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Visualizing "Answer People" In Online Discussions

Posted by kdawson on Sat Jun 30, 2007 01:57 PM
from the gratuitously-helpful dept.
The Internet Science
Marc Smith writes "'Answer people,' the folks who contribute much of the value in the Internet, are a small minority of all online users. According to a recent paper my co-authors and I have published in the Journal of Social Structure, less than 2% of authors in Usenet newsgroups are likely to be the helpful 'answer person' type — authors who reply to many other people with brief replies. The paper Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups contains social network visualizations of the ties created when authors reply to one another. These images highlight the difference between these helpful folks and other types of contributors. The findings may apply to other threaded discussions, maybe even here at Slashdot."
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  • And yet ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WrongSizeGlass (838941) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:04PM (#19700973) Homepage

    less than 2% of authors in Usenet newsgroups are likely to be the helpful 'answer person' type
    And the other 98% think they're helpful 'answer people'.

    • Re:And yet ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:26PM (#19701107)
      You "answer people" exist for one purpose and one purpose only: to tell me what I want to know when I want to know it.

      Of course I am not an "answer person." I have more important things to do.

      I paid for my access to the Internet, which means I paid for my access to you. Dont expect any gratitude from me.

      • Re:And yet ... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Aladrin (926209) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:48PM (#19701231)
        Mod this insightful!

        No, not because it's insightful on purpose, but because it's an accurate representation of how most of that 98% think. For some reason, they honestly believe that they -deserve- an answer just because they post a question.

        I'm talking about the people that post things like 'What, 98 views and nobody answers my damn question!?' and 'Doesn't anyone know the answer?' and 'HEY I NEED HELP HERE AND HURRY UP'.

        I'm an answer person. I actively enjoy helping other people. I'm not a selfless do-gooder, though. I do it because I'm happy when I make others happy. A selfless do-gooder would take all the abuse on forums without losing his top. They'd answer the question, even if the person was ignorant and rude. That's not me, because rude jerks don't give me that feeling of pride and happiness, but instead make me feel used and unappreciated.

    • Slashdot may be full of answer people. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Colin Smith (2679) on Saturday June 30 2007, @03:01PM (#19701301)
      Which ironically could be why it's so popular.

      1: Most don't initiate a topic. Simply reading the latest cool stories.
      2: Look at the social network diagram of an answer person. Few interconnections. It indicates introverted social behaviour, which is classic computer/science etc geek/nerd. It's not like we're short of those.
      3: Hands up the system administrators and technical support analysts.

      In fact, the way Slashdot is structured with the constant new topics may even attract "answer people" over other bulletin board cultures. It'd be interesting to see an analysis done here. It'd be interesting if different bulletin board systems encouraged different types of people to use them. Hmm, you could even track the types of interactions based on the age of the story and by UID to see if the general culture has changed.

      Interesting social research.

       
    • I bloviate much too much to be an answer person.

      Plus, I often use the discussions to think about things which I had not previously considered.

  • Hey (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    authors who reply to many other people with brief replies
    Me too!

  • is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cosmocain (1060326) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:08PM (#19700999)
    ... RTFM a helpful answer? if so, i'm one of the 2%!

    • Re:is... (Score:5, Funny)

      by m0nkyman (7101) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:46PM (#19701219) Homepage Journal
      RTFA and find out for yourself.
      • RTFA and find out for yourself.

        Actually, I've noticed in the last few years that instead of saying RTFM (the value of which advice, incidentally, can't be overstated), is that people post Wiki links [wikipedia.org] instead. My guess is that it may be more useful for those unaccustomed to reading a terse man page and has the added bonus of being a brush-off that appears polite.

        Similarly, offering linkies to popular websites is becoming increasingly common. There's more and more good websites, of course, but most people lo
    • Well apparently being concise is a quality of answer people so you qualify.

      Sometimes RTFA is the answer. Some folks are SFL.

  • threaded discussion (Score:3, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:09PM (#19701003)
    The findings may apply to other threaded discussions, maybe even here at Slashdot.

    Won't apply to me. I use the "nested" view for comments.

  • hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jadin (65295)
    I've noticed when browsing for answers for specific problems I'm having, I'll find an answer I could post to some random web forum. Most of those however require registration, and I never bother. If I'm already a member I'll post it, but sometimes it's just not worth jumping through a dozen hoops to post a random answer. Especially considering they might never check that six month old post ever again.

    I'm sure I'm not alone.
    • Especially considering they might never check that six month old post ever again.

      You know what peeves me off. Obscure Windows OS and Application problems that the only results in Google are slew of 6 month old newsgroup posts with no replies. ;)

      And its usually the ones that fit my problem down to a T with the symptoms and error messages. The only consolation is the fact that some poor smuck out there has faced the same problem I am faced with now but with no solution.
      • Or, the one that I hate even more: An exact description of the problem, aaaaand... "To see the rest of this discussion, become a subscriber! Only $29.99 per year!" (Yes, I'm looking at you, ExpertsExchange.)

        These things should be downlisted like spam-sites, IMO, but they have enough signal to stay on top of the rankings, just nothing actually helpful.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by fbartho (840012)
      Use the bugmenot firefox extension! That's what I do... I don't know about the long term effects of giving good karma to random usernames on random boards, are, however it lets me feel good about helping out, even if in the end it's anonymous and nobody can ever tie it back to me.

  • End of Conversation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by weinrich (414267) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:14PM (#19701037)

    only 2% of authors in Usenet newsgroups are likely to be the helpful 'answer person' type -- authors who reply to many other people with brief replies.
    Another typical marker for an 'answer person' posting is the fact that the conversation (usually a random flurry of replies to the original question) usually stops quickly once they chime in, as everyone else recognizes that their answer is correct and complete.

  • Yahoo makes money off these people. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by binaryspiral (784263) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:14PM (#19701043)
    Answer people enjoy solving problems and helping people. I won't consider myself one, but I do get a sense of accomplishment when I can help someone solve a problem or further a discussion.

    And yet, Yahoo and other online corporations are (imho) exploiting these people by establishing "Answer" areas that reward people for answering questions with useless points. Do they get compensation or a cut of the advertising profits that yahoo is making on them? No. They get honor points.

    Yahoo makes a mint on the viewership of the site and the answer people get a warm feeling... maybe it breaks even. I stopped answering questions after reading the hundredth obvious "I don't want to do my homework, so I'll ask it here" question.

    At least sites like ePinions.com rewards it's reviewers with a pittance of the revenue their reviews generate.

    • Re:Yahoo makes money off these people. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Colin Smith (2679) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:18PM (#19701069)

      And yet, Yahoo and other online corporations are (imho) exploiting these people by establishing "Answer" areas that reward people for answering questions with useless points. Do they get compensation or a cut of the advertising profits that yahoo is making on them? No. They get honor points.
      I'd mod you insightful if I had any points.

       

    • Re:Yahoo makes money off these people. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Khaed (544779) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:53PM (#19701257)
      And yet, Yahoo and other online corporations are (imho) exploiting these people by establishing "Answer" areas that reward people for answering questions with useless points. Do they get compensation or a cut of the advertising profits that yahoo is making on them? No. They get honor points.

      then don't go to Yahoo! Answers and offer your services. It's not like you can't tell they're making money. I personally don't think Yahoo deserves my time, and they don't deserve to make money off my knowledge, so I don't go there and answer questions. But some people apparently don't care -- hey, their choice.
      • The guy was having so much fun playing the victim and blaming the EVIL SLIMY CORPORATIONS and you had to spoil all that with your logic.
    • If you pay the "Answer people", then you generally also need to charge the "Question people".

      That's the model we use at paid Q&A site http://uclue.com/ [uclue.com]

      The downside is: we're not in a position to take on more "Answer people" until we get a higher volume of paid questions.
    • I consider myself an answer guy and also noticed the Yahoo! Answers!! thing. Since I was an answer guy enjoying answering stuff (I think because I then usually learn a lot in the process), I signed up there and started answering. Then I saw Yahoo only used us basically as human bots to run their service and drive revenues from ad profits and building an active service on us without giving us anything back but some abstract idea of "points" that I had absolutely no economic use for whatsoever. Then I stopped
      • About those stupid answers - they just might be on purpose for the person who obviously is not making an honest effort to find something out on their own.

        Frequently question/answer boards and forums light up with questions around finals/semester project/term paper times. It gets really old and it's unfair to those who actually do their own research instead of leeching off the good will of others to the detriment of their classmates.

        That is frequently why a lot of people will give bogus answers - to ca
    • How is that "exploting"? Well, any more than slashdot is "exploiting" you and me, since we are working to provide content and they are making money off us. And google is exploiting people who put up web pages. And, well...you could apply it to just about anything on the web where people participate without making money, while the site shows ads.

      They are providing a simple service, and charging for it (it does cost them money to program and host it, you know). They assume those using it, whether asking

    • Yahoo makes a mint on the viewership of the site and the answer people get a warm feeling... maybe it breaks even.
      Maybe? By definition, both sides come out ahead, or they wouldn't engage in the behavior. This is true of all non-coerced exchanges.

  • Karmic Value (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Original Replica (908688) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:18PM (#19701063) Journal
    "More generally, an answer person's apparent altruism provides an important explanatory challenge for models of collective action raising the possibility that people may be contributing to public goods for social goods like status "

    Well yes people like to be favorably for contributing positively. Is greater status wrong in the light of greater contribution? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/03/194722 7 [slashdot.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by marcello_dl (667940)
      Indeed but I usually help people out because i feel part of some communities. When I have problems I see somebody took the time to do howtos, so when I can help I do it myself.

      Who cares about the status. (did I mention my ***EXCELLENT*** karma on slashdot?)

    • Well yes people like to be favorably for contributing positively.

      There's an added benefit.

      http://lowery.tamu.edu/Teaming/Morgan1/sld023.htm [tamu.edu]

      The bottom 90% "teach others" is a fabulous aid to learning yourself. If you're interested in a subject, someone asks a question and you answer it after a bit of research, you're going to understand and remember the stuff well.

      • That's why I started, and I keep doing it for two reasons: you keep learning, and you maintain a reputation as the one who knows. The latter is not for ego-stroking purposes, it's for career maintenance purposes.
      • What, a neat little pyramid graphic with no apparent source and no backing data is a reliable source? Hey, I can use MS Paint too! Does that make me an expert on learning?
  • I'd be willing to bet that an effective universal micropayment system coupled with a decent reputation network would bring quite a few more of these people out of the (lurker) woodwork, especially the ones who otherwise would be more moved to do other things that actually pay the bills. Forums, Usenet groups, Wikis, etc., not only offer no payment, their feedback mechanisms are poor to non-existent. Even the best of the "super-contributors" can become burned out or discouraged. Even minimal payment would

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by anubi (640541)
      You have an interesting take on it.

      Its been my observation that "trying to be useful", regardless of its economic rewards, seems to be inbred in some of us. Maybe its some sort of genetic thing. I cite the entire concept of open-source as my evidence. Some of the best minds in the industry literally give themselves to the public - a "Mother Teresa" type thing, meant in the best of hopes of sharing in the hopes of providing public display of a concept that should work. The Bible is full of it.

      Payments

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jugalator (259273)
      Google did this with Google Answers, but it's retired. :-( I liked that idea far more than Yahoo! Answers (Google's quality obviously became waay higher) and wonder if there's a well used replacement?
    • I'd be willing to bet that an effective universal micropayment system coupled with a decent reputation network would bring quite a few more of these people out of the (lurker) woodwork

      The motivation for helping is not pay. It's not like work.

      The motivation is helping people, and having other people understand you are helpful.

      To draw in helper people, you need to understand how to make it more visible that people are helpful. When helper people see other helper people being recognized socailly, that makes

  • All you need to do (Score:4, Funny)

    by antifoidulus (807088) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:21PM (#19701083) Homepage Journal
    is to imagine a guy in his late 20s sitting in his parents basement sucking down Mountain Dew and inhaling cheetos.....

    Oh wait, thats not what you meant by "visualizing" them, is it?

  • Answer Guy speaks (Score:3, Funny)

    by pr0nbot (313417) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:24PM (#19701097)

    The findings may apply to other threaded discussions, maybe even here at Slashdot.


    They don't.
  • There's a few places where I'm an "answer guy", there's a few places where I'm not.

    It really has nothing to do with my personality, it has alot more to do with how the conversation area is setup.
    • Of course it has nothing to do with your personality. They are not trying to guess/predict personalities, but roles. Obviously, people have different social roles in different settings. The role of father (to take their first example in the introduction) is not the same as that same person's role as husband/lover/son/employee/whatever. And when he has the father role with a kid he is playing with, it doesn't say anything about his personality. He could be funny or boring, calm or irritable, selfish or not,

  • Long answer people (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Craig Ringer (302899) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:29PM (#19701137) Homepage Journal
    One doesn't have to write lots of brief replies to be useful.

    Some of the most important and helpful - if less frequent - responses are ones that are longer explanations of complex problems or concepts. Disregarding these from consideration is ... interesting.

  • Cheap replacement for traditional customer service (Score:4, Insightful)

    by throatmonster (147275) on Saturday June 30 2007, @02:45PM (#19701211)
    Message boards, email discussion lists, etc. are used by an awful lot of companies as a cheap substitute for providing real support for their products. Go to some company's Support web page: you have 3-4 basic options:

    1. Buy a $upport contract or pay-per-incidence
    2. Free email support! It only takes 3-5 business days to get an unhelpful reply.
    3. Visit our support forums. There are plenty of suckers out there who have already bought our product and figured it out, no thanks to us. Get your answer from them because, hey, they supply the knowledge for free and it only costs us a few $ to maintain the support forum!

    Of course if you really do have some sticky problem, or a valid complaint, well, the support forums are not an officially recognized means of communication to the company. Having said that, we'll still delete posts/threads and bar any whiners that make us look bad. So, back to #1 if you really do need technical support.

    I used to be an "answer" guy on a couple of mail lists. Not anymore. Why? because I've moved beyond the products I used to know a lot about. Now I ask the questions for new products I'm learning. That, and the fact that I've realized how much I've "given away" and not gotten anything back from. If I'm going to waste my time, it might as well be on slashdot.
    • Most implementations of support forums are immature.

      Some of the ideas I have seen for improving forum based support are basic... like paying your level 1 techs to hang out in the forums and elevate complex issues to L2 while resolving basic issues via the forum.

      Other ideas are more complex and some require more active user involvement. One of the most intriguing ideas I have seen is the extension of in-program help files through integrating support forum threads. There is a lot of overhead involved in cla
    • I thought that the newsgroups had pretty much deteriorated into porn images and a way to download all the spam and trojans you ever wanted...

      • I thought that the newsgroups had pretty much deteriorated into porn images and a way to download all the spam and trojans you ever wanted...

        No, that's the World Wide Web. Newsgroups are where technical stuff gets done. Very little spam, mostly on-topic posts, people who know what they're talking about, and no advertising.

        • Some Usenet groups have degraded into nothing but spam havens, and some have just died from lack of traffic. But there are a few that
          continue to be valuable sources of info. I personally find value in following comp.ai, comp.ai.genetic, comp.ai.neural-nets, comp.ai.philosophy, comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.prolog, comp.object and a few others. <shrug />

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by value_added (719364)
            Some Usenet groups have degraded into nothing but spam havens, and some have just died from lack of traffic. But there are a few that continue to be valuable sources of info. I personally find value in following comp.ai, comp.ai.genetic ...

            The entire comp. hierarchy is valuable. For those interested in programming, for example, comp.lang.c, comp.lang.perl.misc, comp.unix.shell are additional groups that alive and kicking and more valuable to just about anyone than most of the rubbish found on the web. Fo

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kadin2048 (468275) *
      Surprises me too.

      However, a few years ago there was someone who was talking about an "imminent Usenet renaissance." Not sure that's actually occurred but their theory was that most ISPs no longer make it easy to get on Usenet, so the users who actually participate in discussions there are usually fairly interested / experts. In other words, most of the AOL users / script kiddies / etc. are busy trolling PHPBB sites, because they're easier to get into than Usenet.

      Unfortunately because of the spam problems, t

      • Almost makes me want to fire up my newsreader and see if there's anything there to see. Almost.

        For me to go back to public Usenet, all the clients would have to have builtin reputation systems/collaborative filtering, compulsory signing of posts and some central registry of IDs. Killfiles and regexp filters just ain't up to it.

        Having said that. Usenet News absolutely rocks in a controlled setting like a private/corporate LAN. If you can make it part of the culture at all there's an order of magnitude improvement in communication over email for group discussions. For some reason, people seem to feel

    • I'm disappointed to see that the paper doesn't discuss evolution over time of the conversational roles. There were hardly even any reference papers from before about 1999, so it's unlikely that any of them used pre-1997 data, even though it's all there.

      Back in the early 1980s, I used to read all of Usenet. It's changed a bit since then :-) (It helped to have a gimongous laser printer in the basement that could do double-sided 4-up printing, though I think by the time we got that I'd stopped reading a f

      • And then there was the September that Never Ended, and there were still a few years of viability before the bandwidth expansion forced most ISPs to stop carrying it.

        Except what really killed Usenet was the world wide web. Note that the "Eternal september" which many consider to be the downfall as a discussion forum was also the same time Mosaic was released. Just removing the binary groups or install a binaries filter would have drastically reduced the bandwudth use. Most importantly, you could make web sit

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