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Why Quora is in trouble

attackofdesign.com

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Re: Why Quora is in trouble

#41

Post by localhost3000 »

I was once a heavy quora user. Here's what drove me away (I do still use it but I no longer 'hang out' there): the overwhelming pretentiousness and self-righteousness of many within the very early core userbase who, because I was in that early group, dominate my feed (don't know if they dominate for others...). You can only read so many "what does it feel like to be dumb" or "if i went to Harvard how should I respond to 'where did you go to school?' without offending the asker?" without rolling your eyes and writing the entire thing off as a circle-jerk for the self-appointed hipster elite. These people suck and unfortunately quora has rewarded them with upvotes and therefore influence. Otherwise I think the site is great and useful for very niche/obscure questions that google cannot answer well.

Re: Why Quora is in trouble

#42

Post by [deleted] »

quanticle wrote: post #32
Hisoka wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow, because of its subject matter will never be mainstream, but I it's immensely popular among those in the programming community, and that's a pretty huge market.

I don't think StackOverflow is really trying to be a general, mainstream Q&A site, largely because there is no mainstream when it comes to Q&A sites. When you go to one of these sites, you don't want your question to be answered by a generalist, you want a specialist with domain knowledge to answer your question. Looking at it that way, the StackExchange model makes sense. Make a number of very specialized communitie…

[deleted]

Re: Why Quora is in trouble

#44

Post by code_duck »

edanm wrote: post #14

Here's what I don't understand about Quora - at the end of the day, all of the arguments in favor of why Quora is so good, especially arguments put forward by Robert Scoble, boil down to one thing: lots of interesting people post to it. 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…

It's a decent position to be in - perhaps not if you have dreams of mass market grandeur, but otherwise, Quora is a success.

Re: Why Quora is in trouble

#46

Post by code_duck »

Hovertruck wrote: post #33

Interesting. I always felt Quora was overdesigned, as if I couldn't move my mouse anywhere on the page without triggering some sort of hover effect. Drove me absolutely crazy.

I've had serious problems with the flow for things like signing in and password recovery. I signed in with Twitter - I think - now when I go back, they're asking for an email? No idea which I used and I can't find any emails from Quora, so my account is lost. I've never had such a problem with any other site.

Re: Why Quora is in trouble

#48

Post by barce »

The author wrote, 'Facebook solves the problem of how to stay in contact with your 250 "friends". Twitter solves... well, ok, Twitter didn’t solve any real problem, but has still grown to become extremely useful.'

How can something be useful and not solve a problem? Twitter is such a great soapbox for complaints that many companies have felt the need to create twitter accounts and respond directly to their customers. Personally, I can find last minute tickets to a baseball game easier on Twitter than on Craigslist.

Re: Why Quora is in trouble

#49

Post by mgkimsal »

codingthebeach wrote: post #4
macavity23 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I agree that Stack[Overflow|Exchange] will never been a mainstream site, I think there's an important difference in that SO is very useful to the community that it does support. They've really nailed the technical question 'problem' to the point that my day-to-day job would be measurably harder without it, and so as the poster says I can easily imagine paying for added-value features there. Quora, not so muc…

From the article: "The site is visually bland: there’s barely any color or images, and you won’t find any effect fancier than rounded corners." Somebody please save us from the attack of web design. If I see another gradient rounded flashing Javascript-enabled button for gradient rounded flashing Javascript-enabled buttons' sake, I'm gonna hurl, Wayne's World style.

agreed. look at craigslist - about as unsexy a design as you could imagine, but it solves real problems for people, and they use it constantly. quora - not so much, and fancier buttons and UI won't really change that.
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