LINE Q

» see lineq.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

LINE opened LINE Q on 5 December 2013, a question-and-answer service hung off the messenger that was already installed on most phones in Japan, with a Chinese-language version for Taiwan alongside it. The mechanic took one sentence to explain: you asked something and the people who answered competed to be the one you picked. The chosen answer was called the Pittari Answer, pittari meaning exactly right, and picking it paid the person who wrote it.

Paid is the correct word. LINE Q points were not a badge, they went through a cash-out program with a real settlement calendar, and from 30 January 2015 you could also take them as LINE Gift Codes and spend them on paid stickers or game currency. On 3 June 2014 LINE shortened the settlement calendar, moving payout from the end of the month after next to the end of the following month and cutting the wait from roughly six weeks to about four. That is a payroll problem, and a question-and-answer site had gone and acquired one.

The answers arrived at a rate that suggests the money was the reason. A million of them had landed by 7 January 2014, one month after launch, and by 9 May the count was ten million. It reached fifty million on 29 September 2014, inside the first ten months. LINE marked the ten-millionth by giving away forty prepaid cards worth a thousand yen each, which against the scale of what it had just been handed was close to nothing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ paying for answers ~

From 19 June 2015 the service ran Q Day on every date containing a nine, which tripled the points earned and came around three times a month. The App Store rating went to seventeen-plus in August 2014 because a bug in version 2.0.0 locked minors out, came back down two days later when the fix shipped, and then went to seventeen-plus properly in August 2015 and stayed.

~ the doctors ~

In May 2015 LINE Q added Doctor's Notes, where a user could write up what they knew about a subject as a list rather than waiting for somebody to ask. A thousand followers made you a Star Doctor and ten thousand made you a Legend Doctor, and a monthly event let people who had not earned the title write a note anyway. From October 2015 the ten most-viewed notes earned their authors the rank of Honorary Doctor, which, unlike the others, could not be taken away for falling below the accuracy bar.

What sat underneath the notes was a payment structure worth looking at closely. A note earned its author one point per reader through the app and two points per reader through the web, and notes were published out on the open web rather than kept inside the service. LINE's own help pages spell out the consequence. Write a note with search engines in mind and readers who had never installed LINE Q would find it from a results page, at which point the view count stopped having any ceiling and the points followed it up. LINE had built a content farm and was paying the rate card itself.

~ the eleven quiet months ~

On 14 November 2016 LINE overhauled the virtual currency across its apps. Gift Code exchange disappeared from LINE Q and the whole earnings side was rerouted into LINE Points. The Japanese record of the service marks that date with a second sentence, which is the one that matters: after this, updates to the LINE Q app ceased.

The announcement came on 6 October 2017, eleven months into a silence nobody outside the company had been told about. Posting was switched off on 6 November 2017, leaving a service you could read but not write to. The final distribution of LINE Points went out on 29 December 2017, because people were still owed money. LINE Q closed completely on 11 January 2018, and lineq.jp now resolves to nothing at all.

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