Yahoo Answers: Uninformed and Clueless

Out of curiosity, I googled "myspace iPhoto" with the idea of seeing if there were any plugins that would let me upload to Myspace directly from iPhoto. Predictably, one of the top hits was a Yahoo Answers question:

"How do i get pictures on myspace off of iphoto?

Myspace won't let me put pics form iphoto on myspace, it says that they are all too big so I tried to download Irfanview but I can't get that to run on my apple. Any advise?"

I'll ignore the fact that the person asking the question doesn't know the difference between a Mac and a PC application. It's an easy mistake, particularly for a recent "switcher." Irfanview is a wonderful application, but it's Windows only, while iPhoto, also a great application is presently Mac only. Let's see what brilliant answer was chosen as the "Best" answer.

Brit wrote:
"Best Answer - Chosen By Voters
save the pic. as jpeg."

What a "special" answer. While it's entirely possible that the person who asked the question had a bunch of Raw or TIFF files form her digital camera, the odds are that she had a bunch of JPEG images. What, exactly, did "Brit" think the asker was uploading?

This user had "won" because they received the one and only vote cast on the question. Let me reiterate that this was the second hit on a Google search for "myspace iPhoto" and thus the second resource people were going to see when searching for those terms.

A total of five people answered the question.

"Andrew" had the most useful answer, telling her to "resize it, make it smaller." iPhoto lets you resize and crop images. If she wanted to preserve the file in her iPhoto library, she could resize with the "Export" or "Share" functions, both of which have options for sending a resized photo to another location or program without modifying the source image. His answer also took into account the fact that her problem whas the photo being "too big."

"bueko" told her to buy a PC, or "find some basic imaging software for a mac." This advice of course completely ignored the fact that iPhoto can scale images all by itself and already HAS a lot of basic image editing capabilities, including the ones the asker needed.

"mikemike6189" completely missed the actual problem, and told her how to use the Mac Finder to locate the files and upload them. At least he caught the fact that she was using a Mac.

"EJ" gave the most pathetic answer of all. He told her how to launch Paint on a PC, having completely missed the fact that she was using a Mac, despite the fact that it was mentioned in earlier answers.

Four out of the five answers were completely useless. The one marginally helpful answer, the one that might have actually helped her resolve the problem, didn't win. In the end I took pity, logged in and rated the answers. At least now the one answer that was actually relevant has a thumbs up, while the clueless failures have a thumbs down.

I have nothing against the people who answered the question. I don't even have a beef with their being technologically clueless. My concern is that people who have no clue what they're talking about
are running around answering technical questions. Their fanciful and misinformed answers are getting highly rated by voters who themselves have no clue what's going on. I'm not running around answering questions about automobile repair, why are these folks answering questions about computers?

My hope is that the people answering these questions are themselves playing games with Yahoo Answers, deliberately mocking the service and its limitations. I'm more comfortable with Yahoo Answers being rendered useless by sarcastic jerks such as myself than by unintentionally clueless answers.