Adam:
Site is good, easy to use. Fix your e-mail validator (you can, afterall have a domain name that starts with a number). The facebook only signup thing is a bit of a hiccup (especially with the HN crowd) even with your priors.
As for the site itself, I would recommend ditching this whole "tagging" system. For example:
http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_the_typical_amounts_of_equit...
Having these tags:
Compensation, Engineering in Silicon Valley, Salaries, Startup Compensation,Startups, Stock Options, ....
Is just going to be very overwhelming, and if you're letting users define these, it seems you're going to have a big problem with trying to eventually police the content, and thats just an endless can of worms..
How about some term extraction, fancy analysis, and leaving that to automated semantics?
On a side note, some of the main topic landing pages are pretty sensible, easy to use, and well defined. Some of the indexing pages seem to have an awful lot going on...
Mainly, the homepage once you're logged in. Very busy here, not even sure exactly what is going on, and its awfully repetitive..
There also seems to be topics/categories broken down, but no real way to browse them effectively -- although there is a "browse" tab which is really more of a "feed", adding a bit more confusion. It'd be nice to be able to consume these "Topics" in more of a directory type of style.. (eg, being able to look up "Dog Breeds" and seeing a list of breeds to click through/browse leading into the particular Quora for a specific breed itself..)
All in all, I think its an excellent start, but there's a definitive need to establish a much clearer picture of the companies identity.. Is this a new E-How, or is it a Wikipedia? More importantly, how is it really different from either? Right now there is a ton of grey area here for the end user, but hopefully a lot of this will work itself out as the ideas mature.
Best,
earle.
EDIT:
Now that I really look at that homepage again (logged in), I really dont like it. There's almost no meanginful content on it -- everything is metadata! This needs to be rethought more in tune with identity/branding of the problem you're trying to solve. I dont think an end user ever wants to see a giant feed of a bunch of meta data if you're delivering a
'really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.' that should translate to content.
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Follow-up question added to topic Programming. 8:22pm
What are the disadvantages of having a degree in Math and working as a programmer?
This is a follow-up question to What are advantages of having a degree in Math and working as a programmer?.
2 Answers • Follow • 2 Topics
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This "feed" stuff may work well for your news feed on Facebook, but it doesnt translate well to a Q&A site when I'm typing in something specific and you're dumping a giant list of unrelated meta-data with links all over the place. If someone is looking for advice on their health issue or tax problem, this is going to have to scale -- to potentially millions of questions and billions of answers. This feed and tagging system dumped into a "feed" just ain't going to get it done. This needs to be rethought, to better effectively deliver your stated vision of 'really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.' and that should translate to content thats relevant and easy to find.