101–110 of 110 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a really good Q&A site. I was a Quora Top Writer in 2012 and 2013, and I've also built a lot of web stuff and spent a lot of time studying web communities. Purely from a craftsmanship perspective, they've done an incredible job. The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch. That said, I have never understoo…
"The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch." I SO disagree here. It's a mess. It's 10x more complex than it needs to be. And it's horribly unapproachable for new/non-geeky users. I've had non-technical relatives sit down and try to use it who were positively baffled by the user-experience. I think Quora is an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a really good Q&A site. I was a Quora Top Writer in 2012 and 2013, and I've also built a lot of web stuff and spent a lot of time studying web communities. Purely from a craftsmanship perspective, they've done an incredible job. The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch. That said, I have never understoo…
Am I the only one who sees none of this "top notch system"? Last time i used it it felt clunky* , now every time i get a search result to them on a random computer, they ask me to login to read the answer, experts-exchange-style. Thanks, but no thanks. PS. I guess the people who find this useful live in San Francisco, and enjoy the "insider" feel. *: Right now, while viewing any question while logged out, the "Contin…
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I've wondered along these lines too. There is clearly something else going on in the VC business beyond strictly evaluating company value based on ability to generate it directly. One factor I'll project (since I can't tell where you're based) is that companies with proven engineering staff in the Bay Area get a boost in inherent value just from acquihire potential. Bonus points for famous and connected founders, as…
Not sure how you define value but Quora is creating quite a lot of it.
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That all makes sense, I would disagree on one point: "topics on Quora are limitless" The thing (only based on my experience) is that when you grow/diversify too much on a Q&A site, quality tends to dilute, and the audience tends to drop off. I don't know if this is true for Quora; I merely suspect it might be (as it has been for all the others who tried). In many ways our focus on just one topic has been our saving g…
My question is completely off topic, but I have some questions regarding your site, if you don't mind answering: How long have you been operating englishforums.com ? Is this your full time engagement? How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number ? Was it purely organic or some paid advertising ? And is the site profitable? Thanks.
And is the site profitable?
I started it in 2002. It's part of my full time engagement. It's paid my way since 2006.
There has never been any business model. Adsense only, yes it's profitable - we pay the 3 of us from that - but only because our costs are so low (single server, I've optimised the code to handle itself on an 8 core with 24gb - it runs at about 10% usage, @ about 10 requests a second)
How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number
We knew what Google wanted, we knew what our visitors wanted. We put our visitors first, but made sure the entire site worked in a way that would help Google do its job. (never really SEO). Our design is lacking, we didn't have a designer - we do now (very exciting for us!)
Essentially we predicted for many years what Google would be looking for, did some things ahead of other folks and tried our best to keep the quality of our content high. We also created a very friendly (most of the time) atmosphere on our site and encouraged high-quality posters to stick around - as much as we could. A lot of sites copied us, but missed the concept of keeping the community conducive to friendly interaction. We also did some interesting things to keep out trolls. Like our 'ghost' mode which makes a troll thing they've annoyed everyone, when in actual fact they're being system-level ignored. Fun stuff like that. This reduced further our overhead, and allowed us to expand while not worrying so much about spam. We spent time to build a system that self-managed, and self-grew. That seemed to work.
That's all the old system, what we've created now is far more interesting.
JCSV's style isn't for everyone (much sarcasm, so profanity, very rude) but he/she makes some compelling points
"Quora has raised $61 million dollars for this life-altering
question-and-answer-cum-blogging site. Let’s break that down
a bit: SpaceX, a company that sends rockets into motherfucking
space, has raised $230 million and employs more than 3000 people
(source: the world’s second-best source for knowledge). Quora,
which lets you ask other people questions on the computer, has
raised more than a quarter of that amount and employs 50
individuals."
Quora seems to have taken a strange turn recently - their email digest is full of creepy racial questions like "do white girls find Indian men disgusting?" and "do Asian men mind if Asian girls date white men?" I guess you can't stop such questions being asked, but they frequently appear as the top question in the digest and thus in the subject line. I deregistered off the back of that. (Come to think of it, not sure…
I just scanned some updates in my inbox and none had anything like this. What's going on is that these updates are custom for each user, so either you haven't used the site and are getting the least common denominator, or for some reason you've lead Quora to believe that you're interested in such questions.
>Founded in 2009 by former Facebook engineers, Quora is a revenue-less, question-and-answer service with 500,000 topics and an unknown number of users. >Quora has now collected more than $140 million in funding from investors. How could this possibly end well for the investors? EDIT - besides a FB acquisition.
Seriously, if they had been actually monetizing, they would not be able to collect the funding.
There was that photo site a few months back which closed much discussed on HN. The problem with them was that they actually tried to make money and thus VCs could see that they would not be the big hit needed.
I am only half-kidding with this.
Do your own startup, bootstrap it, answer to no one, feel the freedom to innovate as you see fit, eliminate the politics, remain true to your own calling. Fuck the VCs... fuck'm in the ass.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've wondered along these lines too. There is clearly something else going on in the VC business beyond strictly evaluating company value based on ability to generate it directly. One factor I'll project (since I can't tell where you're based) is that companies with proven engineering staff in the Bay Area get a boost in inherent value just from acquihire potential. Bonus points for famous and connected founders, as…
Not sure how you define value but Quora is creating quite a lot of it.
http://www.quora.com/Family/I-caught-my-younger-brother-watc...
http://www.quora.com/How-does-a-sixteen-year-old-get-a-girlf...
Look - I don't care if Quora wants to spam my inbox with link bait in order to generate AU and page views, but they could at least not try to take the high road and pretend to be anything more than the lowest common denominator, no-business-model, spam factory that they are.