Why Quora is in trouble

It's quick and the answers to any questions so far have been insightful. I fail to see how structuring all q&a dispersed over the web to a centralised site is a bad thing?

In addition Quora facilitates learning over time for topics and even individual questions I am interested. I absolutely love the follow topic & question features, i've learned a lot about topics I am passionate about using them. Information I probably would never have been able to find in any other way prior to Quora.

Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily bad or easy to pull off - hell, Hacker News itself is the same, in that I only use it because of the great people here.

I just don't see how you can take it mainstream.

It's not so much that no one outside of the valley uses it, it's that, if people outside of the Valley DID use it, no one would like it anymore!

That's not a good position to be in.

My view is, the model will work well for some places, badly for others, and that's perfectly fine - for the places it works well, it works really well. For the others, other solutions will be thought up.

While I think there is a very interesting critical mass of user, I agree that it is largely a valley audience. There are some really interesting answers on there, which I have found valuable; but I have maintained that its flaws are too big and too many for my tastes:

* The UX sucks. While they have made some minor improvements - it still sucks. I had posted about this prior on Quora as well. It was also made worse by their constant self-back-patting on the UX/UI where they were claiming that the users were too stupid to understand the design decisions they made, and that they were in fact design decisions not mistakes. They were constantly praising how they learned so much about good UX from facebook.

* The lack of threading is retarded, and makes discussion impossible. The fact that you can only have 1 sub level (a comment) is just wrong. The claim was they didnt want discussion and that the answers to the questions were meant to be definitive thus not needing discussion. BS.

* The colors and fonts/sizing used is horrid and makes it very difficult to navigate. The use of 'facebook blue' the light grey and then the bold black are all in the wrong order. (http://i.imgur.com/Y9EPV.png) It doesnt work for quick visual scanning.

* The entry boxes are broken; when you begin to type something, it hijacks your cursor and disabled the backspace. e.g. if you try to type @username or http - it makes it difficult to fix typos.

* it is impossible to navigate topics clearly, sort or save any meaningful data. You cannot tag or vote in a meaningful way so as to promote answers either. You can only browse a subscription/follow feed in a linear 1-dimensional manner.

Ultimately, Quora is a one dimensional service which had a lot of early hype due to its founders and early adopters having real influence in the valley.

There is good info, but the architecture of the sites containment of that data is like the work of a talented child with a lot of potential being praised for their genius too early and resulting in stagnation and reinforcement of an idea that started as a good seed, but was ultimately not thought out well enough to scale - ultimately feeling dated and as more-broken-than-not implementation.

So, I go there about once a week for a quick scan - or travel over via HN links to good posts, but I spend very little time on there any longer. The information value in exchange for my time there is too low any more.