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Cwora - taking the piss out of Quora (cwora.com)
176 points by instakill on Jan 7, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 62 comments



Hey guys I'm busy flipping my convertible note into what I'm calling a "second seed" round from a bunch of big name Angels for my social-mobile startup and I was talking to an advisor (totally gonna be on the board when we get our Series A) about how its time to add a technical co-founder who can really take the lead on all the implementation stuff we've got in mind and I was wondering if anyone knew the best places to find technical co-founders who are interesting in joining a startup (no salary, 5%)?

Also if you have ideas for the product we should start with, we haven't decided yet, we just really wanna own the social mobile space.

edit: also, can anyone recommended the best bars and restaurants in nyc to network with other social mobile startups?


I'd suggest instagr.am + foursquare + groupon: Get 10 strangers to take your picture in a 7-11 and check in and you all get free slurpees!


No, you gotta be able to monetize that. Get 10 strangers to take a picture of them viewing an ad and check in for a free slurpee. Also, ads on the slurpee, ads on the photo app, and ads in the participating 7-11s. Now we're rolling in dough. Patents for everybody!


You're hired.


needs follow


I think owning the social mobile space is a great idea!


I'm still a bit hazy on how to define 'social mobile', can you explain just a tad more?

Also, so you have ideas, but no concrete product yet, what is the technical co-f going to be working on?

Funny, because I just shot a fellow HN'er an email commenting on his hyperlocal concept and it turned into a hyperlocal, 'social mobile' concept, if it does fit your definition of it.


/facepalm


yeah duh, lolz. Sorry, morning HN scan!


I'm really disappointed by the state of Quora in the last week. There has been a flood of useless answers into once-useful questions and terrible questions into once-excellent topics. The state of the "Entrepreneurship" and "Startups" topics must be abysmal right now.

Quora could remedy this by identifying redundant questions for new posters. Let's say someone asks where to find the best technical founders in City A. Instead of accepting that question, Quora should suggest that they look at topics on "how to find technical founders" and "how to develop enough technical skills to produce a MVP." Many message boards use this right now.

I've only posted one (unique) question, so maybe Quora filters posts in this manner and I haven't come across it. Regardless, I'm amazed at how a crowd-sourced site can lose quality as it gains traction.


From what I understand, /b/ have been trolling Quora recently and quite enjoyed themselves doing so. Don't know how widespread it is.

I think Quora is okay - I don't recall all the answers being great ever - but people need to learn to understand to use the difference between a question comment and an answer soon.

Quora is definitely going to lose a lot of what makes it great if the developers don't come up with some filters.


That's the problem when a very niche and exclusive product gets mass adoption. Quality goes way down. That's how I felt about Yahoo answers. Their challenge is going to be how to drown/filter out the crap and keep it interesting or engaging.

There's a reason exclusivity works. That's one of the reasons I like Dribbble as a designer so much. The quality of the work is so high.

Maybe if Quora only let you invite people when enough people like your questions/answers that might work. I don't know how they could go back to that once they've opened the flood gates.


Right--Quora needs to set up a walled garden. Either a $5 pay-to-post system (worth it for the exposure and recruiting taking place on Quora), or a QA team that frequently audits questions and answers...something to keep their bottled lightning alive. Quora is at an important point in its development here.


Could be interesting with a flattr-like system where people pay a lump sum every week, and the people whom you thank/upvote the most gets a proportionately big amount of your monthly fee (aside from the share Quora takes).

Keeps away the tossers and rewards the people who take the time to help. Of course, there's the chance that people start gaming the system in order to earn all the money, somewhat similar to a content farm.


>* That's the problem when a very niche and exclusive product gets mass adoption *

Personally, I think there is a lot of facebook alumn echo-chamber cocksucking going on in the valley.


I stopped following entrepreneurship and startups this week. I _might_ follow them again someday.


Cwora - that's Welsh for "Yahoo! Answers", no?


I find it painfully hard to post a question there, it's always pointing to some kind of error, but we get no feedback from the site to what is wrong...

Nice Idea but I think It will take some time to evolve into a nice business, it's like twitter, the business model there will be very confusing.

Cheers from Brazil !


Suggestion for anyone inundated with Quora auto-follow spam: Go here: http://www.quora.com/settings/index

and click "Email Settings" -> "User-related" and then uncheck "Someone starts following me"


What do you do with the piss once you extract it? I have always wondered...


Romans used to use the ammonia in urine to clean sweat and salt off of clothes, and then a second round of sulphur would whiten the urine color off of the clothes. You'd have to have your clothes airing out for a year to get the stench out.


Fix dye to wool, or during tanning to loosen fat tissue and hair from animal skin.

And once you take the piss out, they are less full of themselves...


Sell it as "organic liquid fertiliser". Tesco actually sold a product last summer described with that exact phrase on its packaging.


Urine was historically used to produce saltpetre, one of the ingredients of gunpowder


Or, as Neal Stephenson taught me, phosphorous.

Burn, baby, burn!


If you scroll down to '"Taking the piss"' there's an explanation here: http://www.history.uk.com/history/a-dyeing-art-jess-dyde/


You can use it to piss in their pocket.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/piss_in_someones_pocket


I'm guessing the title is the british slang "taking a piss", always wondered the origin of that


"Taking a piss" is literally urinating. Piss is a synonym for urine. "Taking the piss" in this context means mocking somebody/something.

You can also "take the piss" if you're lying, exaggerating or any number of other social mistakes. If someone said that they had 5 years experience in PHP on their CV and you later found out they didn't, you could say they were taking the piss.

Obviously, it's quite an informal phrase. It's also one that just sounds wrong out of context, the correct context being quite hard to define. Like all slang you have to live amongst people using it before you pick up correct usage.


From Toucan's link, above: http://www.history.uk.com/history/a-dyeing-art-jess-dyde/ [ctrl-f the piss]

> Urine from London was shipped up the coast to Yorkshire, where there was a big dyeing industry, and this is the origin of the phrase "taking the piss'.

> Captains were unwilling to admit that they were carrying a cargo of urine and would say that the barrels contained wine.

> "No, you're taking the piss" was the usual rejoinder.

You can see that accusing someone of "taking the piss" is to call them out on something embarrassing and also to accuse them of lying (about it).


If only there were a place to get answers to questions like that.


Gorilla Marketing. (for himself)


Guys: Guerilla. It's always Guerilla Marketing, and is never Gorilla Marketing, unless Gorillas are your widgets.


What if Gorillas are your customers?


Gorilla marketing is marketing that attempts to be subtle, witty and genuine but instead, blunders around the place in an obvious fashion, making a lot of noise before it's finally shot, put out of it's misery, stuffed and mounted. Also, it has a small penis.


What about when Gorillas are doing the marketing?


I guess you've never heard of MailChimp?

Primates rock at marketing!


I wish. This site was made by Tom Scott.


Brilliant. Funniest thing I've seen all year


Seriously, one needs a detailed filter set to navigate through overwhelming stream (or mess) of questions on quora.


I don't see a browsing path off the homepage on quora that doesn't involve signing up or logging in.


Someone could do this for Hacker News but merely focus on Facebook rage.


funny, but rather pointless...


Why pointless? It's a parody and it contains a critique of Quora that's fairly valid.

It might not be a particularly deep critique but it doesn't have to be.


Good thing I got kicked off for running a script to follow every possible person and every possible question on the site.


I don't get it.


what a waste of time (creator time)...


This guy should simply stop using Quora if he is pissed off by endless stream of discussions. Why go great lengths to mock it? I don't see any point in this effort.


You don't have to use Quora to be irritated by it... The coverage alone is sufficient for that.

God what a nit-picking, humourless bunch we have here today!


Blue-shiftin' the autistic spectrum. Yeah.


You have to make up your mind: Are you criticizing the coverage or the service? The latter has nothing to do with this parody - but it may of course be fueled by the (completely ridiculous, bubble-like) hype.

That's like hating on Obama for the expectations people other than you had for his presidency.


I had a lot of fun doing 73primenumbers.com even though I have a lot of respect for 37 signals, and am extremely grateful for Rails.


The 73primenumbers thing is quite awesome. Thanks for sharing. One question - why include prime in the domain name? As of this post, 73numbers.com hasn't been registered, and it does seem shorter. Plus, the original "minimalist" 37signals guys decided not to use their domain name to highlight the fact that 37 is a prime number. Is that part of the joke, or what?


I just picked something I liked and poked fun at all the 'prime numbers' things out there: 37 S, 43 things...


It seemed like a great joke and definitely much respect to you for taking the time to do it. How long did you it take you to complete it? I had a great laugh and definitely made my day! Our lives need some cheering up from time to time so I totally appreciated it.


I think it took some portion of an afternoon when I was sick and did not feel like working on Important Things.


It looks like they had fun making it. I plan to do a version for HN one day but generated using a Markov Model, with karma as the hidden variable. Just one of the many items on The List :)


Guys, please stop downvoting. Okay, I admit it -- I too had fun looked at the mocked Quora and think it was a time well wasted :)


I have to agree. People here used to only downvote a comment like that to 0 or -1: it indicates disagreement, but without that "get him!" mob-piling-on effect.


My take on it is that the first downvote can be crucial: people see a comment at 0 or -1 and read it in a negative light. Critical comments are interpreted as whiny or negative, witty ones as snarky. Don't let the score do all the thinking for you, voters!


Oh, I disagreed with his comment and didn't really think it added much. But he's been on the site a while, and wasn't trying to be a jerk or anything, so I would have left at at -1.


Yeah, in fact the original motivation of downvotes was to suppress frivolous, irrelevant or off-topic comments (like the one to which you replied but not my original comment). I never downvote anyone I disagree with.




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