Since it may not be obvious, questions like http://www.quora.com/Communication/If-you-had-a-conversation... won't show up in feeds unless you follow the Joke Questions topic. There are several other topics applied to content that doesn't have broad appeal like Quora Community. The alternative is to actively delete questions like this but the reality is that the site is too active for that to be feasible, also, regular users aren't doing the same kind of content curation that they used to. Questions used to get quickly edited or flagged, now they just sit there until they get activity and users just answer them without fixing grammar, punctuation etc... so part of the problem is that the number of people who care about curating content hasn't scaled with the over-all population.
Quora’s Demise
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Re: Quora’s Demise
#22As a longtime online community manager, this piece strikes me as another entry in the time-honored tradition of "this place changed and now I don't like it" complaints. Yes, everything changes. No, it's not the same as when you joined. That's not Quora, that's life.
This comment doesn't actually say anything. Yes, things change. Yes, that's a part of life. That doesn't automatically make all change for the better.
Change for change sake isn't always good but in this case its understandable why Quora is changing (more users = more $) and it's too early to say that Quora is dying because of the lowering of the average user IQ. If Quora is in danger of becoming a less popular version of Yahoo Answers it need only make some new changes.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#23The problem was that there was no barrier to entry, and therefore there was no way to prevent people from misusing it. The intellectual value of Quora dropped as more and more people who had no reservations about posting inherently useless questions joined. If there was a system for filtering out questions from less authoritative or knowledgeable figures, they could have prevented this.
Ah, now how does one find the sweet spot between this and say Stack Exchange? Many times, I have heard users complain about the barrier for Stack Exchange and overzealous moderators. There is not really a way to please everyone. I never really understood how moderation works on Quora so I assumed there was none. Not to say that I hate Quora (I like it a lot), I just feel there is nothing preventing it from becoming Y…
Moderation is pretty active on the site, in fact, users who have interacted with Quora moderation consider the site to be heavily moderated... you are right -- there is a sweetspot somewhere, but even that is just a sweetspot for a small subset of users. Nobody will ever please everyone.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#24...and Ask MetaFilter quietly carries on being fantastic.
$5 + one-week filter weeds out people without sufficient prefrontal cortex size (i.e., they don't have patience and can't understand the value of a future payout).
Re: Quora’s Demise
#25I found the comment about Quora being an encyclopedia of sorts really interesting.
This sort of site would actually fill a niche between something like StackExchange and Wikipedia: thorough, comprehensive articles (although, to be fair, these can be found on SE as well) but with more relaxed editorial standards (no notability requirements or ban on original research).
That being said, a for-profit start-up is probably the wrong medium for such a site. Imagine if Wikipedia were for-profit. There's a good chance that the pressure to monetize all those raw page views would have degraded the quality of the actual content.
For example, I've been using Wikipedia basically since it started. However, I never created an account until about a week ago (to fix a typo). I would have contributed sooner, but I never had anything important to say, and I knew that if I broke the rules or failed to uphold the editorial standards my edits would be removed anyway (admittedly, Wikipedia may have gone too far with the rules in some cases, but that's not really the point).
Contrast that with Reddit, where I've had an account for some time and comment regularly. I do so even knowing I might be down-voted because that's what the site encourages. Making a dopey comment on Reddit once in awhile (accidentally or on-purpose) is just part of Reddit. Making a dopey edit on Wikipedia destroys the value of the site.
In order for Quora to fill the role the OP wanted it to fill it probably would have had to be non-profit.
tldr; Quora could have been Wikipedia-lite. But Wikipedia works because profit isn't important, so quality can be put before monetizing traffic and creating non-essential "engagement".
Re: Quora’s Demise
#26My problem with Quora is that it is very difficult to penetrate the inner sanctum and feel welcome in the community. You used to be able to gain recognition with thorough answers to domain-specific questions. But if you take a look at a lot of the "trending" answers on Quora, they all seem to be written by the same 10 Quora power users (Mark Bodnick, Garrick Saito, Venkatesh Rao, etc..) The problem not so much the ex…
I don't think the low-quality general answers from some of the high volume contributors really matter; I'm a lot more into the niche experts, and Quora makes it easy to find those people. (Marc Bodnick upvotes are so common as to be essentially content free, although his answers are great; there are a lot of users who contribute lots of crap with no actual knowledge, across a range of categories, and a number of user…
I joined Quora soon after it launched, thought it was kinda cool, forgot about it, and yes, then rejoined again sometime in the fall of 2010. There was a nice linguistics community built up for a while (I'm a linguistics undergrad) until everything kind of fell apart. Quora didn't know how to separate people very well, so people interested in memes gradually crowded everything out.
BUT I didn't actually have any problems at all with Quora (at least, nothing notable) until the launch of Boards. In fact, I really enjoyed the linguistics, philosophy, chemistry, biology, theology, travel, and cooking communities. I mostly ignored the Quora superusers and focused on niche experts, like you mentioned, but eventually it was just too much.
Perhaps I will revamp my profile when I get the time, start from scratch, and things will work out better the second time around.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#27My complaints about Quora:
* You have to use a "real" name.
* Their members are predominantly white upper middle class tech/finance/marketing professionals - occasionally some Asians, but mainly from California or NY.
* There's no good way to browse the site - if there is, it's not easy to find.
* Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems for high-IQ communities.Re: Quora’s Demise
#28Boards had a high cost/benefit in the wrong vectors. While they acquired a very low-barrier (i mean low IQ requirement) feature that has great SEO and pageviews benefits, it had a high cost of increasing noise and diluting the Q&A DNA of the product. What i didn't understand was why didn't they go into more related and deeper dimensions of Q&A like interviews, product FAQs, debate, surveys and polls. These are branch…
That's a really good point I hadn't considered - diving into Q&A deeper. When boards were announced I was not a fan at all and don't use them. Your suggestions would definitely fit better, imho.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#29Boards had a high cost/benefit in the wrong vectors. While they acquired a very low-barrier (i mean low IQ requirement) feature that has great SEO and pageviews benefits, it had a high cost of increasing noise and diluting the Q&A DNA of the product. What i didn't understand was why didn't they go into more related and deeper dimensions of Q&A like interviews, product FAQs, debate, surveys and polls. These are branch…
That's a really good point I hadn't considered - diving into Q&A deeper. When boards were announced I was not a fan at all and don't use them. Your suggestions would definitely fit better, imho.
Thanks. Theres plenty of evidence that these are popular. Reddit's Ask me Anything, poll apps (real-time) and the rest are ripe for a market leader to emerge.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#30"The business of startups is a sketchy subject, and I don’t intend to associate myself with it."
That's an unusual sentiment around here.