The Problem with Yahoo Answers!

Yahoo Answers is a great platform for people to ask and find answers to their questions. It is also a great knowledge base and a continuously enriching one. Barring a few instances, the answer quality is very good and to the point. The answers are also very genuine because there is a huge community of users who rate and select top answers. It also helps users to anonymously connect to other users who can be subject matter experts and get guidance from them. There are no fancy widgets or apps, just a simple question/answer model and users get rewarded for contributing. Its a perfect example of user-driven content and information.

After using Yahoo Answers for a while, I have been noticing that it has started being (mis)used by the young children who are putting in their entire homework on Answers and are rewarding other users who give them complete solutions. Check out the Science and Mathematics category and you can easily find tons of questions posted by users asking for complete solutions with a promise of giving away points for total solutions. I think its totally acceptable if children use it to resolve problems where they are stuck or to get explanations on issues they seem to struggle with, but putting in no effort and posting questions should be totally stopped.

I understand its technically almost impossible to remove questions of these types automatically and putting human reviewers will take the entire shine off Yahoo Answers! After giving it a serious thought, I feel a possible solutions could be to generate a lot of awareness among users about this problem and allow for reporting such type of questions even after they have been resolved. And if the reporting threshold has been reached, the user who asked the question as well as the one who answered it should be warned and docked off some points. I know this will be very controversial and will generate a lot of string opinions, but i think in the long run, we owe it to the school going children.

Framed by police

There is very little one can do when authorities turn against you and you are not even given a chance to explain.

I watched this video "Framed by police, youth decided to end his life" a few days back and it brought tears to my eyes. The video shows how few young men, going on with their routine lives are suddenly and unexpectedly hit by a bolt of suspicion that destroys their life as well as that of their families. They are falsely implicated of having links with terrorists and are arrested and tortured. Its shameful and disgraceful for the police that they indict people without strong evidence or proof. They should have investigated in some detail before creating a fake case against them. I totally understand that in today's time police are under great pressure to prevent and solve terror related crimes, but they need to also think that any wrong arrest basically destroys a life and devastates those of their loved ones. Investigative agencies need to be a bit more careful.

The only good thing about this whole episode is that atleast the judiciary is doing their job well even though they take their own time. Another aspect is how we, the common people tend to discard or distance ourselves from people who are under suspicion without trying to find out if the person is really guilty or not. We are quick to form opinions and stick to them even when they are wrong.

I hope the affected youth get their pride back and are able to find good jobs and have a better life for them and their families. God, please give them a lot of good luck!