I answered a question on StackExchange yesterday, and once I had Googled and read through some threads and dug up some answers with links to post, I noticed the question had been edited by a moderator.
Looking at the history, I saw that this neat and tidy question was originally a sloppy mess. Suddenly I felt cheated - here I was answering someone who had asked a sensible well written question ... except they hadn't.
I had a similar realisation that I wasn't answering to help someone, but to help future search engine results, which is less endearing.
Think of it this way: instead of helping one person who can't even phrase a question properly, you're helping thousands of people who will find your answer in the future by searching for the version of the question that was properly phrased (and the one you actually answered).
I appreciate Reg's insight on the appropriateness of his answer. I (usually) hate it when I ask a technical question and get 20 Questions from someone who would rather question my intents or knowledge than just answer the question.
But Reg makes clear why people might do this; most often they are probably trying to be helpful at a level above mere practicality. They care about the person asking the question, not just the question itself. They are involved because there's a community.
Healthy communities offer reciprocal benefits, which draws people in. If you remove that, what is left to motivate participation?
Some people get off on public displays of cleverness, but if people are given to feel they and their free contributions are simply fodder for someone else's business they are not likely to stick around.
Sites like Quora have to decide if losing the participation of someone of Reg's caliber is worth it to maintain some strict protocol.
The first problem is your answer is condescending. To my reading your starting with probably some insider BS about what he's asking. He wants to know where he can find a capable or "rock star" developer. You interpret "Rock Star" as someone with bona fides of a whole different magnitude and then take the opportunity to bitch slap the guy in public. He's not thrilled and takes the opportunity provided to slap you back. There's not a lot of mystery here. Don't not answer questions in order to preen around in public by taking a shot at someones possible misuse of a term that might mean something different to an insider than someone trying to get in or in other words don't be an a-hole.
I am sincere. I think you could have handled this better by making the point you made and educating the person about your understanding of what a "rock star" developer is vs what you understood he needed in a less high handed manner.
Yep. "Not Helpful" really sends a negative message.
Interestingly, one of the Quora moderators did an experiment about three different ways of getting people to give more information on partial answers.[1] None of them worked well. Collapsing was the worst, leading to no improvements and provoking one "aggressive response". Nonetheless the moderator decided that collapsing was the approach to use going forward. Umm ...
I didn't take it as particularly negative. The person flagging it explained that it would be more helpful if I answered the question directly. I agree with them: This type of answer is an Internet Cliché: Person asks, "How do I X?" and the first twenty responses are "You are an idiot for trying to X, you ought to Y instead."
Maybe "negative" isn't exactly the right word here. It devalued your contribution, and after you thought about it you decided it wasn't the kind of contribution Quora wanted, and that it wasn't the right site for you.
The way I look at it, your answer was helpful. Sure, it could have been more helpful to more people if it had been different; and there may well have been other better answers. Calling "not helpful" focuses on what it isn't, not what it is.
It devalued your contribution ... The way I look at it, your answer was helpful.
It's more useful to think in terms of signal to noise ratio rather than a binary helpful/unhelpful. It may have been helpful when considered in isolation but was it helpful enough to be valuable?
Raganwald nails it with: This type of answer is an Internet Cliché
When the ratio of advice and/or opinions and/or theories is 10:1 relative to actual answers to the question being asked (which is common) it's not enough to say those non-answers might be helpful. They have to meet a higher standard. Because they have a built in noise-cost they need to have a signal-value that is very very high.
A individually helpful answer can have a negative value when viewed in the context of the whole system.
So you think that raganwald's leaving is more valuable than allowing his highly-rated answer that a moderator didn't approve of to continue to display on the site?
I really appreciated this blog post. At first I thought it was going to be a Scoble-style 'I got my first moderatorial slap and now my blogger ego is bruised' blogger poutathon, but raganwald clearly delineates between the sort of bonding, community building social sites that he prefers (and might have acted as though he was using), and the content-focused, at times unprecious with other people's writing repository that wikipedia or Quora are aiming for. Quora is so much more obviously social than wikipedia, which I think gives a lot of people the impression that it's more like the former and less like the latter. That might be a problem for them. But I don't think that the inherent lack of sanctity for any given user's contributions is a problem. I think it's a feature.
I have avoided Quora because it seems to combine the drawbacks of Wikipedia with the drawbacks of social sites. It has the lack of respect for contributors of Wikipedia and the lack of respect for reality of social sites.
ADDED: My time is limited and I heed to apply it how I think it will be most useful. Since my major interest is in learning, I have been reducing my internet usage back toward books anyway.
I hate that people use Q&A sites as forums. If I ask a question on StackOverflow.com such as "how do i do x on the iphone", I'm pretty much guaranteed to get responses (in the "answers" section) which state that i shouldn't do that. Q&A sites are for questions and answers. How is "it won't get approved for the appstore" a relevant answer? Maybe I don't even care about the appstore. If you think this is a concern, but still have an answer, include it as a footnote. Or just list it as a comment, but it's not an answer.
This actually drove me away from heavily contributing on SO recently.
This is non-sensical: a similar response to a similar question was up-voted to the roof. It could be Not helpful because it wasn't as cheeky as expected (a hacker over-estimating his tact isn't exactly new), or because that question was trapped in a cluster of users that had negative feelings toward its answers.
I've been trying to make sense of the Question/Follower bi-graph on Quora. Based on very different reactions to similar, but unconnected questions it appears strongly clustered by normative takes, from narrow political frameworks to attitude to entrepreneurship, food, etc. I can't seem to have access to relevant data from outside, though.
FWIW, my answer did receive many upvotes. But that is really the point of moderation: to flag or steer the process when something is popular but nevertheless not in the site's long-term best interests, just as it is my duty as a parent to moderate the amount of candy my children eat :-)
The assumption you seem to be making is that moderation is perfect i.e. that a single moderator marking an answer as unhelpful means that it reflects some absolute, unified judgement of Quora and all other moderators.
We all know that it's not how it works: there's a difference of opinions between moderators. Not all parents deny candy to their children and those that do have different quotas.
So extrapolating from a single data point, like you did, is not really valid.
If you email moderation@quora.com and ask for "the Full Blake Ross"[1], they will delete all your questions from the site and replace all references to your username with "User".
I've been a member of Quora for a while, but I never got around to participating. There was always something about it that struck me as strange.
I think the problem is that there is an assumption that asking a question and receiving an answer is somehow a valuable experience in itself, and for basic bits of factual information it is. But much of what constitutes "interesting" questions, like the one in this article, do not fit that pattern.
I teach teams how to be agile. For many, an honest question they have is: why do we need you? Can't we just read the book and know all we need to know?
It turns out the answer to that question is very interesting, because mostly no, you probably can't. At least not in the way you think. There is factual information and then there is mastery of a complex skill. I look at it this way: I can show you a movie of a great piano player, you can meet him and get his autograph, we can even read books on how to play the piano.
Will any of that make you a piano player? No, it will not. So when you ask a seemingly straightforward and honest question like "How come I can't play this Bach piece?" I'm unable to give you a straightforward answer that you are going to find helpful. It's going to sound something like "Because you don't know what you are doing. First you must do all this other stuff". Of course, you don't want to do all that other stuff, you want to play the Bach piece. And so there we are.
This touches on another problem -- not knowing what you don't know. When I learned to fly, I found a good instructor and told him about the things I would like to do.
"We're not doing any of that," he said, and then explained what we would be doing. You see, I didn't know what questions to ask first. I simply had some goal.
The worst problem I can see is folks getting answers they are not ready to process. For example, sticking with my agile coach example, somebody might ask me why a team takes so long trying to figure out what it's doing. The "answer" might be something like "Because you've restricted their machines and tools in such a way it's taking ten times longer than it should." but good luck in giving it to somebody in that direct a fashion. They'll throw you out of their office -- especially if they were the ones all along pushing for more controls and complexity. This is a case of wanting a solution to one thing, but having a second thing that cannot be touched. And of course, the second thing is directly involved in the first thing. In situations like this you have to help people figure out for themselves where their own internal model is flaky. Sometimes that takes a while. (Interesting side note: many technologists ardently refuse to believe they could be this way, saying things like "just tell me bluntly". I have found that these folks are the worst to deal with, because instead of seeing life as a journey, they are caught up in black-and-white reasoning. So they are the last people you want to treat that way, because to do so you're basically telling them their thinking is broken -- a concept many cannot process)
Comparing viewing a piano player and getting his autograph to learning from a book is not fair at all. It is a straw man constructed to ridicule all autodidacts.
No, he isn't comparing the two, he's grouping them together. Watching a piano player, meeting him and getting his autograph, _even_ read a book. (roughly paraphrased).
I think he's trying to point out that besides "just reading the book" (as was given in his example with his customers) there are other ways people think they can learn and master complex skills - talking to famous, successful people, or watching how they work. While there's certainly value in doing so, his point is that that is probably not what you really need to improve.
"Can't we just read the book and know all we need to know?
It turns out the answer to that question is very interesting, because mostly no, you probably can't. At least not in the way you think. There is factual information and then there is mastery of a complex skill. I look at it this way: I can show you a movie of a great piano player, you can meet him and get his autograph, we can even read books on how to play the piano.
Will any of that make you a piano player? No, it will not."
Isn't that comparing learning from a book to watching a movie of a great piano player? This "we can even read books on how to play the piano" is just a minor addition. It should be the main point, but it is not because the other example is more ridiculous and scores more points. He puts forward an obviously stupid example of learning on your own and insists that it explains why learning on your own in general is stupid.
"Reading the book" of your text, I just can't tell, but if we were face to face I could probably feel out what you were doing. Some things, especially assisting learning, require intense feedback loops, which happen much better in person. You can learn heaps from books, but a book can't notice when you've gone off track...
I do agree that learning from a teacher does have benefits - I just don't like comparing learning from a book to watching a piano player and getting his autograph. What is really the point of getting the piano player autograph - who ever would think this is a legitimate learning procedure?
"In situations like this you have to help people figure out for themselves where their own internal model is flaky. Sometimes that takes a while."
If you are any good at this, please write a book. I would pay a handsome some for even just incremental improvement in this skill.
My day is filled with people going around acting as if 2 + 2 = 5. Thus far my only strategy is to say, "Are you sure it's 5? I'm pretty sure it's 4." Repeat over and over for years until people adopt the new "2 + 2 = 4" mental model and forget I'd been saying it for years...
I think there's also a big difference between learning as a team and learning as an individual. You can probably become a very good pianist on your own if you follow lesson books from start to finish. It's harder as a team because the social interactions are too many and too varied so you need an outside observer.
I agree with your main point, that sites like StackExchange and Quora are not about discussions. From the get-go, Stack Overflow have made it very clear, through their writings and policies, that it is about answering questions, not talking.
Having said that, I disagree with your example. Oftentimes, when people ask a question, questioning their motives is a good idea. I know that when I ask a question, I often discover that I'm trying to solve the wrong problem.
A very common pattern on SO is that the accepted answer is a practical solution to the problem, and the highest-rated answer is a longer talk about whether this is something the questioner even needs to do.
Oddly enough, I just posted a enhancement request to HN asking for comments to be required for down voting. I can tell that I said something that wasn't appreciated, but I don't know why - style, phrasing, bad phase of the moon, just "not helpful"?
Getting no feedback other than a downvote doesn't help me adapt to the community. I may not agree with why my post wasn't accepted by the community that is HN, but at least I'll have more information to work with.
There are two cases. The first case is if your comment deserved a downvote. In that case, yes, one downvote on one comment makes it difficult to adapt. But if the behavior that caused the downvote appears in other posts, those will get downvoted, and you should be able to discern a pattern in what is not appreciated.
The second case is if your post did not deserve a downvote. This happens, particularly as our community grows. Some people downvote comments merely because they disagree with what the person said. We don't want it to happen, we (the community) try to correct for it when it does, but it does happen. And in large threads, such posts can get "stuck" at the bottom in a place where no one sees to correct it. In that case, don't worry about it. It happens to everyone.
How do you know which case it was? Keep posting and you'll be able to find out.
If someone wants to explain a down-vote, they'll say it in a reply to that comment.
Requiring explanations will merely result in meaningless deluges of "not helpful", "bad", "this is a comment of a type I don't wish to see on HN", or people C&Ping long political rants.
Sounds to me like your answer should have been entered as a comment. At least on stackexchange sites (sorry, don't use Quora, but I notice there is a comment option) I like to leave comments that are not going to be directly answering the question. Looks like in Quora there you can't vote up a 'comment' though, pitty.
I was hoping for link to the discussion. But clearly the issue was not your answer it was the way you answered. The answer is clear from your opinion: to find rockstar developers, you also need to be a rockstar entrepreneur/business/marketing/money guy.
I do not think that in this case it is about Quora Though I find it difficult to participate effectively there. But that is not a effective or valid reason to argue that discussion can not occur there. It can, and does. But you need to follow its own style. Much like stackoverflow.
dissent is not about escaping the system. It is about participating in order to change the system.
Of course, I am already hoping you take this frustration and build something better.
Personally, I love sites like SO and Quora. When I'm digging into something outside of my experience/expertise (which is almost daily in my current job), I'm consistently landing on pages that have answers written to my questions. That's great.
What's NOT great, is having some esoteric need, landing on a bunch of pages, and finding that most of them have an "are you sure you want to do this?" response with no effort made to answer the question, ahm, in question.
The author is right in this respect. You are NOT just answering the person who asked the question. Stuff on the internet STAYS. For YEARS. That means that you're answering EVERYONE who EVER asks that question, and chances are that a lot of them DO know what they are doing. All they lack are the mechanical steps to take, which you have denied them by your second guessing of intentions. And that is MASSIVELY frustrating. Sites like Quora understand this, thus the "not helpful" button.
If you must question the judgment of the person asking, do so AFTER answering the question. Otherwise your answer is, in fact, NOT useful. Oh, it may be useful if you've successfully guessed the intentions of the asker, but for a great number of other people who will land on that page in the years to come it is nothing more than condescension.
I participate because I find it a godsend whenever I get stuck on some esoteric API or poorly documented technology, or I just want to use something in a way that it's not actually meant to be used BECAUSE I HAVE A DAMN GOOD REASON TO DO IT. And I want to extend the same courtesy of answering without prejudice so that some other soul can be similarly helped by my answer.
This might be a coincidence but either I remember seeing that question on Quora, or it simply gets asked a lot.
I also remember the answer about how things didn't work like that and I thought to myself "hmm, I agree, but he's not really answering the question though" - It might also be because the answer came off very negative and degrading
So I actually flagged the answer as "not helpful".
I'm guessing more people did, so it wasn't any single person.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with how these Q&A sites work. I don't feel that it's just to serve the search engine results. I think they genuinely help people.
What the author said is true, Quora and Q&A sites in general are more about accumulating knowledge than helping individuals. So, trying to help someone with an XY problem can get you penalized.
One service that I really liked was Aardvark which for a long time did not have public Q&A pages. Also, connecting people through IM allowed for a very personal and instant help.
I commend you for your decision. Quora should not even have a down-vote button -- the best answers will go to the top anyway through up-votes. Also, I think there is just as much (if not more) intellectual value in answers that are funny or slightly off-topic. If I wanted purely factual answers, I would ask Google.
If I want to feel like I've helped someone, I'll volunteer at a soup kitchen. If I want to spread knowledge, I'll write it in my blog. If I want to increase ad revenue by generating content, and fool myself with a false sense of socialization, I'll go to a Q&A site.
But what do you do when you want a question answered that you can't google?
Isn't that the idea that all the Q&A sites stem from?
I feel roughly the same as you. But I have actually asked questions both at StackExchange sites and Quora (and answered others in return for the help I received). And it certainly has it's uses to me.
Since the stuff I work with is generally software, this is quite easy: either read the source code, or ask the person who wrote it on IRC.
Admittedly, this approach has the downside of not producing something that others encountering the same issue can find by Googling. Unless I blog it, of course.
In my experience, if I have a question that I can't Google reasonably well, it will be rejected from S.O. anyway. If I'm able to sufficiently frame my question, I probably already know enough to guide myself toward an answer.
S.O. search results have been useful in refining my understanding of a problem set, but it's rarely been useful for a direct answer. When it does provide a direct answer, it's generally about simple stuff that I'm dabbling in, such as Python syntax questions.
How is it that I can't take criticism? I thought about the response and I agree that my answer was not helpful. How much more accommodating should I be?
For one flagged answer you quit...that's good...it shows you how big your ego is and how perseverent you are. Good "qualities"...
I had answers collapsed there in the beginning...but I persevered and now I am a quite power user. You should try that sometime...
The post specifically says that one flagged answer prompted me to think about why the answer was flagged, which led me to think about the difference between HN and Quora, which led me to deactivate my account.
I've said plenty of unpopular things here on HN, yet I persevered. And if you really want to see negative responses to things that I have written, you should look at the comments on my old blog. If you want to present a theory that my character can be determined from my response to downvotes or flagged comments, I suggest your theory be amended to explain why I persevere with HN and blogging, but not with Quora.
Got the same vibe from the article: the whiny quitter.It's not constructive and not even interesting (who are you and why does your opinion on Quora even matter?). All-in-all HN is lot more unwelcoming to users than Quora is. Here people downvote because they don't agree, even if it is a thoughtful quality reply.
What struck me the most was your wish to delete all your content. Taking your ball, and going home. That shows how you approach the community: with ego over sharing knowledge.
1. Absolutely my ego is involved, it always is, even when I claim that it isn't.
2. I only answered one question, and as that one answer was flagged, I don't actually think it was still visible on the site to other users. And even if it was, everybody (especially myself) seems to agree that it was not helpful. So what would be the harm if I had the option of deleting my account?
3. Who am I and why does my opinion matter? I can't answer that. I blog. You like it, you don't like it. You upvote or you don't. There are no rules about who is and who isn't fit to opine about anything at all. That's the beauty and the hideous reality of the Internet. I would never suggest that I have any particular qualification for writing words except that I do write. The same goes for software.
4. I have no problem whining about how Quora isn't a community in my blog. And you have no problem whining about my blog post in a public forum. We seem to have a lot in common, maybe we should be friends.
UPDATE: I should make something clear: I have nothing against Quora. I am not predicting its demise. From what I have seen of SO, such sites have a lot of potential and perform a valuable service. All I am saying about Quora is that I realize that I am looking for a social experience, and Quora is looking for answers to questions. That's not a bad thing, just not the same thing.
You answered a question with a question, possibly a wise question, but nevertheless an obtuse reaction to the questioner's want of tactical knowledge. You were downvoted once and decided that one person's lack of appreciation of nuance meant the service as a whole has none, and that it wasn't for you.
I quickly conclude from this that you are quick to conclusions. I've found many topics on Quora which have accreted answers which encompass a range of nuance and even questions in kind. I may have even downvoted some of those answers, but I didn't do so in hopes that anyone would stop using the service.
In re: whether you just don't want to be on Quora or you are predicting its demise, the title of your post does allude to a certain implacable finality...
I did not get that vibe at all, but perhaps that's because I've been following raganwald as a blogger and a poster on HN for years. He's definitely the kind of guy I'd like sit down and have a beer with.
It is surprisingly common on Quora: the wording, or the relation with the perceived promises of the service is indeed problematic. So far, the majority of people who left after (their answer) being labeled Not helpful have come back within a week.
Interesting. That says to me that their reasons for leaving were more over hurt feelings than reganwald's distinction between knowledge compendium and community. Do you agree, or do you think something else is going on?
Looking at the history, I saw that this neat and tidy question was originally a sloppy mess. Suddenly I felt cheated - here I was answering someone who had asked a sensible well written question ... except they hadn't.
I had a similar realisation that I wasn't answering to help someone, but to help future search engine results, which is less endearing.