Amazon AskVille

» see askville.amazon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

by the time askville existed i had a stackoverflow account waiting for launch day and a couple of active turkish forum logins for hardware. one more Q&A site with amazon's name on it did not surface on any turkish forum i was reading. amazon was still mostly the online bookstore for me in that year, meaning the place you asked friends who lived in the us to buy things from. an amazon-branded Q&A community was not a category most non-us people knew existed.

askville launched on 8 december 2006 as a user driven research site. anyone could post a question, anyone could answer. the wrinkle was the gamified layer. members earned experience points and a virtual currency called quest coins for good answers and for consistent participation. it was closer in shape to yahoo answers than to a serious knowledge base, only with amazon's brand on the login page and a mechanical turk tie-in as the ambitious technical bit.

the community that stuck around after the initial launch year turned into something more social than the surface pitch suggested. discussion boards spun out of individual questions and people made friends inside them. moderation complaints piled up in 2008 when the community felt some active members were being pushed out unfairly. by 2012 amazon had already unplugged the mechanical turk paid answers integration, which had been the interesting technical piece of the whole site.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the pitch on paper was that amazon had a huge audience already showing up to buy things. if you gave that audience a place to help each other, some of that would leak over into product knowledge. the mechanical turk tie-in was the interesting angle, difficult questions could get paid out to turk workers for real money, which was the mechanism that made askville different from yahoo answers on paper. in practice most of the traffic behaved like a regular Q&A site with a leaderboard.

the character of the community by year two was gen-x-and-older, and drifted into personal territory more than the amazon brand really encouraged. long discussion threads spun out under one-line questions, with inside jokes threading through them for weeks. amazon corporate never really understood what it had, which is the usual story for a big company's side community. the site sat one directory deep off the main amazon.com domain and nobody up the chain seemed to notice it much.

~ what got buried with it ~

amazon closed askville on 25 october 2013 with a few weeks notice. the reason was never really explained in public. the site had become a moderation and content liability without a clear business fit inside amazon's product line. the domain redirected out to a help page and the actual archive of Q&A history disappeared with the shutdown. no data export and no follow up product from amazon in the same category.

the small emotional footprint askville left is the discussion-board thing. some members kept in touch through other channels after the shutdown, which is a decent second-life for a Q&A site nobody was going to include in a category retrospective. the more historically interesting piece is that amazon tried to run a community and could not sustain interest in keeping it going for even a decade. it was 2013 and the answer to Q&A on the open web was already stack overflow and quora, neither of them owned by amazon.

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