The emails Amazon sends (or used to send) to randomly selected prior purchasers of a product when there’s a new unanswered question have a subject line along the lines of “David is asking you if xxx, can you help him?”
They’re deliberately made to look like personal appeals to the individual specifically, and I don’t blame people for not understanding that it’s disgusting growth/engagement hacking.
THANK YOU. That explains those maddening "I don't know" answers perfectly.
I'm usually reasonably good at imagining the mechanisms behind stupid engagement-hacking phenomena like that, but the question of why people answer questions on Amazon product pages with "I don't know" has stumped me for years.
They’re deliberately made to look like personal appeals to the individual specifically, and I don’t blame people for not understanding that it’s disgusting growth/engagement hacking.