Quora’s Demise

#1

Post by delwin » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 8:51 PM UTC

Quora’s Demise
delw.in

Re: Quora’s Demise

#2

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 9:04 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Quora’s Demise

#3

Post by aerosmile » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

I still find a lot of value in Quora, but I guess directionally speaking, you're probably right that the mainstream audience is lowering the standard. Not sure if I heard you point that out, but you probably meant to say that it's possible to build a horizontal site that fits the needs of niche audiences - it's all just a question of product decisions. Twitter is a good example of how it can be done the right way: my stream is completely different from my wife's, and we both love using Twitter.

I recognize that user segmentation is easier to implement on a site that's focused on the social graph as opposed to on the interest graph, but I am not convinced that it's impossible. Ie, how about requiring social credit in a certain vertical before being able to ask a question in that same vertical? That credit could be earned with good answers to existing questions, or inherited from relevant 3rd party sites with applicable currency.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#4

Post by Shank » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 9:27 PM UTC

The problem was that there was no barrier to entry, and therefore there was no way to prevent people from misusing it.

The intellectual value of Quora dropped as more and more people who had no reservations about posting inherently useless questions joined. If there was a system for filtering out questions from less authoritative or knowledgeable figures, they could have prevented this.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#5

Post by the_rara_avis » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 9:38 PM UTC

Slightly off-topic: Forcing sign-in to read full answers strikes me as an odd path to take - reminds me of expertsexchange.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#6

Post by _delirium » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 9:43 PM UTC

There's quite a lot of self-promotion going on as well. I haven't done a real survey, so my perception might be off, but I feel like I run across more not-that-great self-cites/self-links in answers than at, for example, StackExchange. I mean, it's fine to link to something of yours (text, software, startup) that is high-quality and directly relevant to the question, but Quora has a lot of answers where the blog/company/self promotion feels pretty blatant.

(An alternate hypothesis is that StackExchange has just has much of that submitted, but that its voting/moderation works better.)

Re: Quora’s Demise

#7

Post by lincolnwebs » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 9:59 PM UTC

As a longtime online community manager, this piece strikes me as another entry in the time-honored tradition of "this place changed and now I don't like it" complaints. Yes, everything changes. No, it's not the same as when you joined. That's not Quora, that's life.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#8

Post by tptacek » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 10:26 PM UTC

lincolnwebs wrote: post #7

As a longtime online community manager, this piece strikes me as another entry in the time-honored tradition of "this place changed and now I don't like it" complaints. Yes, everything changes. No, it's not the same as when you joined. That's not Quora, that's life.

This comment doesn't actually say anything. Yes, things change. Yes, that's a part of life. That doesn't automatically make all change for the better.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#9

Post by sthatipamala » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 10:51 PM UTC

My problem with Quora is that it is very difficult to penetrate the inner sanctum and feel welcome in the community.

You used to be able to gain recognition with thorough answers to domain-specific questions. But if you take a look at a lot of the "trending" answers on Quora, they all seem to be written by the same 10 Quora power users (Mark Bodnick, Garrick Saito, Venkatesh Rao, etc..)

The problem not so much the existence of these power users but the fact that they seem to only upvote amongst themselves and contribute to each others boards, creating a very exclusive feeling.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#10

Post by rdl » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 11:00 PM UTC

sthatipamala wrote: post #9

My problem with Quora is that it is very difficult to penetrate the inner sanctum and feel welcome in the community. You used to be able to gain recognition with thorough answers to domain-specific questions. But if you take a look at a lot of the "trending" answers on Quora, they all seem to be written by the same 10 Quora power users (Mark Bodnick, Garrick Saito, Venkatesh Rao, etc..) The problem not so much the ex…

I don't think the low-quality general answers from some of the high volume contributors really matter; I'm a lot more into the niche experts, and Quora makes it easy to find those people. (Marc Bodnick upvotes are so common as to be essentially content free, although his answers are great; there are a lot of users who contribute lots of crap with no actual knowledge, across a range of categories, and a number of users who are only contributing in very well defined areas of expertise. e.g. Gus Fuldner's PCI related answers are great, and there are a lot of domain experts and people with first-hand knowledge who post on Quora.

If you have a problem with Quora, follow better users and better topics.

The boards product is IMO pretty ill advised. Quora is doing it because they want to be a repository, easily searched, of a lot of interesting information, but they didn't take into account the second order effects of attracting a lot of boards users to Quora.

The funny thing for me is that the OP joined Quora (I think) during the big wave of idiots in December 2010. ("Scoblegate"). People said all the same things about death of Quora then, and in June 2010 when it opened up to the public. I suspect the average IQ of Quora users has been in strict decline ever since the first user was added after Charlie and Adam.