Introduction of boards made me to move away from browsing Quora for long hours.
Now, to get the best of Quora would be to read the weekly digest sent out in e-mail and the Forbes column where the best Quora answers are posted.
Quora’s Demise
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Quora’s Demise
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their members are predominantly white Adorable racism. Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind Is it groupthink that I pointed out your blatant racism? Message boards the world over are full of people saying wrong, obnoxious, ignorant things and then foolishly thinking that a negative response is just because everyone else is prey to groupthink, etc. It is a short-circuit of self-analysis.
> Adorable racism. How so? Shutting your eyes doesn't make the bias go away.
The poster didn't complain about a bias. They complained about a perceived demographic composition.
Detroit is too black. Vancouver has too many Indians.
How do those sound? There is no difference between what the poster said and those statements, beyond the common acceptance that you can be racist against whites, even if just attacking the imaginary demographic of a group.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Adorable racism. How so? Shutting your eyes doesn't make the bias go away.
The poster didn't complain about a bias. They complained about a perceived demographic composition. Detroit is too black. Vancouver has too many Indians. How do those sound? There is no difference between what the poster said and those statements, beyond the common acceptance that you can be racist against whites, even if just attacking the imaginary demographic of a group.
> racist against whites
I believe that, technically, the term would be "discriminatory" in this case, white people being in a position of relative power and privilege in the West (and most of the world, really. White people are esteemed all over, even if just in relation to other foreigners).
But it just isn't the same as you said. The difference here is that this is a question-and-answers forum, and the lack of diversity, as in the homogeneity of values and experiences, might be indeed undesirable.
Though I wasn't able to quickly find an study that showed that homogeneity begets groupthink...
Re: Quora’s Demise
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the contrary, HN groupthink is quite severe (although it has decreased somewhat since the time that comment scores were no longer displayed). I guess it depends on perspective: if you're in the middle of a box, the box looks like the entire universe.
I disagree on comment scores. Not having them makes bandwagoning more likely because I tended to not upvote comments that already have high scores. It does likely make the data more useful to pg though. On technical questions it is painful not having comment scores.
I don't think that PG has time to analyze the data. I think he's just making an honest mistake by taking away comment scores from us.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#65My complaints about Quora: * You have to use a "real" name. * Their members are predominantly white upper middle class tech/finance/marketing professionals - occasionally some Asians, but mainly from California or NY. * There's no good way to browse the site - if there is, it's not easy to find. * Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems for high-IQ communities.
The first one was the dealbreaker for me. I signed up using part of my real name instead of my full name. Within hours I was blocked from adding anything to Quora. As a result, I haven't been back since signing up.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the contrary, HN groupthink is quite severe (although it has decreased somewhat since the time that comment scores were no longer displayed). I guess it depends on perspective: if you're in the middle of a box, the box looks like the entire universe.
I disagree on comment scores. Not having them makes bandwagoning more likely because I tended to not upvote comments that already have high scores. It does likely make the data more useful to pg though. On technical questions it is painful not having comment scores.
That is exactly what I mean. Before the change you would see a thread of two groups of people with alternating low and high comment scores having a discussion with each other, and it would be clear what HN's groupthink opinion is. Now you have to actually read the comments and make up your own mind. That is true even for technical discussions: the hivemind is not always right.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I joined Quora soon after it launched, thought it was kinda cool, forgot about it, and yes, then rejoined again sometime in the fall of 2010. There was a nice linguistics community built up for a while (I'm a linguistics undergrad) until everything kind of fell apart. Quora didn't know how to separate people very well, so people interested in memes gradually crowded everything out. BUT I didn't actually have any prob…
Ah, I shouldn't have assumed; although even Feb 2011 is early enough to see before and after boards. Have you seen any positive use of Boards? I haven't -- even Marc Bodnick's boards are pretty mediocre, although I don't think they drag the site down like the others. Survey questions are a worse thing than boards, though, I think. Getting rid of both would be great, but if I could only get rid of one...
Agreed. Survey questions are terrible. So are "joke questions", which are now legitimated by an official designation...
Re: Quora’s Demise
#68>"It was a turning point I happened to catch at its birth." Really? Because I'm pretty sure myself and many others caught it when the T-echo Chamber was trying to sell us on this new message board system that was going to make a lot of money and change the game. Quora was an online community that happened to be "cool", so it attracted intelligent people which made the content fantastic. But nothing they were doing, i…
You pretty much nailed it. Quora was a fad for the valley's elite. It was launched with a critical mass of the right people that pretty much everyone in tech had reason to jump on board right away. But if you grow this quickly you're also likely to implode this quickly, especially with the fundamental conflict of interest between startup vs community curation. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to make a great com…
It was a fad for the Silicon elite but it COULD have been so much more. There were actual scientists, historians, etc. getting involved and those people could have made it awesome. The reason Quora faltered was because of startup/investor interests. They didn't seem to be curious intellectual types actually interested in the knowledge curation, they just seemed to have hit upon a good business idea.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#69Boards had a high cost/benefit in the wrong vectors. While they acquired a very low-barrier (i mean low IQ requirement) feature that has great SEO and pageviews benefits, it had a high cost of increasing noise and diluting the Q&A DNA of the product. What i didn't understand was why didn't they go into more related and deeper dimensions of Q&A like interviews, product FAQs, debate, surveys and polls. These are branch…
It's easy to understand why — once Quora understood it was attracting the kind of online socialites who like to boost their egos and flaunt their intellect (which is by no means 100% of the community, just a loud majority), they accustomed their site to a new demographic.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Adorable racism. How so? Shutting your eyes doesn't make the bias go away.
The poster didn't complain about a bias. They complained about a perceived demographic composition. Detroit is too black. Vancouver has too many Indians. How do those sound? There is no difference between what the poster said and those statements, beyond the common acceptance that you can be racist against whites, even if just attacking the imaginary demographic of a group.
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