3 ms·

As a meta-comment, I'm surprised at how good the answers in these kinds of Quora questions, specially when compared to most other internet forums. Even comment

As a meta-comment, I'm surprised at how good the answers in these kinds of Quora questions, specially when compared to most other internet forums. Even comments in this HN thread (including this one, sorry) are uninteresting and confrontative. Why is it that Quora is so different from most other social media?

jfengel 5y ago
There's a few things going on with Quora: 0. For that answer in particular, it's several years old. The best answers have bubbled to the top, rather than consisting of a bunch of hot takes, which is all you get on HN. 1. They started with a strong focus on Silicon Valley, which attracted a bunch of well-educated people early on. It got a reputation as a place for good, intelligent writing, which spawned a virtuous circle as other good writers came to each other. 2. For a while they continued to attract that with rewards for good writers. It was more about appreciation than paying them, so what they got was enthusiastic volunteers. 3. Their rating system is a deliberate black box but it does do a decent job of finding the better content. Poor quality content gets downvoted and hidden. Not always, and it's far from perfect, but there is another virtuous cycle where the good writers get more votes. The further down you go on the page, the worse the answers get, and the collapsed ones are pretty bad. 4. The moderation is also deeply imperfect, but they've done an OK job of pushing down some of the silliness. They used all of that to get themselves good SEO, and for the past few years they've been capitalizing on that to better monetize the site. A lot of people feel that the site has gone downhill, as seems to be the way of all flesh/bits. But it has a large number of really great writers who continue to produce good, interesting things.

3 ms·

As a meta-comment, I'm surprised at how good the answers in these kinds of Quora questions, specially when compared to most other internet forums. Even comment

by mFixman 5y ago

jfengel 5y ago
There's a few things going on with Quora: 0. For that answer in particular, it's several years old. The best answers have bubbled to the top, rather than consisting of a bunch of hot takes, which is all you get on HN. 1. They started with a strong focus on Silicon Valley, which attracted a bunch of well-educated people early on. It got a reputation as a place for good, intelligent writing, which spawned a virtuous circle as other good writers came to each other. 2. For a while they continued to attract that with rewards for good writers. It was more about appreciation than paying them, so what they got was enthusiastic volunteers. 3. Their rating system is a deliberate black box but it does do a decent job of finding the better content. Poor quality content gets downvoted and hidden. Not always, and it's far from perfect, but there is another virtuous cycle where the good writers get more votes. The further down you go on the page, the worse the answers get, and the collapsed ones are pretty bad. 4. The moderation is also deeply imperfect, but they've done an OK job of pushing down some of the silliness. They used all of that to get themselves good SEO, and for the past few years they've been capitalizing on that to better monetize the site. A lot of people feel that the site has gone downhill, as seems to be the way of all flesh/bits. But it has a large number of really great writers who continue to produce good, interesting things.