Knowledge can't be divided, only multiplied
It's the quality of the team that makes a Q&A site work
Sunday 5 October 2008, 10:36 PM
The resemblance between Experts Exchange and the Mortgage Crisis.
Heard today that even hotdog salesman were selling mortgages in the US. The one that was used as an example had sold 19 mortgages and (surprise!) all lead to foreclosures...
Experts Exchange doesn't sell mortgages, but they do "sell" answers and it looks promessing when they state "We have over 2.000.000" solutions and a lot of "experts". However when you look into the over 2.000.000 questions using the search facility, you'll end up with more than 50% being too old to be relevant (who does care about thousands of DOS, Dbase IV or Lotus 123 solutions?) or the "answer" is a broken link...
In the 2003 moderators conference the owners proclaimed that the quality of the answers should be improved and that posting "google links" should be disencouraged. I guess they stated the same in the 2008 conference, but I have to warn the moderators (and experts) to take no notice of this statement. It's not supported by the owners, nor the admins and collegue experts can start calling you names when you post a friendly reminder to elaborate more in their comments.
So now the resemblance:
1) Poor housing was sold and the mortgage arranged by persons without knowledge.
2) Poor questions are sold with answers posted by experts ...(fill in the blanks)
Because of the mortgage crisis, the "Premium membership" will decline (over 50% is from the US), so now we just have to wait for a similar intervention by the state to give the owners more money and keep the site alive, while there's no structural improvement (read better quality) and no "punishment" for mismanagement like they did with the banks and their directors.
Finally it's the customer that's paying the price for this and too sad that so many customers don't use the newsgroups and free sites like bytes.com to get the same (or even better) answers for free...
Nic;o)
PS Still no response from Chris so EE is doing their "silence will solve all problems" trick again
Experts Exchange doesn't sell mortgages, but they do "sell" answers and it looks promessing when they state "We have over 2.000.000" solutions and a lot of "experts". However when you look into the over 2.000.000 questions using the search facility, you'll end up with more than 50% being too old to be relevant (who does care about thousands of DOS, Dbase IV or Lotus 123 solutions?) or the "answer" is a broken link...
In the 2003 moderators conference the owners proclaimed that the quality of the answers should be improved and that posting "google links" should be disencouraged. I guess they stated the same in the 2008 conference, but I have to warn the moderators (and experts) to take no notice of this statement. It's not supported by the owners, nor the admins and collegue experts can start calling you names when you post a friendly reminder to elaborate more in their comments.
So now the resemblance:
1) Poor housing was sold and the mortgage arranged by persons without knowledge.
2) Poor questions are sold with answers posted by experts ...(fill in the blanks)
Because of the mortgage crisis, the "Premium membership" will decline (over 50% is from the US), so now we just have to wait for a similar intervention by the state to give the owners more money and keep the site alive, while there's no structural improvement (read better quality) and no "punishment" for mismanagement like they did with the banks and their directors.
Finally it's the customer that's paying the price for this and too sad that so many customers don't use the newsgroups and free sites like bytes.com to get the same (or even better) answers for free...
Nic;o)
PS Still no response from Chris so EE is doing their "silence will solve all problems" trick again
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