Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#21

Post by Charuru » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 5:05 PM UTC

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…

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

I doubt arrington views that as a bad thing.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#22

Post by nhangen » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 5:07 PM UTC

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…

I tend to think that this piece was posted so that TC could masterfully play both sides of the Quora debate, thus keeping it alive and us talking about both.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#23

Post by sk_0919 » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 5:14 PM UTC

The site-wide quality of answers matters less for Quora to be useful to an individual when you're following people rather than topics. You see answers upvoted by people you follow or answered by people you follow.

Quora will continue to work for the same reasons that Twitter does...I get tweets from people I follow, millions of bieber fans don't affect my twitter homepage.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#24

Post by zaidf » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 5:35 PM UTC

Let's not kid ourselves. Any morning we will wake up to the headline "Quora acquired by Facebook."

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#25

Post by geuis » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 5:36 PM UTC

I find quora to be useless. I finally signed up the other day to ask a question that I was having a hard time getting answered elsewhere. After 2 days, it had exactly 1 view, mine.

I consider the StackOverflow model to be much more useful.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#26

Post by dmor » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 5:37 PM UTC

geuis wrote: post #25

I find quora to be useless. I finally signed up the other day to ask a question that I was having a hard time getting answered elsewhere. After 2 days, it had exactly 1 view, mine. I consider the StackOverflow model to be much more useful.

you'll probably get a lot more value if you post the link to your question on your own social networks (Twitter/FB) to start

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#27

Post by jdp23 » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 5:50 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #16

My problem with the Quora hype is that its only in the TechCrunch echo chamber. Even relatively tech saavy people I know don't know Quora unless they read TechCrunch (and a LOT of very techincal people don't read TechCrunch). And I don't mean they know about it, just haven't used it. I mean they literally haven't heard of it before. I've never been to Quora and this is somewhat surprising given the number of Google/B…

Quora's gotten recent press in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NBC, etc. etc. ... just try Googling them. So the hype's gone beyond the echo chamber.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#28

Post by danielayele » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 5:55 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #7

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. Fac…

Wikipedia doesn't verb-ize well either

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#29

Post by jdp23 » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 5:56 PM UTC

TL;DR summary: "Silicon Valley is again drinking its own Kool-Aid; it is looking at the world through its own prism."

Well worth reading. There's an interesting comment from Fred Wilson too.

Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

#30

Post by michaelbuckbee » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 6:04 PM UTC

Something no one else has mentioned yet (perhaps for fear of plunging down the meta discussion rabbit hole) is the degree to which HN competes with Quora.

As a small experiment, I'd previously posed roughly the same question to both HN and Quora.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-optimum-pricing-strategy-fo...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097527

The response from HN absolutely destroyed the response from Quora. Those links don't even tell the whole story as I had multiple people email me directly from the HN community to offer advice and in one case give me access to a private iPhone application price research tool that he'd built for his own use.