I'm still unable to get a clear answer to the basic question "Why should I use Quora?"
I work at a startup in Austin, I read HN daily, I enjoy news about SV startups, etc. Still, I haven't found a compelling reason to spend any substantial time on Quora. I'm happy to read a particularly insightful answer when I see the occasional link pop up on another site, but that doesn't make me want to search Quora for other information.
I wonder if my disinterest in Quora is common among developers outside of SV?
If I, a tech savvy developer at a startup, don't find the idea of Quora particularly interesting, why would Average Joe be interested in joining the community?
You don't need it, cause you've got StackOverflow and GitHub to build your rep, leaving aside the 'just launch' of putting your own technical talent out there.
If you're not in a tech field, say as a screenwriter in Hollywood—excellent Quora use case, btw—it's a great way to build your brand and increase your chances of discovery/personal breakout. Quora helped me launch my career, working with Startup Visa. It's gotten me political meetings and was warmly received as I'm applying for a fellowship.
Quora's a publishing platform with an increasing number of ways to get into publications. Right now, the two big ones are Forbes, Huffington Post, but I'm sure they're expanding in that direction, based on the utter awesomeness of their weekly and daily digests in contrast with the eh launches of most of their technical additions, from credits on to views.
As a political person, I love it, definitely the best place for thoughtful, civil political discussion on the web, even if that has its failure modes.
I've been a user since 1/10, I'm an admin, and I 'live' in a non-technical topic space on Quora. You can see why my user experience has been amazing, yeah?
I think she's very insightful, and as a community we have a lot to learn from her experience, at least testing the edge cases and failure modes she's tripped through.
...so actually, I did not 'provoke' that post, but was rather 'provoked' by it (just a little). It was the first thing showing in my stream upon signing up.
Quora is just so much better than Ask MetaFilter, Reddit's Q&A/advice subreddits (/r/askreddit, /r/answers, /r/doesanybodyelse etc.), or (dare I say it) Yahoo Answers for nontrivial, factual answers dependent on expertise. Quora is for people who benefit from or enjoy such questions and answers. The longtime existence of all these Q&A communities shows that there is a market for it. There's the most overlap with Ask MeFi I think, but Quora is far better at zeroing in on a good answer, when it exists.
I have a lot of bad things to say about Reddit, but certain focused subreddits are excellent for getting good answers from experts. AskHistorians and AskScience are among the best available forums of their kind on the internet.
Part of my reluctance to use it is i'm not sure it's ever going to give the investors the return they demand, and I don't see it surviving or staying wholesome in the process.
This is increasingly my bar for participating in crowdsourced or user generated content based startups. How much is my investment of time and energy going to be squandered when they don't make it; how likely are they to make it.
I'm still pissed off at all the DailyBooth pictures just stuck in limbo because the management team lost interest post acqui-hire and haven't done anything to help folks get their data - valuable pictures capturing moments in time in some cases - back from the zombie company.
If I, a tech savvy developer at a startup, don't find the idea of Quora particularly interesting, why would Average Joe be interested in joining the community?
Have some reasons :-)
* Many people like helping people and answering there questions. Techie folk have hackernews and stackexchange and perlmonks and whatever. This is a place for everybody else.
* It's not subject-specific which makes it more attractive and useful to people who have expertise in multiple areas
* The combination of the multiple-areas-of-expertise and the social-network stuff means that I can very easily come across fun/interesting stuff
* It's fairly open and friendly compared to some Q&A communities. My impression has been that, because it's not subject specific folk, seem to give greater leeway on "dumb" questions that would be given on a narrow "expert" forum.
* <motivation class="selfish">I have had work via Quora. Because it covers all areas of expertise, and gives some kind of levelling information on expertise, it is a market to some extent. Folk who need - for example - expertise if folk who do agile/ux transitions and integrations it's pretty easy to find the people who answer questions around that topic. And hire 'em.</motivation>
I've no idea if they have a sane business model. The hiding answers thang is icky. You may be better served by other communities for the stuff that you're interested in. But I do think there are lots of reasons for folk to use the current site, and those people aren't well served by any other Q&A service that I've played with.
There is actually a question on Quora: How Should I Use Quora? It's been answered only once. It should be made into a board and employees, admins and reviewers encouraged to answer it (as well as users). It could be sent to all new users, who have the option to opt out of following it. I link to it in the follow-up, The Quora Crisis: How Long Can The Center Hold? Have you read it? Yay, Hacker News! Grateful for the conversation... Grazie mille
http://socialtimes.com/the-quora-crisis-how-long-can-the-cen...
Being a tech-savvy developer at a startup doesn't have a lot to do with whether you'll like Quora.
Quora appeals to people whose intellectual curiosity about a certain set of topics is strong enough that they will endure a bunch of crap from egomaniacal Quora power-brokers.
I wanted to like Quora. I really did. Theoretically, Quora should be a wet dream for me: insightful discussions, check. Answers from bright people, check. A place to learn, to read, to spend hours on soaking in information, check. I never could have guessed that spending time on Quora would turn out to be more of a nightmare.
As the article points out, Quora is a dictatorship, which doesn't really care about what the community wants. Which would be fine, except that the dictators don't know what they're doing. Their policies, and the general vibe of the community, just aren't welcoming. I don't contribute to Quora because I self-moderate myself out of posting. Why shouldn't I post? I have insights to contribute, as much as any other person. The problem is that Quora allows so little room for free expression in a world that is crying out for originality. Don't use your real name? Your account is locked and you can't post. Didn't directly address the question? Your answer downvoted into oblivion. Spelled something wrong? Here let me edit your post. The community they've attracted doesn't help either. There are a lot of nice people they've somehow convinced to stay on Quora, but I can't help but get the vibe that a lot of users think they're the sh, and how dare you disagree with them.
The founder of reddit once said that the philosophy he had towards running reddit was like hosting a party - he couldn't just allow users free reign to do whatever they pleased, but he had to make it an inviting and fun place for users. Otherwise the party would suck. Well, if reddit is a fun party with alcohol, humor, entertainment, and cat pictures, along with the occasional smart person to learn from, then Quora is like hanging out with a group of bitter, pretentious intellectuals who wield their answers like weapons, at a party with no alcohol allowed.
Quora has found its niche among intellectuals who don't mind the stringent rules, and that's great. It's just not for me, and I suspect from what I've observed that it's not for a lot of other people too. Which means that "Quora will never grow to to the size of facebook or reddit". Let's temper our expectations, people. Quora is fine for what it is.
Are there lessons to be learned from Quora?
I think so. I've thought for a long time about what kind of site I would enjoy spending time on. It would definitely have intellectuals, like Quora has, but they'd need to be more of a reddit or HN variety. Ie. treating each other civilly and unpretentious. I've written up my thoughts here for a new startup that will fill a niche Quora and Wikipedia are not serving:
Wikipedia doesn't allow pages about just any topic. See: Kate Middleton's dress. Also, it's incredibly hard to become a mod for them. Finally, there is no room for self-expression, as editors and contributors are mostly anonymized through its process. So Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia, but not a good place for a discussion.
Quora fills the niche of intelligent communal discussion, only its vision doesn't allow wit, misspellings, anonymity, or humor, and seems to have been taken over by domineering powers-that-be, so much so that the party just isn't fun anymore.
Pozium can attract not only intellectuals, but laymen looking to learn as well. First, there are all the ex-Quorans who were put off by the site. Pozium will be a party of intellectuals who don't have a stick up their behind. You will learn, as well as have fun. Everyone will be able to contribute, and no one will feel shamed or intimidated.
This will attract the second type of user: the more casual intellectual.
I remember a post from Quora by this college girl who, while obviously not an Einstein, could still have contributed insights of value. In what seemed to be her last post, the girl said she was intimidated by others and wondered if Quora "was for people like her". So there is a niche being unserved, filled with people like this girl who don't feel welcome. If Quoran's mean IQ is in the 130s and 140s then perhaps the 110-130 IQ crowd is not being served.
Anyone interested in potentially starting something up?
Read more here: http://pozium.com
You describe some dire, humorless Quora, not the one I use. I've seen plenty of misspellings. Founder (and Harvard grad) Charlie Cheever used "its" instead of "it's" several times in one answer. I've made typos that I went back and corrected myself.
You briefly mentioned Reddit, it sounds like there's a lot of potential overlap in the demographic (and certain subreddits, especially AskReddit). You might want to add a "How is it different from Reddit".
Also, I'm still struggling to understand the vision from your description here and there. I hope you can find a way to be more succinct. The main example I see here is Kate Middleton's dress, which afaict would be fine on Quora.
There is definitely overlap, which is why I mentioned reddit :)
Overlap doesn't have to be a bad thing. Reddit is one my favorite sites. users can visit reddit as well as visit pozium.
Pozium wouldn't be link-based. Users would publish essays or insights or ask questions. Pozium is based around concepts. Not article links.
Sorry I didn't want to go into pozium on HN. I linked to a more articulate description of the vision.
There is certainly humor on Quora. I wasn't sure 'jokes' were appreciated. Your examples show that I was wrong. But then from where did I get that impression that overall the site just felt too serious for me? I don't think they're managing the user experience very well.
> But then from where did I get that impression that overall the site just felt too serious for me? I don't think they're managing the user experience very well.
I am sorry but that is exactly the kind of overall experience that I would like on Quora. For everything pun-ny and funny, I can visit the dozens of forums that are out there already, like Reddit for example. Unfortunately, for me at least, I am unable to find very articulate and brilliant threads, content and not humour, on Reddit - either they do not exist or the admins do a very poor job at SEO. More importantly, nearly always are there people who would mess with the mood of the thread using a lame-ass pun or in most cases dumb wordplay initiating a series of similar worthless replies all over. Of course, you would mention that in some of the more serious forums they would be downvoted to hell but then they are no better than Quora anyway, according to your standards.
> "intellectuals who don't have a stick up their behind"
And please stop calling names.
I think that Quora obviously is loved by many, otherwise it wouldn't have grown to the size it did.
But for every wonderful experience you have, I can point to others who've had a poor one. Can we agree that both of us could be right?
I agree though. Something about the way responders write just rubs me the wrong way. Like everyone is trying their hardest to sound intelligent. It's just not fun and doesn't seem authentic to me the way HN or reddit do.
I completely agree, if your point of view or style of reply doesn't fit into the Quora mindset, it'll get downvoted or blocked. It seems they don't really like when you don't think like them.
This article applies to just about every single internet discussion community I've ever been a part of since I started using the internet back in 1999.
First, a community is founded with a small handful of users. Those small handful of users all know the topic well, so good discussion arises. Those small number of users all know each other, and form a bond. Once word gets out that the community is a place where high quality discussion occurs, people start joining in droves. The small handful of people who were there since the beginning start feeling like that community "belongs" to them, and start acting hostile towards the "noobs". You also have this phenomenon where the new users desperately want to be "accepted" by the establishment, so they'll suck up to the core users, which results in cliquish behavior and it really kills the site for anyone who just wants to discuss and learn about he topic/hobby the community was founded on.
It's happened to Something Awful, JetCareers, the entirety of usenet, and yes even Hacker News.
Yup you nailed it. I've been doing online communities since 1990 in one shape or another. This pattern happens in them all. It is hard for owners / managers of such communities to avoid this.
I like the theory described by the spiral of silence and it somehow seems relevant to the continuing discussion about HNs apparent demise (in the eyes of some). it seems like quora successfully implemented a system, that leaves a community largely true to it's original state, by giving dominant admins/moderators the tools to block unwanted content and to promote their own views. left aside whether this fosters better or worse answers, it apparently doesn't help growing a noticeable community and I'm glad that HN didn't go that same way.
This seems to be a common misunderstanding. Admins and moderators have no different powers than anyone else. I (not an admin and not a moderator) can collapse answers with "improvements needed" any day of the week. So can most anyone else. It takes a special kind of person and insults being flung to become edit-blocked, something that happened to my knowledge and according to Bodnick less than ten times in the history of Quora. The author of the linked piece was one of those people because, alas, she could not be asked to act like a reasonable human among reasonable humans, that is treat everyone as an equal and debate on the merits, not the perception of standing.
Promotion of views is the same. Spend six months on Quora and establish yourself as a knowledgeable person in one area (see: Michelin chef Jonas M Luster in food or former police officer Justin Freeman in law enforcement) and you will have credits to promote content, including your own. Your standing in answers is based on votes, your power to elicit answers or promote questions is also based on it. Nothing that does not happen anywhere else. No one on Quora becomes a "superuser" over night, those who spent months giving insightful answers all have.
This article is false. (Regardless of whether Quora will or will not grow.)
Many of the arguments should have been tested against Facebook: elitism didn't slow the spread of Facebook. In fact, it was likely a main driver of growth in the world's most popular website. It's not surprising Quora has been modeled after Facebook since Quora is made up of early Facebook alumni.
Many of the rest of the arguments apply to discussion websites in general. If you consider Wikipedia, for instance, scaling doesn't seem to be a problem. Taking Wikipedia is a good idea, since, despite what's been said, Quora is or should be a direct competitor to Wikipedia.
At a descriptive level, Quora isn't represented accurately.
Judging from the slant of the article, it seems the author is reacting to a bad experience on the site.
A subjective article cannot be false, silly person. It is evidently well-research and supported by evidence; that's as much as one can ask. You may disagree with it's stance, but that's another point. Get over it.
The difference between Quora and Facebook, is that me and my friends can upload photos of ourselves drunk and post wall posts of us swearing, and Facebook will be always a good product to the entire community despite this.
With Quora, the community isn't tied down to who you are friends with. There are no friend requests. On Quora, everyone is technically your "friend".
So with that said, it is not just enough to allow people to behave as bad as they want on Quora. If that happened, people would leave in disgust. If I was posting racist things on Facebook, only my friends would know and you would still be using Facebook regardless. On Quora it's not like that.
After a friend told me about Quora, I spent some time lurking and after a month or so I decided to just skip it. I saw a lot of the same behavior mentioned in the article. If you want a obvious glimpse, just subscribe to the Politics group.
I'm sure there's a core group of people who love and swear by it, it just seems most of the comments in the posts are usually one way traffic. You either agree or just get downvoted into oblivion.
For someone looking for a welcoming community, this is not the sort of impression you want to give new users.
This article makes Quora sound almost like Digg back in the day, with a select few users who work together to ensure they control most of the content on the site.
Quora has been a fine weekly newsletter. So what if most often you see a 25 year old millionaire against another 25 year old millionaire going about their gripe and appreciation of newly acquired money!
As a weekly email newsletter, I get nicely curated content without participating a minute of my time at the site.
Sounds like Digg but also like Stackexchange. The inmates are running the asylum. :-) I don't mind any of the sites, but that's just because I understand their limitations.
I can definitely understand being frustrated however if I wanted to contribute and felt like I was being continuously rebuffed for not being an 'insider'. That's pretty annoying.
I'm still on the fence about Quora. It has some of the best quality content anywhere according to my interests, but I'm naturally distrustful of Facebook mafia since I care about privacy and I find the auto-sharing stuff extremely irritating.
But as to the elitist / insider's club / groupthink accusations, my inclination is to ask what the alternative is? I mean if you don't impose some form of social norms that someone (I'm not personally passing a judgement) will interpret as elitism then inevitably you will face the Eternal September which spirals out of control and leads to evaporative cooling as you grow. I suppose they could be nicer about it, but it's better to please the people who provide value than to try to make everyone happy and eventually degrade into Yahoo! Answers.
This article is terrible. It starts with actual news and then descends into complaints about everything Clay Shirky talked about in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html , i.e. it's just like every computer network social space I've seen since 1988.
People seem to be running in to the same problem everywhere - online communities degrade in quality as they scale.
PG spoke of this (an essay perhaps?).
Why should we be surprised? Culture is the most important thing in a business, morals to a person. Why would we be able to get it right online at scale without a few hiccups (and a lot of dissent).
Why you cannot link to Quora answers? There seems to be a way to 'include' them by the way of some javascript - but I am way more careful when pasting javascript then when just using the anchor tag.
Anonymity (pseudo-anonymity) certainly has downsides but over the years I have found the better thoughts come from posters who are _not_ attaching themselves to a Real Name(TM) that is connected to a web site^W business that would love to attract more followers^W customers.
Anonymous comments have to stand on their own. They can't rely on name association. The reader has to evaluate them for their content, not their author. This is a good thing.
Another thing I have learned over many years of using the web is that intelligent people do not always make intelligent comments. We are all inconsistent; we're human. It's foolish to assume everything Joe the Self-Proclaimed Expert says is going to be worth reading. Sometimes he will say stupid things. By the same token people who in the real world might not be deemed intelligent can sometimes have some brilliant insights. It would be foolish to assume that every comment they make is worthless simply because of the name it's attached to. Anonymous commenting allows each comment to be evaluated individually. It addresses the inherent inconsistency of human comments and protects readers from making unwarranted assumptions. Unless of course they assume every anonymous post automatically falls into some category with respect to its content. IMO, that sort of thinking is the mark of web inexperience.
The notion of "experts" is vastly overrated. This is an idea used to sell advice and services. Socrates figured this out hundreds of years ago. Read what Socrates learned and you too will learn something abut "experts" and earned reputations as "authorities" on given subjects. Learn how to form questions. In learning, it is my opinion that questions, knowing how to formulate them, are far more important than answers.
The web is blissfully free from the hard sell of the "expert" while still being a great place to discover many types of "expertise". No one is demanding to see how many degrees or certifications anyone else has. No one cares about your "reputation". People are just interested in knowledge, no matter who it might come from. They can then evaluate it on their own. Without anyone telling them what to do or think.
This is not stopping some from trying to force their own system, with "experts" and "reputation" and so forth. In my opinion, none of them will scale. The main attraction of the web is that it is free from those sort of restraints. There are plenty of experts on the web, but they do not have to self-promote. They might not be trying to sell anything; maybe they just share their thoughts for the joy of sharing.
Anonymous posting is as close to pure thought, free from real world biases like identities, credentials and reputations, as we're going to get. Every thought can be evaluated on its own merits, irrespective of the submitter.
This is the best answer I've seen on here so far as to why Quora isn't ready for prime time, and why sites like Reddit will end up delivering better content over time. Sure, all of the atrocities mentioned (downvoting into oblivion, banning, etc) happen on Reddit too. However, when it happens there, I'll remain butthurt only as long as it takes to switch to any of my other accounts. The concept of karma exists there only to validate one's reputation to self, and not to validate one's reputation to others. By creating a more ephemeral concept of identity, Reddit has solved the 'ego' problem.
In the future, I see social networking sites dividing into one of two camps : sites like facebook, which are about vanity, and sites like Reddit, which are about content. It would be best for future entrepreneus to decide up front which camp they're in, long before they face the pickle Quora is currently suffering from.
Nice post. I like the approach from first principles. Looked at from this perspective, and if you'll excuse the vulgarism, Quora seems like an exercise in turd-polishing
It's ironic how the article talks about how the admins engage in censorship and a "spiral of silence" for minority views, but when an article talks about the spiral of silence and gets press, the ALL the admins are silent themselves. Oh the irony! Guilty conscience, much?
Seeing as I live in New York, I am by definition not part of the Silicon Valley in-crowd.
My experience on Quora has been extremely positive. Right now, it's one of the best online communities for quality of content.
People who call Quora a nasty community because of downvoting have no idea what they're talking about. Wikipedia in 2004-5 was nasty. Personal attacks all over the place, edit wars and tag teaming (troll raids by influential people, justified by the "3 revert rule"). There was one guy who created a bunch of sock puppet accounts and attempted to attribute them to me on a still-infamous hate page, in which he claimed about 50 accounts, most nonexistent, were my sock puppets when many of them were later established to be his. (Half the accounts weren't used for anything but have obscene names.) That is what I call nasty. Downvotes on Quora aren't anywhere close to that.
I haven't seen Quora get even on the same planet as what Wikipedia was when I last edited (which was more than 5 years ago).
I don't agree with the decision to collapse answers based on 1 downvote, but if I'm really interested in a question, I'll usually read all the answers anyway, so I don't find it to be a major hindrance. Besides, being downvoted isn't a big deal: fewer people read your answer; so what?
Quora's great, at least from my experience. It might be that I stay away from extremely charged topics (e.g. politics) but I've never encountered any of this stuff-- and I've seen it a lot on other internet communities.
I also live in NYC. I go on Quora a lot, and have contributed a decent amount of content, but I do feel that there is a lot of hype around it. The quality of the content is very good for some things (Machine Learning), for others (The Sopranos), not so much. I enjoy going on and reading content, but I cant see a situation where the site is ever mainstream.
One thing that really surprises me is how much some people think the speed of the site matters to the average user. I think the technology they built is amazing, as a software engineer, I am constantly impressed with everything they are doing. I have recommended the site to most of my non-tech friends and they laugh when I try to explain how cool that technology is (I even taught a few of them what Comet is). For the site to become mainstream, I think assumes most people are actually interested in reading/creating quality content - but that is the minority.
I'm a lurker on Quora, but would like to state that I've really enjoyed your answers on Quora. You're the only person I've actually bothered to go through the history of on Quora before.
Right, definitely an amazing answer from Mr. Church breaking down employee contributions and how to (if to) fire them! ++would recommend, answers do not contain bobcat
Sounds like the author got banned for excessive complaining on Quora and is exceptionally butthurt.
I'm a hard core Quora addict and have never encountered most of the things in this post. He's way off about the "elite". Yes there are people who get tons of upvotes and have huge followings but in every case I've seen it's because they are well known off of Quora or they give consistently amazing answers, often both.
It's not like Digg was where some random anonymous person has all this power. Quora power users don't even really have any power beyond knowing lots of people will read their answers, even then those answers still must be good to get upvotes.
The article was clearly well-researched so doesn't seem like a simple reaction to a bad experience. And I can attest to some of the experiences expressed in the article. There's a pretty bizarre ritual going on over at Quora that it's hard to pin down but I think the author did a reasonably good job.
That said, Quora has obviously cracked a nut whereby it is getting very high quality/value content from well-placed individuals.
And clearly you are sufficiently biased, likewise, that your opinion must be irrational. Oh no, wait, we've just fallen into several logical fallacies.
Next time, please switch on your brain before posting.
"Sounds like the author got banned for excessive complaining on Quora and is exceptionally butthurt. I'm a hard core Quora addict and have never encountered most of the things in this post."
"He's way off about the "elite"."
You know, I think I can see where she may be coming from with some of these complaints.
Spot on. Maybe the author got banned, maybe the author just wanted to write an inciteful piece that would get a lot of pageviews. Either way, what's described in the article is nothing like my experience with Quora over the past year+
That is the exact impression i got right down to "butt-hurt". I don't use quora myself, but I do find it annoying when people with blogs project their standards on someone else's creation.
It's like a more articulate "GUYZ Y THE DOWN VOTEZ??!!??"
I work at a startup in Austin, I read HN daily, I enjoy news about SV startups, etc. Still, I haven't found a compelling reason to spend any substantial time on Quora. I'm happy to read a particularly insightful answer when I see the occasional link pop up on another site, but that doesn't make me want to search Quora for other information.
I wonder if my disinterest in Quora is common among developers outside of SV?
If I, a tech savvy developer at a startup, don't find the idea of Quora particularly interesting, why would Average Joe be interested in joining the community?