Just as with HN, it's not the technology that makes it so great, it's the people. If the people stick with Quora, it will continue to be immensely informative.
Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
71–80 of 82 posts
Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Zuck thought Adam was valuable, he would have given him an incentive to stay instead of replacing his position with a newcomer and putting him in a position where he would likely leave the company.
he would have given him an incentive to stay Clearly we don't know if he did. But what we do know is that guys like Adam, Paul Buchteit etc. just want to go do their own thing after a while. And we also know the tendency of founders to sell their co back to their original employer or a close competitor.
Clearly we don't know if he did.
It obviously wasn't enough if there were any. And don't you think it is convenient that Zuckerberg "got rid of" the CTO position when Adam left (when he complains about his position not fitting his stature)...and then a couple months later they have another CTO again?
Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
#73Maybe 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."?
Though it's hard for many of us to disagree with it when: 1) we heard of quora due to TechCrunch 2) we keep hearing of quora due to TechCrunch
#1 assumes that "we" all read TechCrunch regularly
personally if it's not linked from a story I've read here, I don't tend to read TechCrunch. Nothing against the site, but I find that if it's something that would interest me, it'll find it's way to HN.
Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
#74My 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…
I am continually surprised by the number of tech/web people I come across who haven't even heard of TechCrunch let alone read it. It always makes me feel better about not having a glowing TechCrunch article about whatever my latest project is. Though it wouldn't hurt.
Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
#75Quora will be successful if they can devise an algorithm which does personalized ranking of users and answers. Rank users globally, yes, but also incorporate your upvotes, searches, and page views as features in a correction term to locally rerank for logged in users. This way you see the answers at the top which are valuable to you specifically, ranked in order of your probability of upvote.
The basic math here has been around since Kaltix in 2003. It will need to be tuned for this specific app, but an off the shelf version will be a qualitative leap over Yahoo or Goog answers.
Because unlike Yahoo or Google Answers, Quora has the social graph as a critical piece of ranking infrastructure. That is a huge difference, comparable to search before and after the web, because the credibility of many nontechnical answers depends fundamentally on the identity of the respondents. And unlike Facebook Questions, they have the benefit of complete focus on one area (Q&A).
Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
#76Maybe 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."?
Eh, people have been attributing a lot of Twitter's success to the same phenomenon for a few years now.
Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
#77I 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…
Agreed with you on the crappiness of Techcrunch. However it's a bit low calling someone out as an ex-alcoholic. Call him out on the quality and integrity of his articles by all means. But his alleged alcoholism - true or otherwise - is nobody's business but his and his family's.
you made a genuine point, I stay corrected, thanks.
Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
#78I 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
Then perhaps I wouldn't need Quora after all, if all the answers are going to come from within my existing social network.
Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
#79I used Quora a bit, mostly in movie section. The main problem is the quality of the questions are not so good. Something like "What is the best films of director XXXX?" seems so pointless and subjective. And it is not in only movies; in travel, web design etc... You see all around the "What is the best....".
There is no best and the answers will(have) change in time.
Re: Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair; the audience for your particular question is better on HN than Quora. If you had asked "what is the optimal pricing strategy for funding an iphone startup" quora may have been a better bet.
I'm not disagreeing with you so much as I'm still honestly sort of stumped as to what exactly is the "sweet spot" in Quora's audience.
The sweet spot comes from users who have been to the companies during the phases about which the questions are asked. Where else can you find how much serving the Like button costs to Fb. Sure you can do a guess-estimate but how close would that be to the figure quoted by Tweetmeme CEO about their RT buttons.
There are countless such incidents. I think if the user base has some sort of expertise in an area and they "choose" to answer questions about thos domains only, that would be make it a great place for knowledge. I honestly think Quora is the lovechild of Twitter and Wikipedia. You can call it the real time Wikipedia with Questions than topics having info that I do not give a damn about.