Quora has a lot of high-quality content. Yeah, you have to sift through some garbage, but compared to Yahoo! Answers it's a different world. Most of the time, the top answer will be a good one. It may not stay that way forever, but thus far, the quality of the best content is really good when you consider that people wrote it for free, and that the filter is some mix of community voting and machine learning (as oppos…
"Quora's philosophy can be summed up as why should the serfs get a share if they were dumb enough to work for free in the first place?" Different currencies. The owners of Quora are being paid in US dollars, the content creators in both attention and reputation. Both attention and reputation are currencies that will translate to dollars more and more as we progress towards an, in-part, reputation-based economy. With…
@Communitivity, you said "With everyone having access to information what will matter will be your curation of that information, and your commentary". The problem with this view is the curation of the curators that is occuring in our reputation based economy. When popularity is the main arbiter of quality the cult of unfair celebrity runs wild, just like in the non-internet world. You need to assign fairness to conte…
That is an excellent observation. I was in the Open Reputation Management Systems Technical Committe at OASIS. During the initial discussions there we mostly agreed that reputation has to be multidimensional, for exactly that reason. I may have a great reputation in XML, but have credibility in .Net. Popularity is still a concern, but there mechanisms that can mitigate this. For example, a feedback mechanism where the reputation changes of someone feedback into the reputation of people previously voted on that persons reputation. So someone who used a mechanic with a high reputation and down voted him when they found out his reputation was unwarranted would also impact negatively the reputation of the people who gave the mechanic the unwarranted increase in reputation.
Quora has a lot of high-quality content. Yeah, you have to sift through some garbage, but compared to Yahoo! Answers it's a different world. Most of the time, the top answer will be a good one. It may not stay that way forever, but thus far, the quality of the best content is really good when you consider that people wrote it for free, and that the filter is some mix of community voting and machine learning (as oppos…
"compared to Yahoo! Answers" Setting the bar pretty low there, aren't you?