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Maybe I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, but am I the only one who was put off by this comment: "Quora’s membership is growing largely because of the attention that TechCrunch has given it."?
For a Q&A site to take over the market, it needs to be designed with scaling in mind from day 1, it's just that type of market. Thinking that social was the only missing ingredient was pretty naive, though it did advance the state of the art a bit.
The last thing I will say is this, the real deal Q&A site won't have people questioning it's scaling potential, but rather why nobody figured it out before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your "evidence" is anecdotal. Compare this to an answer like this on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/How-can-I-prevent-share... . There are things I'd rather ask about on HN, and the same applies to Quora.
I think we're agreeing more than we're disagreeing. My point was mainly that there is a large degree of overlap between the areas of discussion on the two sites. I'd be very interested in knowing your criteria for which site to ask what kinds of questions.
I think that, on average, you'll get a much more useful response on HN, because there is a general feeling of how to reply and what can be done. When you write a question on Quora, it doesn't feel like you create a discussion; you submit a ticket you hope people will be kind enough to answer (seeing that there is no incentive, i.e. reward, model in Quora whatsoever). The comments for each answer are just yays, nays, and cutesy remarks.
There's a reason I don't feel comfortable calling Quora a community, because the interaction is mainly from answerer to asker.
I went on Quora a while ago and answered a few people's questions, mostly about the Stanford CS department and maybe a couple about Django or AI or something. I haven't been back on the site since - I haven't gotten any emails from Quora saying "you should answer this question" or "these people liked your answer" or "this discussion might interest you". I'm probably the kind of person they want on the site, since I a…
The email notifications are a lot more sparse, presumably by design (to avoid drowning people in the stuff). A weekly summary (upvotes, thanks, and particularly active topics of interest) might be nice...
eBay used to be good as well, then one day they got so big that buyers and sellers were practically left to settle their disputes on their own. eBay used to be my #1 stop for anything that I wanted to buy online. After getting burnt 2 or 3 times, I haven't opened a page on the site in over a year and haven't bought anything from it in the last 3.
I'm also going to make the bold claim that if Facebook was in its current state 3 or 4 years ago, in terms of quality and community, it would probably not have gotten the success it currently enjoys. Most of us would just consider it another MySpace or HI5 clone.
As far as Quora goes, if it is indeed successful, it might also very well be a victim of its own success, but maybe by then it will be financially viable, which is the one thing that matters most to its backers.
Pre-launch, it's definitely true that Quora was given a big boost by the names of its founders and (to a lesser extent) tech blogosphere coverage, but after using the site for a while it's become one of the most important ways I access information, in particular one of the most important ways I discover new interesting information. That is potentially a powerful position to be in. It's telling that the links in the original article to Quora questions were are interesting enough that I clicked on all of them and thought they were all much more valuable and entertaining than the original column.
Maybe I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, but am I the only one who was put off by this comment: "Quora’s membership is growing largely because of the attention that TechCrunch has given it."?
1) we heard of quora due to TechCrunch
2) we keep hearing of quora due to TechCrunch
It prompted me a few times, ...I think, but I couldn't see questions and answers right away.
He is both right and wrong on this. Right, for the present: Quora is special because of who is there, not what , and there is an upper limit to the success of a fan-club. But he is wrong in the long term, or could be wrong, if Quora adapts and allows the rest of the world to create their own fan-club universes. If it goes on to inspire communities from different backgrounds, fields, industries and specialties, then y…
So then what's to say the Stack Exchange platform doesn't just expand to all other areas of life. I'd bet more on SE being more predominant on the web then Quora, since their platform already is modelled this way. It's owner actually said this is the success of such QA websites - create them in "verticals". (don't have the quote, but remember reading it somewhere)
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…