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Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

techcrunch.com

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Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#4

Post by mahmud »

He is both right and wrong on this.

Right, for the present: Quora is special because of who is there, not what, and there is an upper limit to the success of a fan-club.

But he is wrong in the long term, or could be wrong, if Quora adapts and allows the rest of the world to create their own fan-club universes. If it goes on to inspire communities from different backgrounds, fields, industries and specialties, then yes, Quora can become "Stack Exchange" + resident celebrity monks + Wikipedia.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#5

Post by elvirs »

I am surprised by the fact that arrington allowed an article that criticizes tehcrunch for being hype machine (which it is).

Regarding quora, yes it gets too much techcrunch attention but it is not as flawed as the writer thinks, quora generates quality content thanks to its quality users, while quality may start to decline as number of users grows(something that happens to almost all startups) it is possible to prevent that to some extent with introduction of advanced peoplerank/answerrank algorithms.

Going back to techcrunch, yes it is a crappy place that religious fanboys (MG) write about twitter, iphone and foursquare (and now quora) 5 times a day and ex-alcoholics (Carr) makes fun of its readers.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#6

Post by kmfrk »

In the short term, Quora is an interesting site. Long term, I see nothing being done by Quora to anticipate spammers, marketers, trolls, plain stupid people, etc. Add to that the front- and back-end performs atrociously.

The first time I saw Quora, I didn't really see the point of it, but it turned out to have some very interesting users. I don't think they have any roadmap for the service, and I sincerely doubt that Quora is going to be relevant in six months.

Quora may have done some interesting things as a start-up (or not), but the founders seem to have foregone any basic wisdom that concerns creating and maintaining a community.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#7

Post by keiferski »

I don't know much about Quora, and have never used it, so I can't comment on its chances of success.

But I really don't like the name, and I think it may hold them back, as far as mainstream adoption goes. It's not an attractive name to begin with, and I don't quite know how to pronounce it: koo aura or kwaura (rhymes with Laura)?

If we're comparing Quora to Facebook and Twitter, it loses the name game by a mile. Facebook and Twitter are both easy to say and there's no confusion on spelling or pronunciation. Also, Quora can't be easily or obviously verb-ized; "Facebook me" or "Tweet it". I don't see "Quoraize it" or "Quoing" becoming a commonly used phrase.

All of this may be irrelevant if Quora is just that good, but it's certainly something to think about.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#8

Post by jerf »

elvirs wrote: post #5

I am surprised by the fact that arrington allowed an article that criticizes tehcrunch for being hype machine (which it is). Regarding quora, yes it gets too much techcrunch attention but it is not as flawed as the writer thinks, quora generates quality content thanks to its quality users, while quality may start to decline as number of users grows(something that happens to almost all startups) it is possible to prev…

"while quality may start to decline as number of users grows... it is possible to prevent that to some extent with introduction of advanced peoplerank/answerrank algorithms."

You say that as if it's some sort of established industry best practice and they just have to go yank the relevant open-source project off of Sourceforge, rather than something where only a handful of people at great and continuing effort have gotten up to "reasonably adequate", and the usual path for a site like this trying to pull this trick is simply to fail.

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