Question

I was told from a reviewer that they can only feature answers only if they come up in their queue but how does it get in their queue?

Answer 1

Here's the deal.

Explanation:

The featured answers reviewers only look at a sample of the answers posted on Socratic in their respective subject per day.

The actual size of the sample depends on a number of factors ranging from the number of active contributors to the total number of answers posted on the site.

So what we do is have the system select a given number of answers at random and add them to a reviewer's queue. At that point, the reviewer swings by and, well, reviews the answers.

We do this because the number of answers posted on Socratic is simply too high to handle, even by multiple reviewers per subject.

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that reviewers are volunteers, meaning that they get to split their spare time between posting answers and reviewing, so we can't expect them to spend hours of their time reviewing.

Moreover, the answers that we do feature are only a sample of the answers that we could feature. Simply put, the role of the featured answers is to showcase what the community can do.

As a final note, it goes without saying that a lot of answers that could be featured will go unnoticed, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. But even in such cases, the reward of writing a great answer lies in its long-term impact on helping students learn, not on whether or not it gets a trophy.

So you should continue to write great answers. Some will eventually get featured, some will not, but they will undoubtedly help students in the future `->` the name of the game! :D