I reached the same conclusion about stackoverflow.
Is there an incentive from the real world to answer questions because so many beginner try it?
Is there an incentive from the real world to answer questions because so many beginner try it?
Apparently so - if you look at the “Customer Questions and Answers” section of Amazon product pages, there is a remarkably high proportion of answers like, “I don’t know, I haven’t opened it yet” and “I’m not sure, I bought it as a gift”.
If you bought product X and some months or years later “Sam” posts a question on Amazon that isn’t answered, Amazon will send you an email with a subject line that is a variation of “Sam has a question for you about Product X, can you help?” and the body would be something along the lines of “Dear foo, Sam wants to know if <insert question regarding Product X here>? Click here to respond to Sam and help her out!”
In that context, you can easily see why people reply with such otherwise useless “answers.” When someone personally asks you a question you don’t know the answer to, responding with “sorry, I bought it for my husband as a gift and I don’t know,” is not just perfectly valid, it’s also the polite thing to do. But that answer is posted to the website in the genera Q&A as of you had viewed the question and then instead of passing on a question you had no answer for, you chose to reply with a useless answer.