research-article

Why users of yahoo!: answers do not answer questions

Authors:

Khai N. TruongAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 329 - 332

https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753376

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Posing a question to an online question and answer community does not guarantee a response. Significant prior work has explored and identified members' motivations for contributing to communities of collective action (e.g., Yahoo! Answers); in contrast it is not well understood why members choose to not answer a question they have already read. To explore this issue, we surveyed 135 active members of Yahoo! Answers. We show that top and regular contributors experience the same reasons to not answer a question: subject nature and composition of the question; perception of how the questioner will receive, interpret and react to their response; and a belief that their response will lose its meaning and get lost in the crowd if too many responses have already been given. Informed by our results, we discuss opportunities to improve the efficacy of the question and answer process, and to encourage greater contributions through improved design.

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Cited By

Dubois PMaftouni MBunt A(2022)Towards More Gender-Inclusive Q&AsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555676:CSCW2(1-23)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555567
Liu HLi MYang C(2021)Predicting Question Response Rate in Different Topics in ZhihuLISS 202010.1007/978-981-33-4359-7_21(291-303)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4359-7_21
Subramonyam HDrucker SAdar EBrewster SFitzpatrick GCox AKostakos V(2019)Affinity LensProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300628(1-13)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
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Index Terms

Why users of yahoo!: answers do not answer questions
1. Human-centered computing

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2010

2690 pages

ISBN:9781605589299

DOI:10.1145/1753326

General Chair:
Elizabeth Mynatt
Georgia Institute of Technology
,
Program Chairs:
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Vienna University of Technology
,
Scott Hudson
Carnegie Mellon University
,
Keith Edwards
Georgia Tech
,
Tom Rodden
University of Nottingham

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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CHI '10: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 10 - 15, 2010

Georgia, Atlanta, USA

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555567
Liu HLi MYang C(2021)Predicting Question Response Rate in Different Topics in ZhihuLISS 202010.1007/978-981-33-4359-7_21(291-303)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4359-7_21
Subramonyam HDrucker SAdar EBrewster SFitzpatrick GCox AKostakos V(2019)Affinity LensProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300628(1-13)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300628
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Frens JWalker EHsieh GLuckin RKlemmer SKoedinger K(2018)Supporting answerers with feedback in social Q&AProceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale10.1145/3231644.3231653(1-10)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2018
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