Are the questions on Askville becoming nonsense like the ones on Yahoo answers?
There are quite a few different types of members here in Askville, there are those who want serious knowledge and opinions and nothing else, those who want a place to socialize with others, have fun and nothing else, those who just ask a question, get an answer and never come back until another answer is needed, those who are naturally competitive, have the free time and want to scores points which might be valuable, those who just want to be helpful once a while……. You name it. The fundamental problem with Askville, my personal opinions, is not really in the questions. It is in the answers instead. I am a mix of all styles. I like to help, like to socialize and like to accumulate points, but I have only limited time. My main areas are in electronics and cars, serious enough topics, but I never mind silly but fun questions. Sadly, for the last a few months I have noticed that the quality of answers have gone down. So many times I answered a question in electionics or cars, and foun
I, like many here, started out on Yahoo Answers. It was fun and interesting initially there, but after awhile it was just too much. And it wasn’t necessarily the type of questions asked so much as the type of people that were asking. Too many rude, immature, and totally irrelevant answers, and quite often inappropriate and rude questions. In the areas I concentrated in, mostly art, it wasn’t so bad. But in many of the other categories it was a total mess. I don’t see that here. But maybe I am just more laid-back than others. We have a wide variety of questions asked here, from customer service type ones to the “where to find” to “who is god” to “how do I take care of my kid” “Why Bush should die”, etc. And yes, there are the fun ones, ones some might find silly. But the premise behind Askville is not just as a search engine, but as a community of people sharing information AND socializing with each other! They want us to chat, to have fun, AND ask serious questions, too–which I think
After Amazon posted a link in their website and referred their customers to Askville for customer service type questions it seems that we have a whole lot of questions asked by newbies who are just looking for X. That is one factor that reduces the quality of questions here on Askville. About your other point, I should say that there are different types of questions. Some of them are funny questions, some need very simple answers and some others need well thought out answers. It is hard to find them because it seems that the number of questions is growing. When I scanned questions from the front page I used to get 120 pages of questions at most. Now we get around 200 pages of them!! it shows that the number of questions has been increased significantly. About your comparison of this place with Yahoo! Answers I don’t think it is a good comparison. This place still is far better than Yahoo! Answers. Those Yahoo! type questions are asked here much less than there! The community here seems
