What is the history of question and answer websites?
3rd March 2013
My answer to What is the history of question and answer websites? on Quora
I’m afraid this answer will be a little vague, but I worked at Yahoo! back when they launched Answers, and the story I heard was that this category of sites was extremely popular in some Asian countries—particularly countries that didn’t yet have a large number of available native language sites on the Web. Q&A sites filled a valuable gap there by allowing people to discover information online in their own language despite there not being many existing sites.
I wish I could remember which countries were mentioned as examples—this is from a half remembered conversation I had over 5 years ago.
More recent articles
- OpenAI's new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good - 5th August 2025
- ChatGPT agent's user-agent - 4th August 2025
- The ChatGPT sharing dialog demonstrates how difficult it is to design privacy preferences - 3rd August 2025