Facebook Questions

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

~ the obit ~

Facebook Questions launched in July 2010. You typed a question, it went out across friends and friends of friends and topic pages, and the answers came back attached to real names. The reasoning was hard to argue with on a whiteboard: Quora had just opened to the public with a few thousand users and a lot of press, and Facebook had five hundred million accounts and knew which of them worked where.

It went sideways almost immediately. By late August 2010 the product was intermittently offline during its own rollout, and Facebook was quietly throttling it. The rebuild landed in March 2011 as something much smaller: a poll box in the composer with options you could add photos to, aimed at what your friends thought about lunch rather than at expertise. That version was the one most people actually saw, and most of them saw it once.

On 19 October 2012 Facebook confirmed it was pulling the Questions dashboard and taking the option out of the news feed composer over the following days. Questions kept working inside Groups and Pages, which is where polls had found a use, and old questions stayed reachable through your own activity log if you knew to filter for them. There was no announcement page and no obituary. The button was in the composer one week and not the next.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the quora reflex ~

Facebook's answer to any new category between 2010 and 2014 was to build a version of it inside the composer and see whether the graph carried it. Questions was one of the earliest of those reflexes and it failed for a reason the company kept relearning: a Q&A site needs people who answer well and want to be seen answering well, and a social graph hands you the people you already know instead.

If you were writing code in 2010 the site you opened for an answer was Stack Overflow, where reputation was the whole mechanism and answering badly cost you something. Facebook never built anything that told you which of its users knew what.

~ the second version was the real one ~

The March 2011 rebuild is the part with descendants. Stripped of ambition it was just a poll, and polls turned out to be a good fit for Pages and Groups, where an admin has an audience and a reason to ask. Facebook shipped polls again for pages in 2017 and has kept shipping variations of the same box since.

~ what it tells you about the graveyard ~

There are dozens of Facebook products buried on this site and almost all of them end the same way, with a feature quietly leaving the interface and a short statement about focus. Questions is a clean specimen because both of its lives are documented and two years separate them. Two years is roughly how long a Facebook side product got, and that has not changed much.

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