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What are your reasons for making your Q&As private?

This is a question for anyone who makes their questions and answers private. If you are one of these people, what is your motivation for doing so? I don't understand why anyone would want to prevent people from reading their past responses.

My thinking is this: If I made sensible replies, I'd have no reason to hide them. If I made only vulgar and insulting posts, I wouldn't care who read them, since my purpose is clearly to insult (that is, I would not be ashamed).

I can't come up with a logical motivation to hide my answers, yet many people make theirs private. Help me understand this phenomenon.

7 Answers

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  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    My Q&A are NOT private, but I can understand why some people want theirs to be.

    It's unfortunate, but some of us become targets for abuse. Especially Top Contributors. It happened to me in another category, with another Y!A ID which I no longer use.

    When that happens, a person would be completely justified in setting his/her profile info to "private" to prevent others (trolls, etc.) from stalking/tracking that person's activities on Y!A.

    Others set their Q&A and their Contacts to private to disguise the fact that they have multiple Y!A accounts (which is fine and legal) and that they use one of their accounts to answer questions posted by another of their accounts and give themselves thumbs-up and choose/vote themselves Best Answer with their own accounts.

    Like we don't get it, right?

  • 1 decade ago

    I can certainly understand this when it comes to questions. Although I am not one of them, no doubt some members of Yahoo Answers have developed certain "communities", or are in contact with people they personally know. Sometimes however, you may want to ask a question anonymously, if it is embarrassing or private enough that it is not for the eyes of an acquaintance, but a crowd of blank knowledgeable faces.

  • 1 decade ago

    At first I had not put my questions and answers private..But then I started to get my questions and answers deleted due to trolls and then I lost many points...Some of them due to this fact even lost their previous accounts and started new one's now..

    Its better to put them on private since we don't want to get into any trouble if not a big one atleast in the least...Even I give good answers to people but even then my answer got deleted yesterday...There are some people who follow us and give thumbs down for all our answers...It happened for a girl yesterday...So the main reason for putting your Q&A in private is to be on the safer side!!!

    Hope this Helps!!

    All the Best!

  • 1 decade ago

    I have no idea either, this is made for people to ask and answer... and some to search for their questions and find alreaady made answers... it's great!

    Also- sure regular people can't get into you stuff, but if someone wanted to- they could... EVERYTHING on the internet is unsafe.

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  • 1 decade ago

    I make my Q&A private because of people who are trolls and they will go through my answers and questions and report me. I've had a bad experence with trolls and stalkers.

  • 1 decade ago

    i privated mine, but i did it just because. i've seen an answerer who had to privated hers (she's a TC in language, which i sometimes frequented) because there were "stalkers" who would thumb-downed all her answers, even when it was obviously correct. maybe they (stalkers, or 1 with multiple YA accounts) were once offended by her and keeping grudge (yeah, sounds funny), but that maybe because they think the TC is kind of "a little cocky" with her knowledge in language. she's not so bad in her answers, and sometimes i gave thumb-ups to balance it out when i see one with unjustified, sometimes up to 7, thumb-downs, because i'd hate to see she left the place for the "haters". all she did was displaying where she learnt the language.

    but that's after i privated mine, so maybe i should keep it private?

  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    because there are trolls that try to get me suspended. if you don't know what they are, trolls are people who just report answers to get them suspended. and they put spam as answers too. they like to get people suspended.

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