The community. You make friends with other users and want to come back to communicate with them. There have been weeks at a time when I didn’t participate on the q&a aspect of the site, but rather just spoke via PM daily with other users.
Asking and answering questions can be pretty addictive, especially when the question asks for an opinion from other users. People really do like talking about themselves and expressing their personal opinions or talking about who they are as an individual. If you notice, most questions on here ask for others to talk about themselves in some way, shape or form and those are the questions that normally get the most answers. I suppose it’s because we know ourselves better than anyone else and we like to share that with others. Eventually, people don’t want to be known as just an avatar and username – we peel back layers and reveal a lot of information so people know us on a deeper more personal level, while knowing that we’re in control regarding what and how much people know about us.
There are also questions that ask for advice or for some factual information that mostly only contains one possible answer, and the feeling of helping someone out and knowing that your words could have possibly made life easier at that moment for them is always nice. Especially when they express their gratitude either on the thread or via PM.
So in other words, we talk about ourselves and we help each other and sometimes we help each other by talking about ourselves. That alone is enough to make most people come back.
Lastly, while everyone says the lurve doesn’t matter, I would have to disagree and say that a lot of people find points and receiving awards to be important. I’ve personally never seen a q&a site thrive without some form of “rewards” system. It is a strategic, major part in ensuring that users log in everyday. Upon logging in, you see which of your questions and answers have received GQ’s and GA’s and how that has contributed to your overall score. You get to see how close you are to receiving your next high points award. You get to see how many awards of each you’ve received.
I mean, let’s face it: It feels good to know that someone or multiple people have liked your question or answer. It’s also fun to have the ability of rewarding other people for their efforts and increasing their score as well. We also get points just for logging in two days in a row and being added to a fluther. So we need to stop kidding ourselves and say it doesn’t matter because it does. When you’re a newbie at a q&a site, the community around you isn’t strong enough to ensure you stay because you’ve yet to get to know anyone. It’s the rewards system that does it. Any owner/creator of a q&a website knows that.
To you personally, it may not be more important than having discussions and helping other people, but it is one of the major components in making sure a q&a site is successful.
Oh, and every time you reach a lurve milestone, they send you a muffin basket. That’s why I’m here.
