Share via

Is Yahoo Answers Really that Bad?

  • Article

 

Q. On your recommendation, I tried the Yahoo Answers site and was disappointed by the level of the questions and the amount of spam on the site. It seemed like everyone was taking it as a joke.

A. Me, too. Right after my column a few weeks ago the site was inundated with people, many of whom have paid no attention to the guidelines. It has turned into a chat room and doesn't come close to rivaling Google Answers. If they ever hire enough moderators, I will let you know. But in the meantime the site is a disaster.

Source: Scripps Howard News Service

I've never noticed this sort of behavior on the answers site, but I don't really frequent it.  Is this opnion true?  What could Yahoo do to avoid this?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2006
    Sadly that is how the new Windows Live Q&A is turning out to be . . .  I think that wikipedia is the only social networking site that is “answering” questions for the masses.
  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2006
    I actually have to agree.  It seems like the site has been completely flooded with teenagers with nothing else to do, and it seems like some of the categories really don't get any attention, whereas some of them are flooded with "N-E body want to talk 2 me on Y!?"  Ugh.

    You get enough points to constantly ask questions without really having an incentive to answer other people's questions in a thoughtful way.  Without strong incentive, it really is a chat room.
  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    Looking at sites like Experts-exchange etc I'd say it's probably good to have multiple differentiated sites with their own focuses to build a pool of people that have knowledge in that area if you are going with some kind of Q&A system.

    I've never actually went to Yahoo Answers but that name alone gives a first impression that it will answer by the magic of Internet to whatever you want to ask and of course the "answers to whatever, for pretty much free" would be harder to implement so it actually worked. Perhaps a lot of smaller, more personal community sites with a method of redirecting the questions from the main question site to these smaller community sites.. So if I asked about (specific subject) in "Answers to whatever" then it would somehow get redirected to more appropriate community site such as msdn forums. Not sure if this is the best idea though, just something that came up.
  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2006
    yahoo answer is bad i think we should build something like yahoo answer just better
  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2009
    PingBack from http://debtsolutionsnow.info/story.php?id=536