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Why is Quora given so much attention?

• staunch 16y ago
  Because the tech bloggers all use and like it.
• whatrocks 16y ago
  You should ask them.
• l0nwlf 16y ago
  Because the quality of answers are good.
• FiReaNG3L 16y ago
  Facebook mafia, thats about it.
• joblessjunkie 16y ago
  Ditto -- it seems that I read about Quora on HN nearly every day, but I've never actually been taken to the site for any real purpose, or seen any of its actual content linked on HN.
• cletus 16y ago
  +1 To me, Quora is almost the ultimate non-story. There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform. The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it. Another way to put this is that it's a bubble story: journalists and Valleywags think it's much bigger than it is because all the other people in the same bubble talk about it. Outside of SV/SF, nobody really knows nor cares. It's a bit like the AT&T-iPhone story. Sure it sucks in SF/NY (it really does) but journalists and bloggers seem incapable or uninterested in considering that these two cities are representative of the whole country. Last year Quora got funding at a staggering $86M [1] (this sounds like post-money). It's Yahoo Answers meets Facebook, which just so happens to have an insider audience that won't necessarily translate more broadly. Frankly, I'd sell before people catch on. [1]: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchmark-invests-at-86-million-valuation/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchma...
  • whakojacko 16y ago
    > There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform. Don't quite agree, I think their real-time update system excellent and sets them apart. It definitely (IMO) makes the site more addicting. Not that it couldn't be written by competitors of course I don't disagree that Quora is overhyped though, they seem be Techcrunch's pet company of 2011.
  • DavidSJ 16y ago
    To me, Quora is almost the ultimate non-story. There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform. The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it. Replace "Quora" with "Hacker News" and you'll see how valuable getting Valley insiders to use it can be. It's the community.
    • metageek 16y ago
      Upvote, but there is a large difference in degree. Nobody's paying $86M for Hacker News.
      • DavidSJ 16y ago
        Hacker News doesn't have a monetization strategy. Can you imagine it with ads? I can't. Quora I can, though.
  • radicaldreamer 16y ago
    I've heard their stack is actually really well built.
• beoba 16y ago
  Reminds me of these guys, except 15 years later: http://www.well.com/ http://www.well.com/ Obligatory wikipedia background: "WELL membership is available to almost anyone, but requires a paid subscription and use of one's real name." "The WELL was frequently mentioned in the media in the 1980s and 1990s, probably disproportionately to the number of users it had relative to other online systems. [...] This early visibility was largely the result of the early policy of providing free — comped — accounts for interesting journalists and other select members of the media. As a result, for many journalists it was their first experience of online systems and, later, the Internet, even though other systems existed." Not much happened with them, either.
• ig1 16y ago
  As a startup founder I gain a lot of value out of Quora, whereas for many things before I would have gone to the AskHN archive now I go to Quora. For example the discussions of many business models on Quora are unsurpassed in quality anywhere else on the web.