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While Help Vampires in software development skew male, that's easily attributable to the field's sausage-fest reality.

In the general population, I think that Help Vampires skew female to a large degree. Witness Yahoo Answers (and to a lesser degree Ask Metafilter, from which it was cloned). The vast majority of the askers are female.

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As far as I've seen, the vast majority of Yahoo Answers questions aren't really of the "I need help" variety. They're more conversation-starters-in-question-form. It's a forum.

I think it depends on the category, but yes, I can see that.

In the more technical areas there are the predictable "Here's a homework question that I'm sort of trying to disguise" and, what the article said, "How do I build a forum." What Yahoo Answers REALLY needs is an FAQ in each category. But, I suppose, then it would be IRC.

These 'questions' are not allowed on Ask Metafilter. No hypotheticals, no "I'll go first", it'll get deleted as 'chatfilter'

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