Blech. The reason I was enjoying Quora was its lack of explicit gameified geegaws -- versus StackOverflow (and to a lesser extent the whole StackExchange federa

Blech. The reason I was enjoying Quora was its lack of explicit gameified geegaws -- versus StackOverflow (and to a lesser extent the whole StackExchange federation). SO has become less and less useful, if you've got a novel and/or slightly abstract or subjective query, because everyone is playing for points, including moderators. It leads to a Pavlovian house style, favoring novice questions with circumlocutious answers, with terse rebukes and heavy-handed moderation for everything else. I appreciate SO's focus but only inasmuch as it produces something I can use. I still use it frequently as the majority of "duh, what module?" sort of questions have been answered there already. Quora wadn't about that, though; I found the process of socially-networked collaborative question-answering to be as valuable as the answer... E.g. Answers that were 80% there would frequently contain clues to new relevant questions; if people are trying to "win" I m afraid that horizontal exploration of Quora's topics won't be as fun or accessible. In fact I think it will be less fun in general, and the likely inference that less fun leads to less Quora use (and therefore less $)doesn't require rocket-science-grade reasoning. I am sure enough people love this kind of game enough such that they'll stay afloat even if the Quora game is every bit as unpleasant as I might anticipate -- but in my personal expert opinion, that'd be weak.