How you encourage people to answer others questions?

Question

Hello Q2A site owners and developers

After a year having q2a sites, I notices that people originally like to get their answers and are not so eager to take time answering others questions. I checked famous q&a websites and realized that they encourage visitors to answer questions in firsrt steps and first time they visit the site.

For example, after registering to stackoverflow you got a badge and shows you some quides about their system. In first days of membership for each participation you get some new information and some gift (badges or first points that are very nice and exciting first days).

Now common help each other to find q2a-based motivation ways. I think first of all we could answer these two questions.

1) As a q2a site owner, what strategy you have to encourage visitors answer others question, instead of get their answers and go forever?

2) What technical support (addons, core upgrades, ...) you wish to have in q2a for doing this encouragement?

I do apologize for my poor english if you have troubles reading and understanding this text.

All the best

Answer 1

This is actually difficulty and as far as I know stakeoverflow is very well succeeded doing this. In general, this is called gamefication. Stakeoverflow uses both privileges and batches. I am not sure about this, but I believe that there is a market for jobs in computer science called carriers that also provides incentives for this. Furthermore, some people can use stakeoverflow to teach about their own projects and to motivate people to do that.

Answer 2

A plugin that would help a lot is something that allows Admins to trust more people.

I want to trust people the role of moderators but undoing their actions can be very time consuming. We need an undo button for Admins to restore bad edits.

Answer 3

Here are some tips - 

1. Keep good content that gets some good page ranking and users will be feel intrested to come back 
2. Give some awards , recognization to the most active members on a periodic basis . 
3. Keep something like offers and gifts or lotery for your users