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"Quora‘s staff started off answering as many questions as they could. This helped create a site that had activity on it, which encouraged other users to partici
by dabent 16y ago
"Quora‘s staff started off answering as many questions as they could. This helped create a site that had activity on it, which encouraged other users to participate. Suddenly, they didn’t have to spend hours answering questions themselves."
This reminds me of something one of the speakers (I'm pretty sure it was Quora's founder) said at Startup School - It's OK to do something that doesn't scale if it strengthens your position.
- blasdel 16y agoQuora also has a pernicious design feature in that the question asker is publicly anonymous but the answerer(s) are strongly identified and bound to their real names. I strongly suspect that nearly all of the startup-related questions are slow-pitch setups, asked by their answerer. Even StackOverflow's QA mechanics aren't that degenerate!
- kqr2 16y agoActually, both the question asker and answerer can choose to be anonymous. As far as I know though, you cannot ask anonymously and then answer the same question publicly. Also, note that you cannot comment on questions and answers if you are anonymous (unless you are the person who originally asked the question or its your anonymous answer)
- seunosewa 16y agoThere's nothing FAKE about what Quora's did. They answered questions as under their real names. The author, rather deviously, is trying to legitimize shady practices by using a perfectly innocent, open, and helpful activity as his first example of the kind of shady behaviour he's trying to promote. I hope people can see through it.
- blasdel 16y agoBut they definitely seeded the site with anonymously asked 'questions'. There's no way that all those "Why does Quora use MySQL" questions weren't rhetorical bullshit.