I find the Quora interface and usability to be kind of clunky and finicky. Their "walled garden" site rules are also a bit finicky. While it was interesting to poke around Quora a bit, I didn't perceive much value for myself.
Whatever happened to Quora?
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Whatever happened to Quora?
#22Quantcast ( http://www.quantcast.com/quora.com ) and Compete ( http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ ) are better tools to measure traction. Looks like they've had a slight decline lately. With all the buzz they received early this year, I'm not surprised it's lower.
Respectfully disagree - Compete and Alexa both depend on toolbars, and no techie in his right mind wants to install such a thing. Quantcast doesn't use a toolbar, but it's heavily biased towards Quantcast-aware publishers who place the QC script on their pages. Long story short: these sites are bad for measuring traffic, but especially bad for measuring tech / power user / early adopter traffic.
Compete and Quantcast (if not "Quantified") are not good measurements of actual traffic estimates but they can usually report trends somewhat accurately. However, you make a great point about the tech/early adopter crowd which are the primary users for Quora.
Re: Whatever happened to Quora?
#23Interestingly, a large chunk of the traffic comes from SF and the Bay Area. That leads me to believe that Quora is to a large extent a Bay Area echo-chamber.
That's the problem with Quora for me. When it first started to get big, I tried searching for things that weren't startup- or Silicon Valley-related, and the results were practically nonexistent. Maybe that's changed since then, but it didn't give me a good first impression. Not that there's anything wrong with a Q&A site for startups - that may well be a very good niche - but Quora clearly seems to want to be something more, and it seems that they're having a hard time breaking free.
Re: Whatever happened to Quora?
#24Interestingly, a large chunk of the traffic comes from SF and the Bay Area. That leads me to believe that Quora is to a large extent a Bay Area echo-chamber.
That's the problem with Quora for me. When it first started to get big, I tried searching for things that weren't startup- or Silicon Valley-related, and the results were practically nonexistent. Maybe that's changed since then, but it didn't give me a good first impression. Not that there's anything wrong with a Q&A site for startups - that may well be a very good niche - but Quora clearly seems to want to be someth…
I've found Quora to be great for non-tech topics. Human relationships, cooking, pop culture, lifestyle topics are all active on Quora and contain good content.
Re: Whatever happened to Quora?
#25Interestingly, a large chunk of the traffic comes from SF and the Bay Area. That leads me to believe that Quora is to a large extent a Bay Area echo-chamber.
[deleted]
Re: Whatever happened to Quora?
#26Interestingly, a large chunk of the traffic comes from SF and the Bay Area. That leads me to believe that Quora is to a large extent a Bay Area echo-chamber.
Patience. Most big things start from saturating a specific, comparatively-small community. They then expand with leverage.
(E.g.: Facebook, Etsy, Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, etc et all)
Re: Whatever happened to Quora?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate. A few people might see your product and stick around, but I think that the brand confusion (and potential law suit) might be strong enough con's to negate these few users.
> The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate. Would that be a bad thing? Even those that left would then know that your site existed, which isn't without value. As far as names matching a character in a movie, I think it would be very difficult to make a suit out of this. If anything, you could then change your name slightly, and…
> As far as names matching a character in a movie, I think it would be very difficult to make a suit out of this.
You would be very surprised:
'Some controversy has risen in Germany, where Albert Uderzo's own publishing company, Les Éditions Albert René, is claiming in court that certain IT companies whose name end in "ix" (not unnatural in companies who work with Unix) are damaging his brands "Asterix" and "Obelix".'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Uderzo#Lawsuits_in_Germa...
Re: Whatever happened to Quora?
#28Interestingly, a large chunk of the traffic comes from SF and the Bay Area. That leads me to believe that Quora is to a large extent a Bay Area echo-chamber.
That's the problem with Quora for me. When it first started to get big, I tried searching for things that weren't startup- or Silicon Valley-related, and the results were practically nonexistent. Maybe that's changed since then, but it didn't give me a good first impression. Not that there's anything wrong with a Q&A site for startups - that may well be a very good niche - but Quora clearly seems to want to be someth…
This is slowly changing. For instance, see: http://www.quora.com/Ashton-Kutcher
Re: Whatever happened to Quora?
#29They're doing ok, probably just a mini-sharkfin from a wave of press. Interesting that HN is over half as big:
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com,news.ycombinat...
Re: Whatever happened to Quora?
#30The spike probably had a lot to do with the release of Tron: Legacy on December 17 who had a character named Quorra which could easily be misspelled as Quora. The trend for Quorra largely follows this spike as seen at http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra&ctab=0&geo=all... Nothing happend to Quora.com.
Really? You can plot them together, and it appears 'quorra' spiked about two weeks before 'quora'. Tron released December 17th 2010, according to wikipedia, correlating nicely with 'quorra' searches. What happened January 1st to cause a huge spike in 'quora' searches?
http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra%2C+quora&ctab=0...