I bet you're right.

Reminds me a little of the scenario where people bizarrely ask a forum if they can bring their dog to a hotel, some random person says "yes" and then you wonder if the hotel declined to accept the dog if the owner would say "well Bob off the internet said it would be fine"

I like reading Q&A on Amazon listings, because lots of people answer "I have no idea" or similar. I've only received a few of the email prompts for these things, but as I recall they almost make it sound like some potential shopper has decided to ask YOU, specifically YOU, about a particular product feature.

The amazon ones are truly amazing. I have wondered for years who is answering those. I had thought that questions were routed to previous buyers somehow, but that's never happened for me...

Oh that reminds me of a funny story. I used to work for a company that sold various software and one month after their purchase, they'd get an email asking if they would like to review the product. If they ignored that, after another month they'd get one more email asking if they would like to review the product (after that they'd get no more emails).

Well I was going through and approving the reviews (just for stopping spam reviews), and I found a guy leaving a review explaining that he's very sorry but he hasn't had time to use the product as his wife has come down with a bad case of the shingles - I seem to remember he went into quite a lot of detail and obviously hadn't realised this review could have been made public.

I've received a few email notifications for amazon products. They seems to be sent for new questions when you previously purchased the product (not necessarily received it yet).

Most of the answers are so useless or plainly bad. That's why I try as much as possible to answer questions for products I've bought.

I love seeing those amazon q and a sections, full of brilliance. Q "Will this fit my laptop" A "I don't know"

The difference is that the hotel didn't create, own or manage the forum.

Looks like the answer is no: https://support.google.com/communities/answer/9138806?hl=en

> When you become an expert, you'll get exclusive program perks, like special badges in the Google Help Communities, direct access to Google employees to provide product feedback and a chance to test Google products before they're released.

So, the reward for helping with the forum are some badges and a chance to be Google's beta tester, and it appears to be working? Maybe they can launch some sort of mechanical turks service in the future where the workers are paid with this "rewards" instead of money.

Sounds like a great opportunity for Box and Dropbox to provided helpful forum answers about alternatives to Google Drive. Knowing Google they are probably training bots on these forum answers so the Google bots themselves might start recommending competitor products.

I am member of one of these programs, and it's not worth it once you get everything unlocked. At best you get invited to HQ, but that's it.

Likely outsourced. Google doesn't seem to put much effort into any support mechanisms, so I would presume the same for technical support.