4 ms·

Ask HN: Do you guys think these Q&A sites e.g. Quora, can survive Facebook?

• notaddicted 16y ago
  discussion on quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Facebook-creating-a-Q-A-product-to-compete-against-Quora http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Facebook-creating-a-Q-A-product-... ... the first two answers are starkly different
• OoTheNigerian 16y ago
  Clickable link: http://oothenigerian.com/new-facebook-wall-ui http://oothenigerian.com/new-facebook-wall-ui
• faramarz 16y ago
  I think so far Quora has been successful because a) It attracts a high calibre of domain experts b) the questions are edited and curated by mods/others This really helps with things like spelling, rephrasing and correctly categorizing the questions. I don't see fb a direct threat to Quora. Perhaps an inevitable partnership/acquisition is down the road?
  • OoTheNigerian 16y ago
    Why this is different is that they have 500 million users from day one! Quora is all about the bay area (at least now). Facebook is about the world. My opinion is Stack overflow will survive but not a general Q&A site like Quora.
  • pedalpete 16y ago
    I would add to your list c) they've done a great job with autofill on the question form, resulting in users getting answers to their questions without actually needing to post anything. I've never posted a question because I've always found somebody else has already answered (or asked a better question).
• ThomasStratton 16y ago
  Without knowing anything about Facebook's Q&A plans, beyond your screenshot, let me put these two thoughts out: * First, the screenshot makes me believe these Q&A questions would be posted to your wall, rather than a dedicated Q&A environment. I could easily be wrong, but if this is the case then their Q&A would be no different from just posting a question to your own wall, since most people have their privacy settings limited to only show wall posts to friends. This limits the amount of input on any given question. * If the above is incorrect, then I still have certain qualms about associating my personal identity (in the form of a Facebook profile) with certain content I might put online, and Q&A sites can ask questions on which I may not want my opinion to be associated with my personal identity. For instance, if I were to come from a family who enjoys hunting for sport, I may not want to come out swinging too hard against it if that content were to be easily associated with my by my family. My family may know my stance on the issue, but to make it a public on Facebook could have certain liabilities (let's say my father and I have a mutual friend who is a hunting buddy of his). I think that without a certain amount of anonymity, broad spectrum Q&A is limited by certain predispositions and security concerns. Pre-emptive rebuttals: * Yes, I use my own name on Hacker News, but I imagine I'm not the only Tom Stratton in the world and you can't necessarily correlate my identity here with my personal identity like you could with Facebook. Also, if I have something particularly sensitive I want to say, I can make a second account to express those opinions. * I realize that sites like StackOverflow have a lot of users that use their real names as their username, and have a lot of personally identifiable information associated with their accounts, even listed on their profiles. To that I say that sites like StackOverflow are narrow range topics, and (at least some of) the users there are in it at least partially to show off their skills, and most information they put on that site is positive (helping answer a question) rather than incendiary. Even the incendiary topics are typically just semi-trivial religious wars about things like "vi vs. emacs."