Everyone has a story about their first WOW moment on the “Internet”. Mine was back in 1994, when I logged in on a green VAX terminal, and onto Usenet, the precursor to online forums. I still remember the wonder and excitement that there were “real people” online, complete strangers with funny handle names, sharing tips and ideas on everything from the latest Melrose Place episode, to figuring out URL encoding Chinese characters.
The common lore about the demise of Usenet was that AOL’s $19.99/month Internet access created an unwashed wave of “newbies” that simply overwhelmed what was until then a pretty small group of “experts” (yes, it includes Melrose Place experts!) who freely contributed knowledge to strangers. It was a tragedy of the commons example of too many grazers, not enough grass. And since then, while the notion of the Internet as a world wide forum for tapping into people’s knowledge is still very powerful, there has always been this tension between too much demand versus too little supply of FREE answers to people’s questions.
The price mechanism doesn’t work to balance supply and demand because there is no marginal cost to sharing answers on the Internet. So things like Usenet, Message Boards, Groups, Clubs, Forums, and the latest example of user-generated sharing of knowledge, Wikipedia, have all relied on different variants of community rules and social mores to strike a balance between the askers and the answerers. Many rely on the “culture of generosity” coined by Caterina Fake (Flickr) and an exclusivity that made the solution scalable. So how can we recreate the old Usenet, but this time accommodating the everyday user?
Yahoo! Answers tries to solve the problem by increasing the supply of answers without resorting to price. Call it supply-side answeronomics, it changes the dynamics of the equation by lowering the barrier to entry for users to answer each other’s questions. Instead of relying on a few experts, Yahoo! Answers empowers each user to become a source of knowledge.
Its built on two premises:
1) the wisdom of crowds notion that even if the average user is not as knowledgeable as one expert, with enough diverse opinions and ideas, you eventually get a pretty good answer in the end, and
2) the law of large numbers that says if you have a large enough sample size, you can increase the probability you’ll find the one person in the world who has the experience or knowledge that you are looking for on Yahoo! Answers.
Both these notions rely on Yahoo!’s unique asset, the large registered user base, who already participate in user forums in many different contexts like Yahoo! Groups and User Reviews. And the key again, is that because people are simply sharing what they already know or have experienced, and the cost of sharing that information is only the time it takes to share it. We think that many of the life’s most complex and difficult questions don’t actually need a true expert or a Ph.D. to answer.
