MumbleVille

I don’t know about you, but wherever I turn these days I see “peer-to-peer forums” and “online communities” and “open innovation.” Well, sure, they’re not the same things, and yet they do share some common characteristics; central to which is the theory that if one asks a question of everyone in the world, someone out there is bound to have the right answer. The buzz a few months ago was open innovation (see InnoCentive); wherein a multidisciplinary cadre of bright minds would incubate solutions to problems in completely different fields. It sounds fascinating – and, at least according to the company’s PR, it works.

That’s not what I want to discuss, however – I want to discuss the poor man’s version, so-called “peer-to-peer” forums. More than anything else, they’re a sneaky way for a company to abrogate its responibilities for customer support by passing it off to its fan base. If you’ve used Intuit’s TurboTax product in recent years, you’ve seen such a forum – “ask the community,” it’s called. The great unwashed form a social network and lend their expertise – usually garnering “ego-boo points” for answering many questions; sometimes getting additional points when their answer is chosen as the “best” by the person who posed the question (a puzzling thought – but more on that later).  So what’s wrong? you wonder…

Have a look at a few such forums of various flavors:

eHow.com – if you look through my back list, you can see it’s not my favorite site. People “earn” money for advice, and the more advice one gives, the more money one makes. It’s also social, with little mini-forums and friend lists and the like; but the core is the advice pieces. Not to put too great a spin on it, but a lot of the advice is bogus or simply paraphrased from another source (what some might call plagiarism). After all, unless one is a genius, eventually one should run out of advice topics, right? but some eHowians never seem to stop.

Yahoo answers – one of those places where people vote on what’s a good answer and the person who asked the question gets to choose the best answer. Excu-u-u-se me! how can someone possibly know what’s the best answer if he had to ask the question in the first place? Overrun with trolls as well, with most questions drawing as many smart-ass replies as serious posts.

Adobe Software Forums – one software company that’s decided to outsource a chunk of its support to its users. You have a fifty-fifty chance of getting a good answer here; about par for the course. Try asking twice from two different accounts to see how the answers vary. Be careful to say nothing whatsoever negative about the company or its products, or you will suffer the flames of Adobe Hell – one has to be strange to like Adobe, and these people show it.

TurboTax Ask the Community – do you really want to risk an IRS audit based on the answers you get from some guy sitting at home downloading porn in one window while he answers tax questions in another? I’m no tax expert, but a third of the answers I’ve seen here are wrong – or at least off-topic – and most of the rest simply cut and paste the relevant IRS forms.

AT&T Uverse Peer-to-Peer Forums – this bunch puts the “flame” in flaming assholes. Never, never, never suggest that their favorite product is anything less than perfect; for if you do you’ll need asbestos underwear. You’re not going to get any answers here, either, so don’t bother.

Social Networking is supposed to be the next big thing, and that’s what this is all about – bringing eyes to a site so that one can sell more software, advertising, and the like. However, these networks spawn numerous problems, among which are

• an “us against them” mentality that creates and reinforces insular attitudes, and
• competition to become more “expert” in whatever the topic, all too often demonstrating the Peter Principle

Social Networking may be fine when it comes to flirting and sharing one’s personal hopes and tragedies, but these five examples demonstrate that once you start asking people to be smart, it’s at best hit-ot-miss. More often, it’s just plain “miss.”

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