Some people have more than one Y/A account to ask questions and answer...?

Question

I wonder why the different identities..... what's the motive?

Answer 1

All the ulterior motives in me have balanced each other out to result in this ONE and ONLY account.


P.S. Come to think of it, shouldn't YOU be answering your own question? ;-) ;-) ;-)

Answer 2

Believe it or not, there have been studies conducted about why people engage in online activities such as this one. Motivations for people generally fall into four different categories: achievement, socialization, immersion, and aggression. Based on these primary motivations, there are different reasons why each might create multiple accounts and use them all at once around here.

Achievement people want to accomplish stuff. Even though the goals may be inherently meaningless, they like to set an achieve them. Around here that might mean accumulating points, getting best answers, being a 'top contributor', appearing on a top list, and so on. You can see how multiple accounts might make this much easier - you might vote for yourself or give yourself best answers, or otherwise artificially inflate your success.

Socializers just want to associate with others. They are probably the ones most likely to treat Yahoo!Answers as a chat room. I can imagine that a socializer might want to have different accounts in order to associate with different peer groups who might otherwise exclude them on the basis of some of their answers and the like.

Those after immersion want to sort of have an altered state of consciousness. They might want sometimes to play at being someone else or even just be themselves more. An immerser might want multiple accounts to 'be' multiple people... and maybe even answer the same questions from completely different perspectives.

Aggressive people want to defeat other people. Some studies just called this a variant of the social motivation, but it might be more-properly termed an 'anti-social' one - aggressives usually insult, instigate, and interfere with normal procedures as much as they can. These people are often dependant on multiple accounts because administrators often want to get rid of them and do so by squashing accounts whenever they have a basis to.

Of could while these are reasons why each of the groups might have several accounts, there are also reasons why they might not, not the least of which is an interest to conform to the rules (even aggresives sometimes like to thumb their noses at the system by adhering to all the rules and STILL being a pain). But the motive for this behavior, I think, is dependant largely for their motive for being here in the first place.

That's my take on it, anyway, for what it's worth. Hope that helps!

Answer 3

I can think of five offhand:

1) Maybe, they want best answers without trying to honestly answer the question. Answer their own question with one identity, then pick it for best answer.

2) Boost their answers that are being voted on. Very few people vote, and voting for yourself twice would give you the overriding majority in most cases.

3) Ask questions without losing points.

4) The thrill of role playing. Each account could be a sepparate identity, like one a college professor and one a cool party boy.

5) To troll and be obnoxious without losing anything. You could have one account for being an answerer, but if you feel like being an @$$ one day, troll with your other account, get reported, and punished, but not lose the ability to answer questions.

Answer 4

I have more than 1 b/c I've made several over the years. I currently have two yahoo accounts. but, i rarley go on the one. I use the rarely used one for Borders Email.

Answer 5

That's just the way people are...there's no real solution or explaination to why they do that..only that they are weird.

Answer 6

I'll get right on it. Perhaps they have multiple personalities. There you see I solved it for you. I'll bill you for it.

Answer 7

that's cuz they suffer from multiple personality disorder...

Answer 8

They think they are getting over.....

Answer 9

so they can give themselves more points

Answer 10

I wonder about that too,I mean wtf, I can tell anyway.