Why i almost left yahoo answers

The: 02/03/2011 - AT: 0:19

When i started at Yahoo Answers, i was mostly still planning what to make out of Brugbart, and i didn't have much original content, and the content i had, didn't even meet my own quality guidelines.

It was frustrating, because i was still unsure where i wanted to take things. Today I'm pretty confident, because i have a solid platform, that i developed on my own.

I have reached a point, where i feel its more or less a waste of time, to obsess about places like Yahoo Answers. Because why post something on YA, when i could spend the same time improving my own content, and get even more visitors from search engines?

Its no secret that i mostly see places like yahoo answers, as a powerful tool in getting noticed, getting more traffic, etc. After all, its nearly inevitable if you participate enough. The problem is you have to participate a lot to get noticed.

When the above didn't work well for me, i almost decided to leave YA. But ended up staying for other reasons, which i won't mention in this blog post.

YA the sadness

It takes a lot of effort to get noticed on YA, it isn't enough to simply post good answers, and have a high best answer percentage. You have to post thousands of answers.

As a user i quickly became frustrated with the problems on YA. Mostly other users who just recklessly posted the same answers over and over again. These users do not seem to care whether or not the information that they post is true, and often seem to follow you around, and deliberately post their answers just to annoy you.

Another annoyance with YA, is that the "Top Answerers" list in categories, never get rotated. Its practically dominated by reckless spammers, often having little knowledge about the stuff that they post about. This of cause goes with a few exceptions. But the main problem with this, currently, is that its very hard for new users to gain some recognition this way, because it would require them to post thousands of answers.

Finally it can be hard to post code on answers, since they don't use code boxes.

Comments: [1]

Author: BlueBoden

Poster: Akram

Date: 19/03/2011 - 9:59

Interesting post. I'm always trying to find new sources of traffic for my websites (isn't everyone?)- but really only in the natural course of doing what I do anyway - I dont try to force it and it is a pity if YA is dominated by an intention to get recognized rather than to answer a question on close to your heart topic though we are all probably guilty of doing the former to some degree, I suppose.