The history of question and answer sites
People will always have questions. It is the nature of the human condition. We love to ask questions and more importantly we love to answer, maybe it gives us a sense of purpose that we can advise others or maybe we just like to feel a sense of superiority.
Whatever the reason, they have become very popular, and what Facebook is is just a glorified Q&A site. There are hundreds of these sites offering expert and hobbyist solutions to everyday problems. From the mundane like “what can I have for lunch today?” to life-changing questions like “should I get a divorce?”
Some of these sites are well loved by their followers and used on a daily basis, some of these early examples of question and answer sites are very rare.
One of the first was Forum 2000, a very curious site that claimed to be run by artificial intelligence, although in later years it was recognized as a hoax.
The Hatatetron went live on January 15, 2002 at a time when many other Q&A sites were springing up. The Hatatetron ran on software written by its creator Safiire Arrowny and has gone through different incarnations since its release. The main difference from Hatatetron was that in addition to answering questions with its characters, known as “Haters”, it had a forum called the User Owned or UO Forum.
The evolution of this type of forum was a fluke and became an extension of the question and answer format. Haters who answered questions on the front page now came to life within the UO Forum, interacting with users who had become active in the community. The Hateatron boasted a community and readership of over 100 regular users, hosted an annual convention called Hateakon, and answered nearly 5,000 questions.
Sometime in early 2005, the Hatatetron Q&A portion was removed from the site’s front page for unpublished reasons. The rest of the site has since been taken down, though it is still occasionally updated with strange messages. An extreme version of the format perhaps, but it still cemented the importance of these websites on the public agenda.
One of the biggest Q&A sites in the UK is Interestingly or Answerbank which covers topics like News, Food, Fashion and Health. Users post as many questions as they want, and some post multiple links per week. Subscribers are encouraged to respond to multiple posts, and many questions have more than one answer.
If you haven’t tried one of these sites yet, they can be very interesting and informative, so why not give one a try?
