LinkedIn Answers

» see linkedin.com/answers as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

LinkedIn has never been a site I read. It is a page about me that gets updated when something changes and then closed again, and I suspect that covers most engineers who hold an account there. Somewhere behind that page, for six years, there was a working question and answer board with actual experts on it. I did not know it had been there until I went looking for what LinkedIn had killed.

Answers launched in 2007, while LinkedIn was still deciding whether it was a resume file or a place people go. You posted a question into one of about a hundred subject categories and it went out to your network and to anyone browsing that category. People answered under their real names, with their current employer sitting right underneath. That last part was the entire design. On Yahoo Answers you were a handle. Here you were a supply chain manager at a company anybody could look up.

The asker then chose a best answer. Winning one put a line on the answerer's profile saying they held expertise in that category, with a count beside it that went up over time. It was reputation you had to be handed by somebody else, on a site otherwise built entirely out of claims you type about yourself.

~ the case file ~

~ how a question worked ~

The mechanics were modest and they held up. A question stayed open for a week and the asker could push it directly at a chunk of their own connections. Answers came back from strangers with no reason to be there beyond the fact that the category was theirs. Because every answer sat under a real employer, a bad one cost something, and that is a rare thing to build.

It lived three levels deep inside a menu called More, which is where LinkedIn parked everything it was unsure about. For most of its life there was no link to it from the home page. A feature that good and that buried tells you the company never worked out what it was for.

~ the link farmers ~

Two things ate it from the inside. Asking a real question in front of your whole industry, under your own name, next to your employer's name, is a professionally expensive act, and nobody wants to be the person who did not already know. Answering, on the other hand, was free advertising, so marketers worked the categories in volume and replied to everything within reach in order to leave a link back to their own site.

LinkedIn announced the end in January 2013 and closed Answers on the thirty-first, saying it wanted to focus on more engaging ways to discuss professional topics. Members were pointed at Groups and at the status update instead. Groups turned into spam within a few years and the status update became the feed, which is the thing the company actually wanted. Quora had opened to the public in 2010 and inherited most of what was left. Three weeks before the closure, on 9 January 2013, LinkedIn announced its two hundred millionth member, and then shut down the part of itself where those members talked to each other.

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