Somebody Else Had the Same Question

The teacher finishes explaining, caps the marker and turns around.

“Any questions?”

Nobody moves.

It isn't because everyone understood.

Half the room is lost, but no one wants to be the first to admit it, so they sit very still and hope it'll make sense later.

Then one kid puts a hand up and asks if the teacher can go over the second part again.

You can almost hear the room breathe out.

Heads come up, pencils start moving, and somebody in the back mutters, “Yeah, that part.”

Thirty people had the same question, and one of them asked it.

Going First

We tend to think of the person asking as the one who didn't get it.

I've always seen it the other way around.

The kid with the hand up spent a little of their pride so the rest of the room didn't have to spend any of theirs.

That's not a small thing.

Most of us would rather stay confused than look confused.

I'd bet plenty of people reading this have rewound a video four times, or searched for an hour and pieced together half an answer, before they'd type one honest question where other people could see it.

Online, the Room Is Even Quieter

In a classroom you can at least see the other lost faces.

Online you can't.

You join a group, scroll through the posts, and it looks like everyone knows exactly what they're doing.

There's no post asking what a tracking link actually does, and no one admitting they've been posting for three weeks and heard nothing back.

So you assume you're the only one.

You aren't.

The usability researcher Jakob Nielsen wrote about this in 2006 and called it participation inequality.

His rough rule was that in most online communities about 90 percent of people only read, 9 percent chime in now and then, and 1 percent do most of the talking.

It's a rule of thumb, not a law of nature, but anyone who's spent time in a group will recognise it.

Behind every question that gets posted there's a crowd of readers who were wondering the same thing and never said so.

The Answer Stays There

You can watch this happen in any hardware store.

Someone stops an employee to ask which screws will actually hold in drywall, and a couple of steps away another customer, holding the same little box, goes quiet and listens to the whole answer.

They won't say thanks, and they don't need to.

Odds are they walked in with the same question.

A community works like that, except the answer doesn't disappear when the conversation ends.

The member who joined last week and hasn't said a word reads it.

So does the one who nearly quit last night because they were sure everyone else had it figured out.

Six months from now, somebody will type the same words into the search bar and find the thread sitting there waiting for them.

That's one of the quieter reasons I think a community is worth more than a course.

A course can only answer the questions somebody guessed you'd have.

In a community you get answers to the ones you actually have, in front of other people who needed them as well.

Putting Your Hand Up

If asking still feels uncomfortable, it helps to mention what you've already tried.

People can see you're not asking them to do your homework, and they can skip straight to the useful part.

Being specific helps even more.

“How do I get traffic?” is almost impossible to answer well.

Compare that with “I've posted five short videos on one platform and none of them got past a few dozen views. What would you look at first?”

The second version gives people something to work with.

Ask in the open when you can.

A private message helps one person, while a question in the group helps everyone who reads it.

And when somebody asks about something you already know, answer it the way you'd have wanted it answered back when you didn't.

People rarely remember who asked the question that finally got them unstuck.

What stays with them is the relief that somebody did.

So ask it.

Somewhere in that group, someone is sitting very still and hoping you will.