Simon Willison’s Weblog

What is the history of question and answer websites?

My answer to What is the history of question and answer websites? on Quora

I’m afraid this answer will be a little vague, but I worked at Yahoo! back when they launched Answers, and the story I heard was that this category of sites was extremely popular in some Asian countries—particularly countries that didn’t yet have a large number of available native language sites on the Web. Q&A sites filled a valuable gap there by allowing people to discover information online in their own language despite there not being many existing sites.

I wish I could remember which countries were mentioned as examples—this is from a half remembered conversation I had over 5 years ago.