom boys at Yahoo Answers are using the subtle marketing mechanism of “positive feedback” by playing to consumers human wants. In other words they keep the answers flowing in and give you points for making their site viable. They know what most people want and the’ve no doubt studied it. As such it can tends to detiorate into a generalized hub bub town hall forum. Maybe Internet sites like this have largely replaced town hall forums just like email has supplanted “snail mail”.
This state of affairs is reinforced by giving points to anyone and everyone whatever the quality of their answer. And to loose points for asking questions well I’m just in disbelief about that.
¢нαяℓιє вяσωη says;
“As to the issue of why it costs points to ask a question,the answers to this question in the link below puts it best:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;…”
I say;
yes I undertand what the link says but it is all one-sided.
You can have pointless answers ( driven by the inane motive of scoring points) as well as pointless questions.
Everybody has questions but the “positive feeback mechanism” used by Yahoo recognizes that people by and large need an incentive to answer someone’s question that they don’t know from a bar of soap.