Why Quora Won't Scale

You describe some dire, humorless Quora, not the one I use. I've seen plenty of misspellings. Founder (and Harvard grad) Charlie Cheever used "its" instead of "it's" several times in one answer. I've made typos that I went back and corrected myself.

Humor:

https://www.quora.com/Ultimate-Frisbee/Is-it-possible-to-pla...

https://www.quora.com/Marc-Bodnick-1/Does-Marc-Bodnick-ever-...

https://www.quora.com/Chief-Executive-Officers/Who-is-the-mo...

Casual subjects:

https://www.quora.com/Hipsters

https://www.quora.com/What-Ani-Is-Wearing

You can answer anonymously, but you have to register.

There's sheer irreverence in some of the boards (new feature, non-Q&A posts):

https://www.quora.com/DeathByPuns

For something completely freeform and casual, Yahoo Answers exists (I've actually found useful answers in it too, rarely).

Anonymity (pseudo-anonymity) certainly has downsides but over the years I have found the better thoughts come from posters who are _not_ attaching themselves to a Real Name(TM) that is connected to a web site^W business that would love to attract more followers^W customers.

Anonymous comments have to stand on their own. They can't rely on name association. The reader has to evaluate them for their content, not their author. This is a good thing.

Another thing I have learned over many years of using the web is that intelligent people do not always make intelligent comments. We are all inconsistent; we're human. It's foolish to assume everything Joe the Self-Proclaimed Expert says is going to be worth reading. Sometimes he will say stupid things. By the same token people who in the real world might not be deemed intelligent can sometimes have some brilliant insights. It would be foolish to assume that every comment they make is worthless simply because of the name it's attached to. Anonymous commenting allows each comment to be evaluated individually. It addresses the inherent inconsistency of human comments and protects readers from making unwarranted assumptions. Unless of course they assume every anonymous post automatically falls into some category with respect to its content. IMO, that sort of thinking is the mark of web inexperience.

The notion of "experts" is vastly overrated. This is an idea used to sell advice and services. Socrates figured this out hundreds of years ago. Read what Socrates learned and you too will learn something abut "experts" and earned reputations as "authorities" on given subjects. Learn how to form questions. In learning, it is my opinion that questions, knowing how to formulate them, are far more important than answers.

The web is blissfully free from the hard sell of the "expert" while still being a great place to discover many types of "expertise". No one is demanding to see how many degrees or certifications anyone else has. No one cares about your "reputation". People are just interested in knowledge, no matter who it might come from. They can then evaluate it on their own. Without anyone telling them what to do or think.

This is not stopping some from trying to force their own system, with "experts" and "reputation" and so forth. In my opinion, none of them will scale. The main attraction of the web is that it is free from those sort of restraints. There are plenty of experts on the web, but they do not have to self-promote. They might not be trying to sell anything; maybe they just share their thoughts for the joy of sharing.

Anonymous posting is as close to pure thought, free from real world biases like identities, credentials and reputations, as we're going to get. Every thought can be evaluated on its own merits, irrespective of the submitter.

After a friend told me about Quora, I spent some time lurking and after a month or so I decided to just skip it. I saw a lot of the same behavior mentioned in the article. If you want a obvious glimpse, just subscribe to the Politics group.

I'm sure there's a core group of people who love and swear by it, it just seems most of the comments in the posts are usually one way traffic. You either agree or just get downvoted into oblivion.

For someone looking for a welcoming community, this is not the sort of impression you want to give new users.

There is a lot HN admin(s) could learn from this criticism. Opaque moderation is one of the really bad things about Hacker News.

This article applies to just about every single internet discussion community I've ever been a part of since I started using the internet back in 1999.

First, a community is founded with a small handful of users. Those small handful of users all know the topic well, so good discussion arises. Those small number of users all know each other, and form a bond. Once word gets out that the community is a place where high quality discussion occurs, people start joining in droves. The small handful of people who were there since the beginning start feeling like that community "belongs" to them, and start acting hostile towards the "noobs". You also have this phenomenon where the new users desperately want to be "accepted" by the establishment, so they'll suck up to the core users, which results in cliquish behavior and it really kills the site for anyone who just wants to discuss and learn about he topic/hobby the community was founded on.

It's happened to Something Awful, JetCareers, the entirety of usenet, and yes even Hacker News.