Success and Greed In the New Economy Of Web Point Payouts
The question, "Why is the sky blue?" has been asked 889 times on Yahoo Answers, a Q&A site run by Yahoo. "What is your favorite movie?" has been posed 2,203 times. Do users of the free service retain a childlike sense of wonder about the world around them or possess an abiding interest in the film taste of others?
Maybe. It's more likely, though, that they are simply exploiting loopholes and inefficiencies in the "points economy" Yahoo -- in what is becoming a common practice -- has set up to keep the site lively.
A points economy is like a regular economy, except the currency is points, not currency. Even though you can't exchange these points for real-world goods and services, people will still spend enormous amounts of time accumulating them just to beat others in a list of top point-getters, or simply to compete with themselves.
Web sites are taking advantage of this aspect of human psychology and setting up point systems to draw in users to help create "content" for them.
If you're a member of Answers -- total users are in the millions -- you can gain points asking questions, answering questions, and rating the questions and answers of others. The points are good for nothing, save allowing you to move up through the seven levels in the Answerers hierarchy. With each new level, you gain more powers on the site, such as the ability to ask and answer more questions, and thus get more points.
In the real world, incentives can have unintended consequences. Tie executive salary to stock price and you find -- surprise, surprise -- that some of them start cooking the books to get shares up.
Nothing felonious like that happens with the points handed out on Yahoo Answers. But people there and elsewhere try to game the system in other ways.
When Yahoo Answers was launched in December, Answerers were given points for asking a question. After all, what better way to populate the site with interesting questions? The result, though, was a deluge of easy questions, like those involving the color of the sky.
You could also get two points for answering a question, a good thing since the whole premise of the site is to bring askers and answerers together.
But that caused a run of answers along the lines of, "I don't know," or "That's a good question," or even, and more cynically, "Thanks for the two points." The software monitoring things would see that an "answer" had been posted. It didn't have the smarts to understand how bogus the answer really was.
Another way to get points was to help decide which of the several answers to a question was the best answer, which rates the answer higher and gives even more points to the person who answered it. Kevin Cole, a top-rated answerer, said that led to the practice of "speed voting," in which answerers zoomed through the questions as quickly as possible, not bothering to carefully read the answers but simply selecting the first one that came up.
So why did people bother? One reason is that Yahoo Answers posts lists of the answerers with the most points. The main list, the Leader Board, ranks the site's top Answerers; the current champion, a woman who goes by the handle of "Jane Furrows -- Chavez fan," has more than 118,000 points. But there are also tallies of top point-collectors in each of Answers' subject areas, such as computing or health.
Yumio Saneyoshi, Yahoo's product director for Answers, said his team figured from the very beginning that some users would be using the point system in a way that would make the quality of the site suffer. And so Yahoo has continually fine-tuned the point-award process. For example, it no longer gives out points for asking questions; in fact, now to ask a question, you need to give up points.
Even more-technical steps are being taken. For example, some of the technologies Yahoo uses to find spam emails is being employed to ferret out useless, point-grabbing answers. More adjustments can be expected in future weeks and months, said Mr. Saneyoshi.
Yahoo Answers is by no means the only Web site to have to deal with the vagaries of users in the move to increasing reliance on "user-generated content." Wikipedia, for instance, gives its editors points for making edits to entries. But one result of that is said to be editors making potentially unnecessary minor changes to articles to drive their ratings.
Of course, people participate in Answers for other, more legitimate, reasons, including a simple desire to help people out. I've become something of a fan of the service and have gotten numerous Excel tips from it. (Google's for-pay version, Google Answers, is also worth a look, as it tends to be useful for questions involving serious amounts of research for which you don't mind paying someone.)
Jon Kleinberg, a Cornell University researcher, said the issues involving online reputations and what people will do to advance them are at the intersection of computing science and psychology, and is a hot area for Web watchers.
Online games, with their ranking of top players, are the best-known of all the points economies. With other sites now doing the same thing, let's hope users don't bring smash-mouth-style game talk with them.
“点数经济”中的成功与贪欲
在雅虎公司(Yahoo Inc.)的问答网站Yahoo Answers，“天空为什么是蓝色？”被问了889遍，“你最喜欢的电影是什么？”出现了2,203次。这项免费服务的用户们真的像小孩子一样对世界充满著好奇心？那些人真有不停地探索他人电影口味的癖好？
也许吧。不过他们更有可能只是在利用“点数经济”的漏洞。雅虎引入“点数经济”本是为了提高其网站的人气，不过却发现自己正越来越多地受到这种“戏弄”。
除了流通的不是货币而是点数外，点数经济与正常经济别无二致。尽管你无法用这些点数在现实世界中换到任何商品或服务，但却仍然有很多人乐此不疲，花大量的时间累积点数，仅仅是为了在排行榜上拔得头筹，或者只是为了和自己较力。
而网站恰好抓住了人类的这种心理，它们设计点击系统，让用户为网站创造“内容”。
成为Answers的用户后──目前其用户总量已达到数百万──你就可以通过问问题、答问题、评价问题或者评价答案来获取点数。当然，这些点数除了可以让你在回答者的7个等级中不断升级外别无他用。每每登上一个新的级别，你的能力也随之大长，比如你又可以问更多问题，然后得更多的点数了。
在现实世界中，很多刺激措施都会产生意想不到的结果。比如将管理人士的薪金与股价挂钩，你会意外地发现，很多管理人士竟然开始通过作假帐来推高股价。
当然，Yahoo Answers在发放点数时可能不会有这么丑陋的事情发生。不过在这里，一些人开始用其他方式做手脚。
雅虎在去年12月推出Yahoo Answers时，提问者可以通过问问题获取点数。毕竟，有什么更好的方式能比登一些有趣的问题更能吸引眼球呢？但是，结果却是整个网站被类似“天空是什么颜色的”这类幼稚问题所淹没。
回答问题时你还可以得到两个点。既然网站的宗旨就是把提问者和回答者连在一起，这也不是坏事。
不过你难免会看到一长串的“我不知道”或者“是个好问题”之类的答案，更搞笑的是，有人竟然回答说“谢谢你送我两个点”。软件监控器之类的东西可以看到“答案”被送出，至于说答案是什么，它们还没有聪明到这种程度。
另一个获取点数的方式是评判答案，你给出的评级越高，回答者所得的点数也越多。拥有很高得分的回答者凯文?科尔(Kevin Cole)说，很多人开始采取“快速投票”的方法，一大排问题他们一览而过，这些人根本不费神去细看这些问题的答案，只把排在最前面的那个选出来了事。
那么为什么总会有人做这些无聊的事情？原因之一可能是Yahoo Answers把得点数最多的人列出来。他们通过叫做Leader Board的排行榜列出得分最多的回答者，目前的冠军是一位网名为“Jane Furrows -- Chavez fan”的女士，点数超过了118,000点。除此之外，在诸如电脑和医疗等分区域也分别设立了排行榜。
负责Yahoo Answers的经理Yumio Saneyoshi称，他们一开始就发现有些人的行为正在给网站的质量带来麻烦。所以雅虎正在不断改进发放点数的程序。比如，网站不再给问问题的人发放点数；事实上，现在问问题时你还要花掉一个点。
此外公司还采取了其他技术措施。比如，雅虎已经开始动用搜索垃圾邮件的技术来清理没用的、专为获取点数的答案。Saneyoshi说，未来几周或几个月公司还会有更多调整。
在吸引用户为网站增添内容的过程中遭到用户戏弄的还不只雅虎一家。维基百科(Wikipedia)也在为广大参与者提供点数，然而据说很多参与者为提高级别已开始专门对文章作一些无关紧要的修改。
当然，很多人出于正当理由参与Answers的问答，有些人的确是想帮助其他人解决问题。我甚至有时也会沉浸在回答问题的乐趣中，并且还获得了很高评价。（谷歌(Google)的Google Answers也不错，它是收费的，但是你在这里绝对可以找到一些让你心甘情愿为之付费的资料。）
康奈尔大学(Cornell University)的研究员乔恩?克莱内贝格(Jon Kleinberg)称，围绕网站信誉和人们如何提升网站信誉的问题其实是计算机科学和心理学的交叉领域，这也成为了当前互联网观察人士的热点话题。
网络游戏无疑是点数经济的最典型代表。而随著其他网站纷纷引入这种做法，我们衷心地希望人们不会把游戏中的闲言碎语带进来。
Lee Gomes
