Slightly off-topic: Forcing sign-in to read full answers strikes me as an odd path to take - reminds me of expertsexchange.
Why did I read that as expert-sex-change?
Quora’s Demise
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: Quora’s Demise
#32My 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.
> Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems for high-IQ communities.
That's what I like about HN. Groupthink is indeed present (especially when it comes to technical topics such as programming languages or OSes - we all have a strong incentive to promote what we use), but not nearly as much as any other online community I'm aware of. There's a recurring pattern that I like here: usually, when a submission argues X, the top comment in the comment thread criticizes/refutes X. By hearing the two sides of an argument, one can better form an opinion.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#33Same complaints here. You nailed it:
I came to Quora to find cool information.
Quora used to do a good job of surfacing that, now it's turned into mostly people trying to advertise in a sneaky way or asking inane questions.
They should put it back the way it was before it becomes a ghost town.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#34Re: Quora’s Demise
#35My 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.
Fear of being ostracized is universal. If anything, I'd say "high-IQ" communities are less susceptible to groupthink and penalizing dissent.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#36>"It was a turning point I happened to catch at its birth."
Really? Because I'm pretty sure myself and many others caught it when the T-echo Chamber was trying to sell us on this new message board system that was going to make a lot of money and change the game.
Quora was an online community that happened to be "cool", so it attracted intelligent people which made the content fantastic. But nothing they were doing, in my opinion, was especially original. And as has been pointed out, if you try to scale up an online community, you deal with more and more noise. Predictably, that happened.
I apologize for the past tense; I realize Quora still exists, and nothing I or the author says has any real bearing on where it goes from here, or whether or not it is successful in the future. But I do know that I've gone from using it occasionally to using it never.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#37There seems to be an over-active "troll" patrol on Quora as well. If you ask a question or present a point of view that's outside of conventional thinking, its common to see those views lambasted in the comments. Quora is definitely not a place for "things you can't say" ( http://paulgraham.com/say.html ).
I
Re: Quora’s Demise
#38My 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.
> Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems for high-IQ communities. That's what I like about HN. Groupthink is indeed present (especially when it comes to technical topics such as programming languages or OSes - we all have a strong incentive to promote what we use), but not nearly as much as any other online community I'm aware of. There's a recurring pattern that I like here: usua…
HN groupthink is getting out of control. No answers but donwvotes to any dissenting comment.
Re: Quora’s Demise
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 prob…
Ah, I shouldn't have assumed; although even Feb 2011 is early enough to see before and after boards.
Have you seen any positive use of Boards? I haven't -- even Marc Bodnick's boards are pretty mediocre, although I don't think they drag the site down like the others.
Survey questions are a worse thing than boards, though, I think. Getting rid of both would be great, but if I could only get rid of one...
Re: Quora’s Demise
#40I wonder how much money has been sunk into it already.