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Quora’s Demise

delw.in

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Re: Quora’s Demise

#71

Post by carguy1983 »

huggyface wrote: post #56
carguy1983 wrote: post #27

My 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.

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.

Yeah, I guess I'm racist. I want diversity in my populations, applied to every context possible. Full stop.

"I'm sorry you're offended."

Re: Quora’s Demise

#72

Post by sitkack »

Two issues ...

There shouldn't be "a community" there should be multiple communities, otherwise there will always be an 'in crowd'

Second issue: quora has a multidimensional filtering problem and this goes back to point 1. There will always be an element of digg/reddit/4chan in everything. To try and remove it is futile, just try to keep it discernable from the content you care about, maybe the 4chan stuff is your bag and you don't want the high brow shit, so be it ...

Re: Quora’s Demise

#73

Post by sitkack »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #64
J3L2404 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is the metadata so important to so many people on HN? I don't understand it.

Is it a mechanism to find the best comments in a thread? Is it a visualization issue? Is it ego? Is it a voting mechanism to know what others think is important? I honestly do not know.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#74

Post by sitkack »

olalonde wrote: post #54
unalone wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's actually better now than it was. There are a number of contrarian voices in each contentious thread arguing firmly that there's more to an issue than perhaps simple analysis would give credit for. There used to be more of an Ayn Randian/"supermen" feel, more people patting each other on the backs for being superior creatures cos entrepreneurs are the end point of evolution. The site seems a fair deal san…

That's why I don't think down votes should be used to express disagreement (although pg doesn't share this opinion). I personally frequently up vote comments I disagree with if I feel they are thoughtful and bring an interesting perspective. The variety of ideas is important and should be encouraged.

Up/down is the wrong direction for the arrows I think. Left right, meaning on-topic/off-topic ? One of the problems I think is that there are so many dimensions represented by two simple little arrows that it is difficult for the system (the web software itself) to discern the intent, so it turns into a popularity (I agree,I disagree) button.

But if you had a button for each piece of information it would look like

   [] well written
   [] well thought out
   [] agree
   [] disagree
   [] poorly written
   [] funny
   [] off topic
For bonus points they would be in a random order in the UI so people wouldn't develop muscle memory voting on comments.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#75

Post by rdl »

delwin wrote: post #67
rdl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Joke questions by people who are already on the site, if they're a small percentage of the total, and easily filtered out, aren't that big a problem for me. Survey questions basically attract and retain the formspring crowd. Better filtering should prevent you from seeing content you don't like, but in the long run, the second order effects will take over :(

Re: Quora’s Demise

#76

Post by dennisgorelik »

sitkack wrote: post #73
dennisgorelik wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is the metadata so important to so many people on HN? I don't understand it. Is it a mechanism to find the best comments in a thread? Is it a visualization issue? Is it ego? Is it a voting mechanism to know what others think is important? I honestly do not know.

Item's rating is not a metadata. It's at the core of the data about comments made.

Yes, it's a way to find best comments in a thread (not guaranteed, but much better than nothing).

Has nothing to do with ego.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#77

Post by huggyface »

carguy1983 wrote: post #71
huggyface wrote: post #56

Earlier 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.

Yeah, I guess I'm racist. I want diversity in my populations, applied to every context possible. Full stop. "I'm sorry you're offended."

I get it: You're a racist. "Diversity" indeed. I honestly have no idea what the racial make-up of Quora is because it neither seemed relevant, nor have I sought it out. I don't even know how you'd even know in many cases.

But it's too white? Give me a break. The only reason that bullshit, obnoxious, offensive statement gets a pass is white-guilt, a bunch of people afraid they offend someone looking for, ha ha, "diversity".

Re: Quora’s Demise

#78

Post by carguy1983 »

huggyface wrote: post #77
carguy1983 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I guess I'm racist. I want diversity in my populations, applied to every context possible. Full stop. "I'm sorry you're offended."

I get it: You're a racist. "Diversity" indeed. I honestly have no idea what the racial make-up of Quora is because it neither seemed relevant, nor have I sought it out. I don't even know how you'd even know in many cases. But it's too white? Give me a break. The only reason that bullshit, obnoxious, offensive statement gets a pass is white-guilt, a bunch of people afraid they offend someone looking for, ha ha, "diver…

I find it fascinating that white people are finally getting upset at racism directed towards them.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#79

Post by skore »

sitkack wrote: post #74
olalonde wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I don't think down votes should be used to express disagreement (although pg doesn't share this opinion). I personally frequently up vote comments I disagree with if I feel they are thoughtful and bring an interesting perspective. The variety of ideas is important and should be encouraged.

Up/down is the wrong direction for the arrows I think. Left right, meaning on-topic/off-topic ? One of the problems I think is that there are so many dimensions represented by two simple little arrows that it is difficult for the system (the web software itself) to discern the intent, so it turns into a popularity (I agree,I disagree) button. But if you had a button for each piece of information it would look like []…

I have thought about the On/Off-Topic button as well for some time now. I think it's a good concept to try out, mainly because it is not judgmental - Sometimes I like following an Off-Topic discussion and I've had a couple of good ones on HN. But most of the time, it can be very distracting - separating it from the main discussion is worth a shot.

As for more detailed buttons - I think that would make it too complex. Slashdot has established the same concept, probably based on the same reasoning (mostly to distinguish between "just" funny and actually insightful comments). Can't speak that much about how successful it is, maybe somebody else has more insight here.

Re: Quora’s Demise

#80

Post by leoedin »

Power users, ranking users or in any way giving precedence to users with a history of popularity has been the death knell for a number of online communities. It's consistently a poor way of identifying users who make positive contributions to the site, and it's a consistently good way to alienate new and occasional users.

I suspect there's two reasons for this. The first is that popularity is not necessarily indicative of quality. Take a look at Reddit's front page today, and you'll have a hard time picking out anything worth reading from the memes and jokes. Popularity normally reflects the lowest common denominator. Rewarding users for being popular inevitably leads to users rewarded for pandering to popular opinion, rather than for making insightful or meaningful contributions.

The second is that engagement level rarely is indicative of comment quality. The internet is a vast place with a huge number of users, and as a number of studies (particularly on Wikipedia [1]) have shown, a users commitment to the project or website doesn't correlate with contribution quality. Essentially, contributions from a new or rarely commenting user are just as likely to be worthy as those from long standing members.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/10/anonymous-good-sa...

I've been actively commenting and engaging forums, social news sites and other online communities which allow commenting on topics since 2002, and time and time again I've seen sites grow in popularity and decrease in quality. My personal desire in a site is one with a fairly active membership which both introduces interesting topics and news stories and provides interesting commentary on them. I enjoy engaging in discussion about a wide range of things, and I do my best to find websites that allow and encourage that. I think perhaps the most interesting thing I've observed is that communities with a fairly high barrier for entry - perhaps a payment of some sort - and aggressive moderation policies manage to maintain a consistently good level of discussion over much longer periods of time.

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