« Philosophy now, baby! | Home | I’d say it had to happen, but I don’t think it did »
On Answerbag, Everything2, and turning your brain into its own candy
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:57 am on 7/4/2003
So my brother’s old boss, a very cool guy named Joel, sends this email today. He’s announcing his new web application. Now, that’s one thing right there, that someone can just kind of make a web application and email his friends to tell them about it, like he just put up a page about his cats. My how the world has changed, blah blah et cetera.
Here’s the app: Answerbag, “a universal, user-generated set of frequently-asked questions” and “a compilation of human knowledge and experience.”
I’ve been poking around a little and even answering some starting questions. I don’t know much about Epinions firsthand, but it seems as if this may be a bounce off of Epinions, with some Everything2 and a little Open Directory Project thrown in to keep it saucy.
Answerbag sorts all questions into categories, which may or may not be (and maybe should be) derived from the ODP like Google’s. Under the top-level Business heading, for example, you have one question as of this writing – “Which is the best payroll processing service? ADP? Easypay? Others?” – and a few subcategories. Once you drill down to a question, you can see all the attempted answers, who made the answer, and how the answer has been rated by other users. You can also rate it yourself. Clicking on an answerer’s user name yields (here’s where it gets good) the average rating of all their answers.
The voting is the most direct connection with Everything2.com. As an inveterate noder myself, I already understand the thrill of putting something you know into a database where other people will vote on it. Or, rather, I am totally mystified by the thrill, but I feel it despite myself. Systems like the voting systems on E2 and Answerbag make the exercise of showing off how damned smart you are, always a favorite pastime of geeks and nerds, into something even more than it’s been for the Internet’s past history. It somehow solidifies online social approbation in a way that scarily electrifies it. Even if you’re not getting the votes, going for them with little bite-sized pieces of your brain can become entertainment in itself. It becomes addicting. For some people, it nearly becomes… twitch.
Gaming the system of human knowledge in this way can lead to strange results. For instance, political debates might be selected against in Answerbag: if a highly polarized debate delivers an average-ratings hit for those on both sides, users will be incentivized to stay out of such monkey knife fights. But maybe it won’t go that way. And what about cults of personality, both positive and negative? What about the sponginess of categories? E2 has both of these latter problems in spades, but a lot can be blamed on E2′s lack of a hard line on what it’s there for.
What I love most about Answerbag so far is its clarity and simplicity. The challenge will be to hang on to that as people dork out on it and its functionality inevitably grows. (My geek brain is already blazing: of course, you’ll want RSS feeds in there, and it really gets wild when you add TrackBack…) If it can manage that, it’ll lead a long, healthy life, and maybe become serious competition for E2 and other putative expertise-farms. But Joel, we’ve got to do something with that front page. It looks too much like one of these things you get when you typo.