My problem with Quora is that it is very difficult to penetrate the inner sanctum and feel welcome in the community.
You used to be able to gain recognition with thorough answers to domain-specific questions. But if you take a look at a lot of the "trending" answers on Quora, they all seem to be written by the same 10 Quora power users (Mark Bodnick, Garrick Saito, Venkatesh Rao, etc..)
The problem not so much the existence of these power users but the fact that they seem to only upvote amongst themselves and contribute to each others boards, creating a very exclusive feeling.
I don't think the low-quality general answers from some of the high volume contributors really matter; I'm a lot more into the niche experts, and Quora makes it easy to find those people. (Marc Bodnick upvotes are so common as to be essentially content free, although his answers are great; there are a lot of users who contribute lots of crap with no actual knowledge, across a range of categories, and a number of users who are only contributing in very well defined areas of expertise. e.g. Gus Fuldner's PCI related answers are great, and there are a lot of domain experts and people with first-hand knowledge who post on Quora.
If you have a problem with Quora, follow better users and better topics.
The boards product is IMO pretty ill advised. Quora is doing it because they want to be a repository, easily searched, of a lot of interesting information, but they didn't take into account the second order effects of attracting a lot of boards users to Quora.
The funny thing for me is that the OP joined Quora (I think) during the big wave of idiots in December 2010. ("Scoblegate"). People said all the same things about death of Quora then, and in June 2010 when it opened up to the public. I suspect the average IQ of Quora users has been in strict decline ever since the first user was added after Charlie and Adam.
I joined Quora soon after it launched, thought it was kinda cool, forgot about it, and yes, then rejoined again sometime in the fall of 2010. There was a nice linguistics community built up for a while (I'm a linguistics undergrad) until everything kind of fell apart. Quora didn't know how to separate people very well, so people interested in memes gradually crowded everything out.
BUT I didn't actually have any problems at all with Quora (at least, nothing notable) until the launch of Boards. In fact, I really enjoyed the linguistics, philosophy, chemistry, biology, theology, travel, and cooking communities. I mostly ignored the Quora superusers and focused on niche experts, like you mentioned, but eventually it was just too much.
Perhaps I will revamp my profile when I get the time, start from scratch, and things will work out better the second time around.
Ah, I shouldn't have assumed; although even Feb 2011 is early enough to see before and after boards.
Have you seen any positive use of Boards? I haven't -- even Marc Bodnick's boards are pretty mediocre, although I don't think they drag the site down like the others.
Survey questions are a worse thing than boards, though, I think. Getting rid of both would be great, but if I could only get rid of one...
Joke questions by people who are already on the site, if they're a small percentage of the total, and easily filtered out, aren't that big a problem for me. Survey questions basically attract and retain the formspring crowd. Better filtering should prevent you from seeing content you don't like, but in the long run, the second order effects will take over :(
There's quite a lot of self-promotion going on as well. I haven't done a real survey, so my perception might be off, but I feel like I run across more not-that-great self-cites/self-links in answers than at, for example, StackExchange. I mean, it's fine to link to something of yours (text, software, startup) that is high-quality and directly relevant to the question, but Quora has a lot of answers where the blog/company/self promotion feels pretty blatant.
(An alternate hypothesis is that StackExchange has just has much of that submitted, but that its voting/moderation works better.)
Quora.com has slightly higher link authority than 'new to the internet' site X, so putting as many links to X in Quora boards is a form of search engine optimization (SEO).
As a longtime online community manager, this piece strikes me as another entry in the time-honored tradition of "this place changed and now I don't like it" complaints. Yes, everything changes. No, it's not the same as when you joined. That's not Quora, that's life.
It reflects the lack of content in the article, which boils down to, "things changed so I'm leaving." Lincoln isn't claiming that Quora is doing fine. (At least not in this comment.)
I find it useful to be reminded that as a species mankind hasn't figured out how to grow things without changing them (and so exposing them to the possibility of decline).
Change for change sake isn't always good but in this case its understandable why Quora is changing (more users = more $) and it's too early to say that Quora is dying because of the lowering of the average user IQ. If Quora is in danger of becoming a less popular version of Yahoo Answers it need only make some new changes.
I was going to say the same thing. This happens in every. single. online community.
Community launches with savvy early adopters. The success starts to bring in new people. The community slowly begins to evolve. Early adopters start complaining that all the new people are ruining it.
"Yeah, I think once we get to 100,000 it could start to get too big. I’m OK with how big it is today. It is a lifestyle business for me—I’m just running this thing and I have a few employees and we’re all happy. What’s better than that?"
He has money. The employes are paid. No need to sell to google.
$5 + one-week filter weeds out people without sufficient prefrontal cortex size (i.e., they don't have patience and can't understand the value of a future payout).
Oh, there're plenty of idiots on MetaFilter. $5 curbs growth but is no indicator of intelligence. Trust me.
Give credit where credit is due: MeFi's moderation team is hands-down the best on the Internet. It's astonishing how much shit they have to deal with and how good they are at keeping the site civil and high-quality without pushing too many buttons.
>"It was a turning point I happened to catch at its birth."
Really? Because I'm pretty sure myself and many others caught it when the T-echo Chamber was trying to sell us on this new message board system that was going to make a lot of money and change the game.
Quora was an online community that happened to be "cool", so it attracted intelligent people which made the content fantastic. But nothing they were doing, in my opinion, was especially original. And as has been pointed out, if you try to scale up an online community, you deal with more and more noise. Predictably, that happened.
I apologize for the past tense; I realize Quora still exists, and nothing I or the author says has any real bearing on where it goes from here, or whether or not it is successful in the future. But I do know that I've gone from using it occasionally to using it never.
You pretty much nailed it. Quora was a fad for the valley's elite. It was launched with a critical mass of the right people that pretty much everyone in tech had reason to jump on board right away.
But if you grow this quickly you're also likely to implode this quickly, especially with the fundamental conflict of interest between startup vs community curation. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to make a great community is to prioritize that over profit and growth. That's why HN, MetaFilter, and countless smaller communities and boards can thrive long-term, but "community" startups like Digg, Reddit and Quora tend to go to shit. The closest I've seen to bucking the trend is Stack Overflow, but that's due to subject matter focus, phenomenal long-term utility, and abysmal competition, and even there it's hard to argue it's still as great as it was a couple years ago.
It was a fad for the Silicon elite but it COULD have been so much more. There were actual scientists, historians, etc. getting involved and those people could have made it awesome. The reason Quora faltered was because of startup/investor interests. They didn't seem to be curious intellectual types actually interested in the knowledge curation, they just seemed to have hit upon a good business idea.
Boards had a high cost/benefit in the wrong vectors. While they acquired a very low-barrier (i mean low IQ requirement) feature that has great SEO and pageviews benefits, it had a high cost of increasing noise and diluting the Q&A DNA of the product. What i didn't understand was why didn't they go into more related and deeper dimensions of Q&A like interviews, product FAQs, debate, surveys and polls. These are branches of the same tree with lesser noise penalty than a 'board that you can cram ANY kind of content'.
There is one explanation for this move though. Pinterest-envy.
That's a really good point I hadn't considered - diving into Q&A deeper. When boards were announced I was not a fan at all and don't use them. Your suggestions would definitely fit better, imho.
Thanks. Theres plenty of evidence that these are popular. Reddit's Ask me Anything, poll apps (real-time) and the rest are ripe for a market leader to emerge.
It's easy to understand why — once Quora understood it was attracting the kind of online socialites who like to boost their egos and flaunt their intellect (which is by no means 100% of the community, just a loud majority), they accustomed their site to a new demographic.
There seems to be an over-active "troll" patrol on Quora as well.
If you ask a question or present a point of view that's outside of conventional thinking, its common to see those views lambasted in the comments. Quora is definitely not a place for "things you can't say" (http://paulgraham.com/say.html).
I still find a lot of value in Quora, but I guess directionally speaking, you're probably right that the mainstream audience is lowering the standard. Not sure if I heard you point that out, but you probably meant to say that it's possible to build a horizontal site that fits the needs of niche audiences - it's all just a question of product decisions. Twitter is a good example of how it can be done the right way: my stream is completely different from my wife's, and we both love using Twitter.
I recognize that user segmentation is easier to implement on a site that's focused on the social graph as opposed to on the interest graph, but I am not convinced that it's impossible. Ie, how about requiring social credit in a certain vertical before being able to ask a question in that same vertical? That credit could be earned with good answers to existing questions, or inherited from relevant 3rd party sites with applicable currency.
The problem was that there was no barrier to entry, and therefore there was no way to prevent people from misusing it.
The intellectual value of Quora dropped as more and more people who had no reservations about posting inherently useless questions joined. If there was a system for filtering out questions from less authoritative or knowledgeable figures, they could have prevented this.
Ah, now how does one find the sweet spot between this and say Stack Exchange? Many times, I have heard users complain about the barrier for Stack Exchange and overzealous moderators. There is not really a way to please everyone.
I never really understood how moderation works on Quora so I assumed there was none. Not to say that I hate Quora (I like it a lot), I just feel there is nothing preventing it from becoming Yahoo Answers in a couple years time. No barrier, no moderation.
Moderation is pretty active on the site, in fact, users who have interacted with Quora moderation consider the site to be heavily moderated... you are right -- there is a sweetspot somewhere, but even that is just a sweetspot for a small subset of users. Nobody will ever please everyone.
I found the comment about Quora being an encyclopedia of sorts really interesting.
This sort of site would actually fill a niche between something like StackExchange and Wikipedia: thorough, comprehensive articles (although, to be fair, these can be found on SE as well) but with more relaxed editorial standards (no notability requirements or ban on original research).
That being said, a for-profit start-up is probably the wrong medium for such a site. Imagine if Wikipedia were for-profit. There's a good chance that the pressure to monetize all those raw page views would have degraded the quality of the actual content.
For example, I've been using Wikipedia basically since it started. However, I never created an account until about a week ago (to fix a typo). I would have contributed sooner, but I never had anything important to say, and I knew that if I broke the rules or failed to uphold the editorial standards my edits would be removed anyway (admittedly, Wikipedia may have gone too far with the rules in some cases, but that's not really the point).
Contrast that with Reddit, where I've had an account for some time and comment regularly. I do so even knowing I might be down-voted because that's what the site encourages. Making a dopey comment on Reddit once in awhile (accidentally or on-purpose) is just part of Reddit. Making a dopey edit on Wikipedia destroys the value of the site.
In order for Quora to fill the role the OP wanted it to fill it probably would have had to be non-profit.
tldr; Quora could have been Wikipedia-lite. But Wikipedia works because profit isn't important, so quality can be put before monetizing traffic and creating non-essential "engagement".
Since it may not be obvious, questions like http://www.quora.com/Communication/If-you-had-a-conversation... won't show up in feeds unless you follow the Joke Questions topic. There are several other topics applied to content that doesn't have broad appeal like Quora Community. The alternative is to actively delete questions like this but the reality is that the site is too active for that to be feasible, also, regular users aren't doing the same kind of content curation that they used to. Questions used to get quickly edited or flagged, now they just sit there until they get activity and users just answer them without fixing grammar, punctuation etc... so part of the problem is that the number of people who care about curating content hasn't scaled with the over-all population.
Just to clarify, I am not a power user. If anything, I'm less active than the average Quora user. My problem isn't really with the content of Quora, that's just a manifestation of a larger change that is happening — a shift from a Q&A site to a social network.
A successful social network is always going to have a lot of content you don't want. That's why you need to be filtering the sources of that content constantly.
Quora is an interesting case because it plays nicely with Twitter. I've found if you keep your Twitter feed curated, your Quora feed will be well curated too.
If someone is consistently tweeting junk, unfollow.
If there's a Quora board that has a ton of lousy questions, unfollow.
Don't feel committed to following someone once you have, and don't worry about whether your observations about a person's or board's signal to noise ratio are accurate or not - if a content creator belongs in your content world, they'll get back in one way or another.
Start right now. If you find useful comments in this thread, follow all commenters on Twitter and Quora. Best way to curate is to add more quality to differentiate from junk.
Power users, ranking users or in any way giving precedence to users with a history of popularity has been the death knell for a number of online communities. It's consistently a poor way of identifying users who make positive contributions to the site, and it's a consistently good way to alienate new and occasional users.
I suspect there's two reasons for this. The first is that popularity is not necessarily indicative of quality. Take a look at Reddit's front page today, and you'll have a hard time picking out anything worth reading from the memes and jokes. Popularity normally reflects the lowest common denominator. Rewarding users for being popular inevitably leads to users rewarded for pandering to popular opinion, rather than for making insightful or meaningful contributions.
The second is that engagement level rarely is indicative of comment quality. The internet is a vast place with a huge number of users, and as a number of studies (particularly on Wikipedia [1]) have shown, a users commitment to the project or website doesn't correlate with contribution quality. Essentially, contributions from a new or rarely commenting user are just as likely to be worthy as those from long standing members.
I've been actively commenting and engaging forums, social news sites and other online communities which allow commenting on topics since 2002, and time and time again I've seen sites grow in popularity and decrease in quality. My personal desire in a site is one with a fairly active membership which both introduces interesting topics and news stories and provides interesting commentary on them. I enjoy engaging in discussion about a wide range of things, and I do my best to find websites that allow and encourage that. I think perhaps the most interesting thing I've observed is that communities with a fairly high barrier for entry - perhaps a payment of some sort - and aggressive moderation policies manage to maintain a consistently good level of discussion over much longer periods of time.
There shouldn't be "a community" there should be multiple communities, otherwise there will always be an 'in crowd'
Second issue: quora has a multidimensional filtering problem and this goes back to point 1. There will always be an element of digg/reddit/4chan in everything. To try and remove it is futile, just try to keep it discernable from the content you care about, maybe the 4chan stuff is your bag and you don't want the high brow shit, so be it ...
Did anyone else get an email survey from the Quora Data Team asking for feedback on the site? I got this the other day, seems like maybe it was targeted at people who hadn't used Quora much in a while but had recently logged in?
Introduction of boards made me to move away from browsing Quora for long hours.
Now, to get the best of Quora would be to read the weekly digest sent out in e-mail and the Forbes column where the best Quora answers are posted.
* You have to use a "real" name.
* Their members are predominantly white upper middle class tech/finance/marketing professionals - occasionally some Asians, but mainly from California or NY.
* There's no good way to browse the site - if there is, it's not easy to find.
* Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems for high-IQ communities.
> Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems for high-IQ communities.
That's what I like about HN. Groupthink is indeed present (especially when it comes to technical topics such as programming languages or OSes - we all have a strong incentive to promote what we use), but not nearly as much as any other online community I'm aware of. There's a recurring pattern that I like here: usually, when a submission argues X, the top comment in the comment thread criticizes/refutes X. By hearing the two sides of an argument, one can better form an opinion.
On the contrary, HN groupthink is quite severe (although it has decreased somewhat since the time that comment scores were no longer displayed). I guess it depends on perspective: if you're in the middle of a box, the box looks like the entire universe.
I disagree on comment scores. Not having them makes bandwagoning more likely because I tended to not upvote comments that already have high scores. It does likely make the data more useful to pg though. On technical questions it is painful not having comment scores.
That is exactly what I mean. Before the change you would see a thread of two groups of people with alternating low and high comment scores having a discussion with each other, and it would be clear what HN's groupthink opinion is. Now you have to actually read the comments and make up your own mind. That is true even for technical discussions: the hivemind is not always right.
Why is the metadata so important to so many people on HN? I don't understand it.
Is it a mechanism to find the best comments in a thread? Is it a visualization issue? Is it ego? Is it a voting mechanism to know what others think is important? I honestly do not know.
How about if there was a glyph or color that denoted the amount of votes,views,etc? I think one of the issues was putting a numeric score on an item encouraged upvoting already popular comments.
May be some intelligent coloring would be a good replacement. I just need something that would tell me what comments are likely to be more informative.
For me, it is visualization issue. I used to be able to skim through the comments much faster. Sometimes there was a comment with tons of votes deeply nested in a thread and I would pay attention to it.
I think it's actually better now than it was. There are a number of contrarian voices in each contentious thread arguing firmly that there's more to an issue than perhaps simple analysis would give credit for. There used to be more of an Ayn Randian/"supermen" feel, more people patting each other on the backs for being superior creatures cos entrepreneurs are the end point of evolution. The site seems a fair deal saner, from my point of view.
The nature of systematic conversation ensures there will always be groupthink. Systems are designed to function in certain ways and deny other approaches to get their desired result. The result is that people who want this system flock to it, and people who want to somehow act counter to this system are going to be a minority that's possibly chased away by the system itself. Options like downvoting and "ranking" comments" and flagging inappropriate topics basically say that there is a right way to behave or talk, there are topics that are better than others. Then either people are attracted to the sites that reinforce their worldview or they're conditioned by these rules to decide there're right and wrong ways to think or to be – I'm not sure which it is. Probably a little of both.
That's why I don't think down votes should be used to express disagreement (although pg doesn't share this opinion). I personally frequently up vote comments I disagree with if I feel they are thoughtful and bring an interesting perspective. The variety of ideas is important and should be encouraged.
Up/down is the wrong direction for the arrows I think. Left <--> right, meaning on-topic/off-topic ? One of the problems I think is that there are so many dimensions represented by two simple little arrows that it is difficult for the system (the web software itself) to discern the intent, so it turns into a popularity (I agree,I disagree) button.
But if you had a button for each piece of information it would look like
[] well written
[] well thought out
[] agree
[] disagree
[] poorly written
[] funny
[] off topic
For bonus points they would be in a random order in the UI so people wouldn't develop muscle memory voting on comments.
I have thought about the On/Off-Topic button as well for some time now. I think it's a good concept to try out, mainly because it is not judgmental - Sometimes I like following an Off-Topic discussion and I've had a couple of good ones on HN. But most of the time, it can be very distracting - separating it from the main discussion is worth a shot.
As for more detailed buttons - I think that would make it too complex. Slashdot has established the same concept, probably based on the same reasoning (mostly to distinguish between "just" funny and actually insightful comments). Can't speak that much about how successful it is, maybe somebody else has more insight here.
Yeah, the buttons get out of hand, but the information they would represent is greatly needed. And how do you encourage people to rate what they read and interacted with? Based on the stats people post about the amount of traffic driven by an HN or Reddit submission ... the vast majority of users don't interact via any sort of voting mechanism at all.
I am working on a site now that is heavily based on passive activity voting, users have no idea how their actions are being used by the site to rank itself. Their inputs have much less weight than purposeful actions where both parties are aware of the event.
It is almost like you need an agent that votes in certain public ways (sentiment analysis,summarization,etc) to decide if comments snarky, funny, off topic, etc.
I guess that would fall down once you get to mixed comments - something can be snarky, funny, off- and on-topic at the same time. Human conversational interaction is just bloody hard to quantify. The first few steps are always simple and then it gets hard fast.
Passive voting sounds interesting, though - would that work via Javascript? How would you determine what the user is focused on?
Finally - I think it's important not to get ahead of ourselves - because I think that's what happened at Slashdot. Talking about new classifications is all nice and well, but it's useless when you don't have a clear plan what it should result in and how it would engage people. You need a clear use case.
For instance - my proposal about an off-topic discussion button is pretty straight forward. People would see the immediate benefit: Hey, this can help us make conversation less wasteful and save me scanning time as it separates the cream from the crop. I think it wouldn't have a problem enticing engagement, too - nothing drives engagement in nerds like being annoyed, so they'd click that button.
On Slashdot, I can theoretically reduce a conversation to exclude all the funny-only comments so I'm left with just the cream. But seriously - how often does anybody use that? Once you give people elaborate personal filters, you actually end up having them worry whether they're missing something. Which is why they can only be consistent and transparent. If I reduce a comment thread on Slashdot to exclude the funny business and see that one of the nodes has a HUGE conversation, I wonder whether I should check it out and maybe end up annoyed because it's just a chain of memes after all. If there was a way in HN to mark things as off-topic and have that a clear process that is always applied, I think I would be more confident in skipping. Mainly because if it was broken, the community would complain until it is fixed.
It's a social problem unlikely to be solved by a technical solution. When it's an open flat democracy and votes from hordes of new users have the same weight as elder ones it is pointless. They'd just start flagging for spam or offtopic to hide dissenting comments (like it's done in youtube).
On the converse, if the older people can amass power and karma new people can't move it.
I don't have a solution. I am not sure there is one or that it could be "fixed"
Maybe semi-intelligent Eliza like agents that constantly clean the place up.
Stackoverflow has done a pretty decent job I think. Wikipedia could use some work.
----
I think the base set of rules need to be codified by the system. The users can guide each other and the system, but the system itself should be stable.
This is a tricky one. Of course every human community has some measure groupthink. However, when people complain about groupthink here and you investigate their comment history you often find a confrontational or rude tone paired with unconvincing arguments. Much like "Fanboy", "Groupthink" is a sort unassailable conversation-ending ad-hominem that people trot out when they are frustrated, with or without reason...
I think there is groupthink in HN even on non-technical topics, but it's much more subtle. It's about that every problem should be resolved using a rational argument. I think arguments appealing to intuition, emotion or authority are likely to get down voted. I am not saying it is a bad thing, that bias is part of why I read HN and not some tabloid. However, I don't think rational thought is perse the best answer to every question, because it's inviting to make incorrect assumptions.
I do get downvoted less for voicing angry opinions around here, which is refreshing and polite. Don't underestimate the value of politeness... especially when you want to voice angry opinions.
Why does it matter that they are predominantly white? I agree that the other things you mention like class might be important. But race, seriously? How do you even know they are white anyway?
The first one was the dealbreaker for me. I signed up using part of my real name instead of my full name. Within hours I was blocked from adding anything to Quora. As a result, I haven't been back since signing up.
Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind
Is it groupthink that I pointed out your blatant racism? Message boards the world over are full of people saying wrong, obnoxious, ignorant things and then foolishly thinking that a negative response is just because everyone else is prey to groupthink, etc. It is a short-circuit of self-analysis.
The poster didn't complain about a bias. They complained about a perceived demographic composition.
Detroit is too black. Vancouver has too many Indians.
How do those sound? There is no difference between what the poster said and those statements, beyond the common acceptance that you can be racist against whites, even if just attacking the imaginary demographic of a group.
I believe that, technically, the term would be "discriminatory" in this case, white people being in a position of relative power and privilege in the West (and most of the world, really. White people are esteemed all over, even if just in relation to other foreigners).
But it just isn't the same as you said. The difference here is that this is a question-and-answers forum, and the lack of diversity, as in the homogeneity of values and experiences, might be indeed undesirable.
Though I wasn't able to quickly find an study that showed that homogeneity begets groupthink...
I get it: You're a racist. "Diversity" indeed. I honestly have no idea what the racial make-up of Quora is because it neither seemed relevant, nor have I sought it out. I don't even know how you'd even know in many cases.
But it's too white? Give me a break. The only reason that bullshit, obnoxious, offensive statement gets a pass is white-guilt, a bunch of people afraid they offend someone looking for, ha ha, "diversity".
You used to be able to gain recognition with thorough answers to domain-specific questions. But if you take a look at a lot of the "trending" answers on Quora, they all seem to be written by the same 10 Quora power users (Mark Bodnick, Garrick Saito, Venkatesh Rao, etc..)
The problem not so much the existence of these power users but the fact that they seem to only upvote amongst themselves and contribute to each others boards, creating a very exclusive feeling.