I've identified two problems, but thinking about it and observing a bit might turn up more.
The main one I was alluding to above is like this. Assuming that you're involved for the money, rather than just the sheer joy of answering questions:
* Gaining high status is immensely valuable, as it greatly increases your payoffs.
* You jeopardize that status by answering any questions to which you're not very confident of your answer.
* So it's not worth risking answering non-payoff questions (which is almost all of the questions on the site) unless you're absolutely certain of your answer.
* So you don't take part in the overwhelming majority of non-payoff questions.
* The purpose of non-payoff questions (as far as the site's concerned) is that users pose them to each other for fun and practice, plus they serve as something to show prospective question-payers (customers) regarding the collective wisdom of the site, plus they show the site as busy and thriving. So the behaviour of skilled users as above undercuts all of these. Non-skilled or "fun" users may still answer everything in sight and chuckle when they get them wrong, but they're not what you want to be showing to your customers.
So for example I fairly quickly got my status up to Scholar in every field. I answer every payoff question that comes up, regardless of my confidence in my answer. If I get enough wrong that I lose my status in that field, then I pick a few non-payoff ones to answer to push me back over the line: then I go back to ignoring the non-payoff ones again.
This would all be mitigated if there were more payoff questions compared with non-payoff, but that won't happen unless customers can view the site with confidence, which... vicious circle.
The other problem is the one secondhandrick said: that in payoff questions where I have no idea of the answer, and where I don't think other people will really either, I guess one that's away from the hump of guesses. Assuming other people do this too, the distribution that the customer gets reported back is artificially flattened.
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Date: 2008-05-16 08:33 am (UTC)The main one I was alluding to above is like this. Assuming that you're involved for the money, rather than just the sheer joy of answering questions:
* Gaining high status is immensely valuable, as it greatly increases your payoffs.
* You jeopardize that status by answering any questions to which you're not very confident of your answer.
* So it's not worth risking answering non-payoff questions (which is almost all of the questions on the site) unless you're absolutely certain of your answer.
* So you don't take part in the overwhelming majority of non-payoff questions.
* The purpose of non-payoff questions (as far as the site's concerned) is that users pose them to each other for fun and practice, plus they serve as something to show prospective question-payers (customers) regarding the collective wisdom of the site, plus they show the site as busy and thriving. So the behaviour of skilled users as above undercuts all of these. Non-skilled or "fun" users may still answer everything in sight and chuckle when they get them wrong, but they're not what you want to be showing to your customers.
So for example I fairly quickly got my status up to Scholar in every field. I answer every payoff question that comes up, regardless of my confidence in my answer. If I get enough wrong that I lose my status in that field, then I pick a few non-payoff ones to answer to push me back over the line: then I go back to ignoring the non-payoff ones again.
This would all be mitigated if there were more payoff questions compared with non-payoff, but that won't happen unless customers can view the site with confidence, which... vicious circle.
The other problem is the one