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Quora in the next YC batch

blog.ycombinator.com

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141–150 of 188 posts

Re: Quora in the next YC batch

#141

Post by yeukhon »

Quora is awesome but lack of enough users who can actually deliver "answers". As a student I visit Quora for three things: find out some "secrets" about a company written by former and current employees, find out secrets about cities and history and find out just about anything interesting.

StackExchange has a strong, super strong moderation. You can't just start a random question and not expect someone close it in ten minutes. SE's divisions makes asking question and finding related questions very difficult. Sometimes you don't even know where to ask the right question...

If Quora has the active user base that SE has I will sure people will flood there.

Quora to me is the modern Yahoo Answer but with the hope of quality control.

Re: Quora in the next YC batch

#142

Post by ProAm »

mbesto wrote: post #101
ProAm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive not used Quora, what is their struture like? SE is fairly fragemented now, is Quora similiar?

I'm not sure if you were insinuating that SE's fragmentation was a bad thing. If you are, SE actively fragment's itself for a reason. Watch Spolsky talk about it here: http://vimeo.com/37309773 Quora's non-fragmentation is it's ultimate downfall. I'm all bull on SE and bear on Quora.

Im not sure yet if the SE fragmentation is a good thing or bad yet. From one perspective I see where they are coming from and why they are doing it. But in today's age of IT where the specialists is dead and people are more-or-less required to be an expert generalist it is very frustrating to use SE. I find myself more or less giving up when a question gets migrated to a SE Im not a 'member' of yet (they should really just make all users IDs members on all their sites whether people use them or not). Whether you are a webmaster, server admin, programmer, general PC user or just want to ask a general question about how SE works, I shouldn't need to go so many places. It's really 50-50 in my mind if they are doing a good thing or bad (and it probably doesnt matter in the end)

But I have never used Quora, so I know nothing about it beyond getting the blurred webpage when you are not a member there. Ill check out that video now.

Re: Quora in the next YC batch

#144

Post by Chronic26 »

notatoad wrote: post #68
itsprofitbaron wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To remove that & avoid logging in / registering, just add "?share=1" to the end of the URL.

i avoid logging in / registering by avoiding quora. There's plenty of sites out there that don't engage in scummy growth tactics and try to harvest my personal information unnecessarily, i'll visit them instead.

I also click the back button the moment Quora tries to get me to give them my Facebook/email.

Re: Quora in the next YC batch

#145

Post by harryh »

mrgn wrote: post #85
harryh wrote: post #7

It would be interesting the learn the terms of the deal. Presumably it's nothing like the standard $120k for 7%. I'm struggling to figure out how this makes sense as a part of the y combinator investment portfolio. EDIT: The only plausible thing I can see Quora wanting that Y Combinator has is access to talent. Is this a recruiting move?

Quora would have to be having an extremely difficult time hiring for it to be a recruiting move. A Venn diagram of engineers or designers for whom Quora is more interesting when affiliated with Y Combinator, whom Quora would also want to hire, but who could not already join most other Y Combinator startups does not overlap.

Ya, I tend to agree with you, but without some sort of recruiting angle I'm left with nothing. Still scratching my head.

Re: Quora in the next YC batch

#146

Post by adamnemecek »

jfoster wrote: post #124
benwilber0 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is devouring that use-case. I'm not sure where Quora fits in.

I don't use Quora very much, but I have noticed that it seems to be very focused on the identity of the person replying, and even the identity of upvoters. It feels like a great place for senior management in organisations to answer questions about topics related to their roles.

It also feels a lot like a Quora & SV circlejerk. Idk why but for example the fact that this question http://www.quora.com/Quora-Community/What-do-the-Quorans-par... is posed as "What do the Quorans' parents look like?" as opposed to "What do the your parents look like?" is indicative of something that I can't quite put my finger on but that I find really, really annoying.

Re: Quora in the next YC batch

#148

Post by bhaumik »

dude_abides wrote: post #11

Hard to imagine what's in it for Quora. - Network connections? Their CEO is the former CTO of Facebook. - Help with fundraising? They raised $80mm at $900mm valuation not more than a month ago. I strongly suspect Quora is planning a huge pivot which they feel is ambitious but doable in 3 months, and YC believes in the value of this pivot; that is the only plausible explanation I can think of.

Asked the same question on Quora [1]. Adam D'Angelo's answer:

There are a bunch of reasons why it's valuable for Quora to be a YC company:

>>We'll have Sam and all the other partners to help us.

>>We get to be part of the YC community / alumni network of founders.

>>We get access to all the resources of YC.

We were raising money anyway, so there was no overhead in letting YC participate. And independent of the benefits to Quora, I think it will be fun personally to participate in some of the YC events. I hope my perspective can help some of the other companies.

[1] http://qr.ae/y2vdI

Re: Quora in the next YC batch

#150

Post by cookiecaper »

benwilber0 wrote: post #114
gedrap wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Quora is a totally different product, content wise. You don't go to Quora for programming help unless it's hello world in php. You go there for /r/iama type of questions. Or it's just my usage, largely influenced by the weekly email.

Reddit is devouring that use-case. I'm not sure where Quora fits in.

Reddit is only "devouring" it because it has no decent competitors. Quora could potentially be one if it at least let you read without registering. I can understand wanting to restrict it to "real name"-type contributions, but it's a major mistake to make it unreadable imo. This also prevents indexing by search engines.

I even have a Quora account, but rarely log into it. Most of the time when I come across an interesting question on Quora and it asks me to log in to read more than the first answer, I say, "Well, I guess it's not that interesting anyway."

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