Gift economy

Overview

A gift economy is an economic system that builds social bonds and trust through the exchange of gifts, without directly asking for payment. It's a concept systematized by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his 1925 work "The Gift," which holds that gift-giving comes with three obligations: "the obligation to give," "the obligation to receive," and "the obligation to give back."

Question boxes and the gift economy

Exchanges through anonymous question boxes have some similarities in structure to a gift economy. The sender delivers a gift to the other person in the form of a "topic." The person answering gives back a gift in the form of an "answer." Neither involves any monetary payment, and the exchange itself leads to building the relationship.

Anonymous questions in particular are close to pure gifts, because the sender can't directly receive anything in return (follows, likes). Sending a question with the sole motive of "I want to give this person a fun question" can be seen as gift-giving in the digital age.

The community a chain of gifts creates

Some people who receive good questions in their question box come to want to send good questions to other people's question boxes too. This "chain of gifts" leads to the whole question box community becoming more lively.

On the other hand, if people keep sending questions that go unanswered (their gifts are ignored), the chain of gifts tends to break. When the person answering responds carefully to questions, it's a return gift to each individual sender and, at the same time, an act that keeps the gift economy of the whole community going.