Gaming online point systems
Wall Street Journal talks about the point systems and gaming them in the online world exemplified by Yahoo! Answers:
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.