How old are questions really?

1 Answer
Feb 26, 2017

Here's the deal.

Explanation:

The main point to keep in mind here is that no unanswered question goes to waste, so to speak.

Questions that do not get answered will eventually make their way back to the top of the activity feed as requests made by students. This is why you will see a lot of questions that appear to have been asked recently when in fact they are months old.

Now, as you would imagine, the students who post questions on Socratic expect answers as soon as possible. That, sadly enough, is simply not possible, i.e. we cannot guarantee that every question will get answered in a short period of time.

At the rate at which questions are being posted, both on the site and on the app, we simply cannot expect to have answers ready for each and every new question hours after it gets posted.

This is why a lot of questions end up spending months in rotation on the site before getting answers.

So yes, chances are that the students who didn't get answers in time moved on; however, other students can still benefit from an answer, even if that answer gets posted months (or even years) after the question was answered.

That is why we keep unanswered questions around and not delete them after a given period of time.

We want to look beyond helping one student get a quick answer -- we still want that to happen, but we are well aware that goal is not something that we can achieve at this moment.

So, to sum this up, yes, a lot of question have been originally posted months ago, but we let students "bump" them back by requesting answers because creating a high-quality online learning resource is the name of the game.