Like Loach, I’ve been a cop, and I’ve had on-duty accidents, and I’ve witnessed on-duty accidents by others. I didn’t even open that thread, partly because I knew there were enough others to provide answers, but also because I figured there would be a heaping helping of “you know they get away scot free” type stuff that I just didn’t feel like slogging through it.
And as a 500x read per 1x post old timer, I concur that GQ has gotten…more cluttered. It seems answers 2-8 are pretty much “I thought I read somewhere a couple of years ago that…” rather than a factual answer. And that’s fine for IMO and MPSIMS, but GQ is definitely suffering from a reduced signal/noise ratio in the past 2-3 years.
The problem with Yahoo Answers, so far as I can see, is not so much that it produces a lot of false answers or WAGS, but that it only rarely attracts answers from people who actually know what they are talking about, and had poor mechanisms for criticizing and rejecting incorrect or misleading answers.
This board keeps knowledgeable people around by keeping things fun, and has a culture that encourages the criticism of bad answers.
I would fear that excessive moderation of jokes and WAGS would take a lot of the fun out of things, and cause useful, knowledgeable members to drift away. It is remarkable, really, that this board has developed a culture whereby good answers to often very difficult and obscure questions can very often be obtained. Yahoo Answers tried but failed to do that successfully. I say take great case in messing with a successful culture, they can be very delicate things.
njtt his a great point. How many times on this board have we seen a question like “What are the Space Shuttle tiles made of.” and within 30 minutes someone replies, “My father-in-law made them. Let me ask him.” or a question on load distribution in 15th Century Islamic arches and someone quotes out of the articles and books they’ve written on the topic.
As I said, I don’t believe this is true. The perception is due largely to the “good old days” phenomenon, that things were always better in the past (just long ago that you don’t remember them distinctly). Have a look at some ancient zombies when they pop up. They are essentially indistinguishable in terms of the average quality of answer from recent threads.
