JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
©
2006
Why
Are You Working for Free?: Asking for Yahoo! Answers
Last week, Yahoo! Answers—that crapola sham of an answer-person
site—was pulling its latest publicity stunt by having Stephen Hawking ask a
nonsense question on the site, to which thousands of users immediately barfed
out nonsense answers.
Simultaneously, I was engaged in
about 20 hours worth of e-mail warfare with Yahoo! and one of its users to stop
Yahoo! Answers from plagiarizing four of my own answer-man columns—actual
questions with actual answers.
I inhabit a world of dark irony, but
this was a bit much even for me. Especially considering I just wrote a column
condemning Yahoo! Answers as a fount of regurgitated hyperlinks and non
sequiturs, not answers, and describing my own previous experience of being
plagiarized by one of these answer-serfs.1
Yahoo! Answers is so appropriately
named, because it has so much to answer for. It combines the worst ingredients
of blogs, wikis, MySpace and reality TV into a vile stew, then dares to label
it as some sort of useful, yummy product. It operates as grotesque
cyber-feudalism, convincing thousands of unpaid schlubs to serf the ’Net and
fill up the site with answers, giving Yahoo! terabytes of free content and
astronomical demographic and site-traffic stats.
Actually, they’re technically not
unpaid; there might some monastic brand of dignity in that. No, the serfs can
actually earn points for “good” answers. And what is the point of these
points?
“While you can’t use points to buy
or redeem anything, they do allow everyone to recognize how active and helpful
you’ve been. (And they give you another excuse to brag to your friends.),”
explains the Yahoo! Answers Web site.
Wow! Sounds great! And since Yahoo!
thinks it’s so great, I assume they’ll start letting all their advertisers pay
them in points. I hereby offer Yahoo! 1 million points in exchange for lifetime
banner ads for this column. Yahoo!, think of how helpful you would feel!
Ah, why be stingy? Make it 10
quadrillion points! Hello? Anybody there?
Me, I can’t eat points. But Yahoo!’s
free labor apparently thrives on them. And in this case, you get what you pay
for—“answers” that are unfailingly lazy and inane, at best struggling toward
some sort of well-intentioned helpfulness, at worst plagued by illiterate
trolls.
I try to hate the serfdom, not the
serf. And frankly, if Yahoo! Answers was pitched as the MySpace-like community
of gossipers and would-be gurus that it is, I wouldn’t whine. The problem is
that Yahoo! advertises itself as an actual, pseudo-intellectual service, and
that I cannot abide. It is gutting the valuable institution of the answer-man
column specifically, and making a mockery of critical thinking in general.
As I described in my previous
column, Yahoo! recently placed some of its “top” answerers inside a giant fake
brain in
Yahoo! Answers isn’t about making
people smarter. It’s about selling them the aesthetic symbolism of being smart.
For that alone, it richly deserves to go straight to hell.
A let’s-fake-being-smart system
predicated on literally giving bragging points to the attention-starved
inevitably leads to plagiarism. That is, of course, where I come in.
In a roughly two-week period, four
of my old “Stupid
Question” answer-man columns were used verbatim (at most missing a couple
of sentences) as Yahoo! Answers answers, with no other content. A link to the
original columns was provided at the end as a “source(s),” with no indication I
had actually written the entire answer—indeed, my name and the column’s title
didn’t appear at all.
At least three of these plagiarisms
were undertaken by the same user; the fourth showed the same MO but was
attributed to an anonymous “Answerer 3.” For some reason, these all showed up
in search engines under the Yahoo! India banner, though it turned out the same
content was available on the main US Yahoo portal, and likely others.
A blistering letter to the user took
care of the three attributed plagiarisms, which is to say the user apparently
immediately deleted the answers him/herself. The fourth question, then, was
between me and Yahoo! Here’s how Yahoo! really answers.
First, Yahoo!’s “Copyright Agent”
told me that Yahoo! India is a completely distinct company I would need to
contact directly. This Al-Qaeda sleeper cell vision of Yahoo! corporate
structure is romantic, but incorrect; as I discovered, all Yahoo! Answers
content is apparently the same under all international Yahoo! flags.
Then Yahoo! told me my official
“Notice of Infringement” was incomplete. Of course, it wasn’t, and in any case
constituted more than enough notification to sue them back to the Punch-Card
Age for continuing to make money off my content without permission.
So then I resubmitted an even
wordier complaint, and my content was finally removed—even from that distant
realm of Yahoo! India. (Didn’t
Each “Stupid Question” was something
I spent dozens of hours independently researching, refusing to simply repeat
the conventional wisdom even on commonplace questions. Seeing someone use them
to essentially impersonate me as an answer-man pisses me off for all the
obvious reasons, but even more as an example of especially vile irony. I
intended to dig out truth and encourage curiosity; instead, I’ve become just
another link to mindlessly rip off and puke up.
Of course, I’m flattered by answer
sites that have properly quoted and cited my material. But they’re usually
materially no better—another zombie answer, a clattering, walking skeleton of
links without a brain. In the case of my four plagiarized columns, they weren’t
merely the best answers on the site (naturally—goes without saying), they were
the only ones with any utility at all, or more than a couple of sentence
fragments. I refer to link-farming, but truth is, most of Yahoo!’s answers are
brain-dead one-liners whose authors didn’t even bother to capitalize the first
word. Even a link was too taxing for them. (It is, of course, a well-known
irony that plagiarism actually is relatively time-consuming work.)
But what really kills me about this
particular situation is the time it took: five “Notices of Infringement,” three
other letters, and more hours per day than Lars Ulrich devoted to Napster. I
had another column I wanted to research and write; I wound up fighting a
fundamentally negative battle instead. Plagiarism didn’t just rob my past, it
stole from my future. Yahoo! Answers didn’t just rip off my answers, it kept me
from discovering new ones.
It’s yet another facet of what’s so
infuriating about trying to write in this culture. There’s always another idiot
(sometimes including oneself) who has to be placated, rebuked—dealt with, one way or another—before
you can even begin to delve into the good stuff. That’s a big reason I fled
poetry for journalism; if I flee journalism—well, I won’t be responsible for my
actions. There’s a hell of a lot of rind to peel off before you can get to the
fruit. I intended this forum to be all fruit, all the time (yes, in every sense
of the word). Instead, I don’t even get a bite of it for at least another week,
and spend my time here picking out another vile consumer-culture parasite from
its core.
I try to be fair to my mortal
enemies, or at least give them enough rope. If Yahoo! Answers is so
Bono-asking-questions, people-in-giant-brain-answering, fan-fucking-tastic,
then surely it can answer for itself. I decided to ask the site four questions
about itself—a kind of interview with the hive mind. I posted them yesterday;
the answers are, of course, those received up to this moment.
My first question was the most
pressing, and the most obvious: “Why are you all working for a giant
international corporation for free?”
Here are the answers in their
entirety, including original spelling and punctuation:
free: yahoo
pay: google
who has more
celebrity status? yahoo thats who..i go with free.
who makes more
profit? yahoo thats who.” (by “Ramo!©” [copyright symbol is part of their user
name])
First, this gives us an excellent
flavor of Yahoo! Answers’ answers: something akin to an aged Commodore 64
programmed to generate koans by a monk who then spilled Coke all over the
motherboard.
Second, the answers appear to depict
the sad-sack mentality of slaving for someone in what amounts to a grotesquely
co-dependent relationship. We have, respectively, apparent denial; tautological
prestige; and a somewhat indecipherable sense of superiority over Google
Answers, where questioners pay a nominal fee to the answerers (with results
little better than the best of Yahoo! Answers, I might add). These people need
a hug, not elevation to sage status.
Naturally, I also had some
passive-aggression to get out, hence: “What is the best legal remedy for answers
that plagiarize material?”
“Jeffro5150” provided an answer that
probably has a “Copyright Agent” chewing his necktie. Verbatim: “if you only
want an answer to a question, it’s not plagiarism, it’s an answer. If you are
asking for something in a report, and the report does’nt mention it’s sources
and in someone elses words, that is plagiarism.”
Wrong where it’s intelligible, and
wholly off-topic…Jeffro, you really should start plagiarizing.
However, also answering this
question was “EmilyRose,” one of the more literate lights of Yahoo! Answers.
Her (?) research principles don’t pass my muster, and hopefully not those of
any decent freshman college course; but she’s a relative intellectual giant of
Yahoo! Answers, and more importantly makes stabs at the philosophy of the whole
thing.
Her answer about plagiarism was
actually useful, thoughtful and indeed revealing. Besides noting that civil
suits are always an option, she remarked: “I’ve been advocating on the Answers
Forum for quite some time that the Answers Team should take action to prevent
plagiarism (such as automatically comparing text to various sources, or at
least actually responding to abuse reports on plagiarized answers), but they’ve
yet to do anything about it.”
She also encouraged making more
complaints to Yahoo! Chew that tie, Copyright Agent!
“EmilyRose” bolsters my general
feeling that the answerers are not the real problem. It’s the system designed
to exploit them.
Of course, that is not an
endorsement of them as answer-people. To burst the brain-shaped bubble,
question-answering is not for everybody, nor even for most people. I like
democracy and all, but it’s patently obvious that most people have no idea how
to think in a critical or even disciplined fashion (and even more obvious that
Yahoo! Answers doesn’t encourage them to). Not everybody should be doing
Olympic pole-vaulting, either. (Though Yahoo! Pole-Vaulting would not surprise
me in the least.)
Yahoo! Answers clearly finds my
answers to be useful. That’s because they were created under very un-Yahoo!
principles like independent research (including direct interviews and
consultation of old, non-electronic sources).
And utterly unlike Yahoo! Answers, I
considered my research incomplete if I didn’t consult at least 10 references of
whatever kind. This was arbitrary, and certainly not all of them were of equal
significance. But I stuck to that number for two reasons: first, to make sure I
confirmed and compared sources as much as possible; and second, to increase my
chances of finding an unusual fact that might challenge my hypothesis or add to
it an unexpected way. In short, I sought problems and complexities, not the pat
answer. (And, because I questioned everything, I usually needed a lot of
sources anyway.) On many questions, it was my standard practice to contact at
least 10 expert human sources directly, whether they ever answered or not,
besides all the other source materials I might use.3
What is the discipline of Yahoo!
Answerers? My final two questions explored that topic. “How many references, on
average, should an answer to an objective question have to be considered
reliable?” I asked. And also: “Have you ever based an answer on material that
is not on the Internet?”4
On the number-of-references
question, most people seemed to suss out that I was talking about setting an
arbitrary standard. But they could not think of any utility in doing so.
“Gethsemenerose,” who has apparently
mastered the tautology, responded, “that would depend on the reliability of the
references.” (If it’s unreliable, is it a reference?)
The quintessential answer, from
“lamagnificagamesa”: “Well…on yahoo answers the need for reference is not that
much so long as it sounds sane it should be fine. On papers and other
stuff…five is good.” [Ellipses in the original.]
“EmilyRose,” our philosophical
answerer, noted pointedly that she was giving no references for this answer,
because it’s merely opinion. She said some answers are so obvious or such
common knowledge, she merely retrieves them from her own brain without
citation. Meanwhile, on the “other extreme,” she has gone so far as citing
three to four scientific journal articles.
I consider such an extreme to be
warm-up jumping jacks. But before I get lost in more physical/mental exercise
analogies, I should note that “EmilyRose” gave a concrete example of fairly
subtle distinction. She noted that a question about the names of all the
planets has an answer so well-known, she wouldn’t need to look it up and thus
would cite no source (indeed, an exterior source “would simply be
superfluous”). But a question about the “temporary name of the recently
discovered 10th planet,” a more unusual topic, would need cited
references—though a single citation to NASA would probably do it, she said.
And if you were talking about
disease research, “you’d better give more than one source”; she suggests that
“one or two review articles from reliable sources might be better than five or
six primary research articles.”
I like that “EmilyRose” has thought about
these things more abstractly. However, there are obvious severe flaws and
fallacies remaining. What if, in drawing on your own memory, you’re wrong, or
have outdated information? And what about people who already know things about
tenth planets and disease research—do they get to not consult sources?
Indeed, “EmilyRose” apparently
doesn’t know there’s controversy over the existence of a tenth planet and the
definition of “planet” itself—the sort of things that consulting numerous
sources would reveal. The idea of consulting only NASA on a space-oriented
question amounts to argument from authority, a classic logical error.
Her example also has a built-in
conflict. If you merely rattle off the names of nine planets without mentioning
the situation of a possible tenth planet, you haven’t really answered the
question.
And one or two abstracts are better
than five or six primary sources?! Maybe if you don’t really want an answer,
are mentally incapable of digesting the material and/or hate the scientific
method. People who want abstracts are called “askers,” not “answerers.”
And “EmilyRose” was my best
answerer.
All three of the answers demonstrate
a general bias toward simply locating and repeating conventional wisdom, and
even pegging the number of sources consulted to a preconceived notion of the
simplicity or complexity of the answer. It’s bad science, which is to say, bad
answers.
Even more striking is the implicit
idea that you should think of the answer and then go find sources that give it
a sheen of authority—if that’s even deemed necessary. Yahoo! Answers is all
about the facade of intellectuality; it isn’t surprising its users follow suit.
My question about using non-Internet
references seemed to hit a nerve, perhaps because it allowed answerers to
discuss their favorite source: themselves. It was the most-answered question.5
“Irish1952” intrigued me right off
the bat: “Most of my answers don’t come from the Internet, though I’m sure they
would be on it somewhere.” Was my link-farming hypothesis dead? Nope. It turns
out that Irish pretty much answers only opinion or unanswerable questions. “Can
you eat bacon with your hands?” is one Irish recently tackled.
That’s pretty popular, since as
aforementioned, much of Yahoo! Answers is just a crypto-Usenet or MySpace, a
gossip forum masquerading as an answer-man site, while doing pointless harm to
the concept.
“yes I have cause some things are
from my personal experience,” responded “queendjbam.”
“Jeffro5150” was back, getting
philosophical: “If someone asks a dumb question, you give a dumb answer or go
to the next best thing…my brain! The internet is NOT smart. It only knows what
PEOPLE tell it.” You learn something new every day, don’t you?
“If I have something in notes, that
I feel is appropriate to answer with, I do,” answered “Rachel O,” an apparent
model of discretion.
“EmilyRose” was here yet again: “I
give answers based on personal experience, and things I’ve learned in various
classes all the time, and a couple of times I’ve even looked something up in a
textbook before posting an answer.” I’ve done that a couple of thousand times,
so don’t worry about hurting yourself, Emily.
And then along came “tw2251stst”: “I
base my answers on what I know, If I do not know I do not answer.If I really
need to know something I don’t ask it on Yahoo questions. I search the
Internet.”
Finally—my Yahoo! answer.
1
In August 2006, I was again plagiarized by a Yahoo! Answers serf. The
plagiarized answer was voted the best answer by the question-asker, who added,
“Thanks for taking the time to BREAK IT DOWN!” Of course, the serf only took
the time to COPY IT DOWN. But allow me be the first, and only, to say, you’re
welcome. (Yahoo! Inc. did remove the plagiarism after notification.) Meanwhile,
as it appears that this site is destined to be plagiarized regularly by Yahoo!
Answers—and probably keep lawyers in my future employ rabidly busy—I will
maintain a simple, running box score here. Times this site has been plagiarized
by Yahoo! Answers: 13. Times the plagiarism was voted “best answer”: 6.
Plagiarisms in August and November 2007 resulted in the
plagiarizer being praised as “knowledgeable.”
2
Such a trip is one thing points can earn you indirectly. For those who might
care to defend the system on those grounds, let’s break it down. You could
spend a weekend in New York, traveling from anywhere in the mainland US, for
about 700 or 800 bucks of your hard-earned money, and zero expenditure of
dignity. Or you could answer thousands of questions for Yahoo! for free, then
get shipped to
3 Readers of “Stupid Question” will note that
the columns never (or rarely) listed that many sources. That’s still a point of
chagrin for me. Most of them were written under an editorial limit of 500
words, meaning citations had to be pared down to the necessities. (Many would
have consumed another 500 words otherwise.) I kept a bibliography for each
column for years, however, though I believe I was only asked about sources
twice. Perhaps foreshadowing Yahoo! Answers, readers didn’t seem to care about
sources as much as I did. The “John the Obscure” columns have no such restrictions,
and I try to cite everything/everyone significant, which readers will note
seems to amount to 10 to 30 sources for a research-oriented column.
4 Actually, I misspelled it “based on answer.”
Answerer “mJc” should be credited with noting my I-already-know-the-answer-and-it-ain’t-good
tone by responding sardonically, “Yes. And I manage to use correct grammar
too.” Touché. Well, except that it was a misspelling, not bad grammar, and good
grammar includes putting a comma before “too.” Wiseass.
5 A key feature of Yahoo! Answers is its
deployment of flattery, (over-)elevating the importance of the average person’s
experience and opinions. Interestingly, self-deprecating remarks about not
being very smart are very common on Yahoo! Answers; and yet, also very common
are braggadocio remarks about one’s own opinions. The point system slyly
creates a relativistic version of truth, where what is most popular—rather than
most correct—is the most valuable, and any lazy dope with a search engine is
capable of garnering the reputation of an expert. The idea seems to be that any
doubts about one’s own intelligence will readily succumb to the craving for
attention. It’s interesting to note this also describes the psychology of
infamous plagiarists. Plagiarism is an action, but it begins as a mindset—and
Yahoo! Answers thinks like a plagiarist. But on most days it just acts like a
bad journalist or a deranged diarist.
You wouldn’t know it from the way I write, but
question-answering (in true truth-seeking terms) requires intellectual
humility; Yahoo! Answers operates with exactly opposite physics, by ego
inflation. I worked by Socratic
ignorance; it works by technocratic arrogance.
I refer to ego inflation as the overall mechanism of the
site. It is not always so boosting in individual cases. In one of her answers
to my questions, “EmilyRose” described once providing an answer that used
journal articles as sources, only to see another answer that had no sources at
all be voted the “best.” Live by instant guru-ism, die by instant guru-ism.
As a final note on the subject of truth, a complaint I
frequently heard about “Stupid Question” (primarily from my editor, not from my
readers) was that I sometimes couldn’t provide a definitive, or at least tidy,
answer. Unfortunately, reality can be that way. I won’t go into an
epistemological defense here; the interesting point is that Yahoo! Answers has
since become the paragon of providing the simple answers. There is something to
be said for pragmatism and utilitarianism. Yahoo!’s version is certainly the
popular one. But then, mine’s the plagiarized one.
A
significant source not cited in the text or footnotes is “Hawking turns to
Yahoo for answers to his big question” by Ian Sample, The Guardian,