10 ms·

Why Quora Won't Scale

129 points by desbest 14y ago

agscala 14y ago
This article makes Quora sound almost like Digg back in the day, with a select few users who work together to ensure they control most of the content on the site.
- webwanderings 14y ago
  Quora has been a fine weekly newsletter. So what if most often you see a 25 year old millionaire against another 25 year old millionaire going about their gripe and appreciation of newly acquired money! As a weekly email newsletter, I get nicely curated content without participating a minute of my time at the site.
  - andrewcooke 14y ago
    personally, i wish they would follow the legal guidelines for unsubscription that were posted here a few days ago. i've tried several times to unsubscribe, and failed.
    - creativityland 14y ago
      You are not alone...
    - desbest 14y ago
      I unsubscribed, and a few weeks later I automatically got subscribed again.
    - kstenerud 14y ago
      Remember to mark the emails as spam.
- 23david 14y ago
  Sounds like Digg but also like Stackexchange. The inmates are running the asylum. :-) I don't mind any of the sites, but that's just because I understand their limitations. I can definitely understand being frustrated however if I wanted to contribute and felt like I was being continuously rebuffed for not being an 'insider'. That's pretty annoying.
andrewcooke 14y ago
we're still using the present tense? shouldn't this be "why quora did not scale"? or is exponential growth one more thing that isn't the same as it was back in the day?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
eslackey 14y ago
You should ask this question on Quora
- XiaoPing 14y ago
  Why? To waste time?
wilfra 14y ago
Sounds like the author got banned for excessive complaining on Quora and is exceptionally butthurt. I'm a hard core Quora addict and have never encountered most of the things in this post. He's way off about the "elite". Yes there are people who get tons of upvotes and have huge followings but in every case I've seen it's because they are well known off of Quora or they give consistently amazing answers, often both. It's not like Digg was where some random anonymous person has all this power. Quora power users don't even really have any power beyond knowing lots of people will read their answers, even then those answers still must be good to get upvotes.
- tbatterii 14y ago
  That is the exact impression i got right down to "butt-hurt". I don't use quora myself, but I do find it annoying when people with blogs project their standards on someone else's creation. It's like a more articulate "GUYZ Y THE DOWN VOTEZ??!!??"
- ericdykstra 14y ago
  Spot on. Maybe the author got banned, maybe the author just wanted to write an inciteful piece that would get a lot of pageviews. Either way, what's described in the article is nothing like my experience with Quora over the past year+
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Nice head fake into correct use of "inciteful".
- Noldorin 14y ago
  And clearly you are sufficiently biased, likewise, that your opinion must be irrational. Oh no, wait, we've just fallen into several logical fallacies. Next time, please switch on your brain before posting.
- pbreit 14y ago
  The article was clearly well-researched so doesn't seem like a simple reaction to a bad experience. And I can attest to some of the experiences expressed in the article. There's a pretty bizarre ritual going on over at Quora that it's hard to pin down but I think the author did a reasonably good job. That said, Quora has obviously cracked a nut whereby it is getting very high quality/value content from well-placed individuals.
jcfrei 14y ago
>The Spiral of Silence I like the theory described by the spiral of silence and it somehow seems relevant to the continuing discussion about HNs apparent demise (in the eyes of some). it seems like quora successfully implemented a system, that leaves a community largely true to it's original state, by giving dominant admins/moderators the tools to block unwanted content and to promote their own views. left aside whether this fosters better or worse answers, it apparently doesn't help growing a noticeable community and I'm glad that HN didn't go that same way.
- brokenloaw 14y ago
  This seems to be a common misunderstanding. Admins and moderators have no different powers than anyone else. I (not an admin and not a moderator) can collapse answers with "improvements needed" any day of the week. So can most anyone else. It takes a special kind of person and insults being flung to become edit-blocked, something that happened to my knowledge and according to Bodnick less than ten times in the history of Quora. The author of the linked piece was one of those people because, alas, she could not be asked to act like a reasonable human among reasonable humans, that is treat everyone as an equal and debate on the merits, not the perception of standing. Promotion of views is the same. Spend six months on Quora and establish yourself as a knowledgeable person in one area (see: Michelin chef Jonas M Luster in food or former police officer Justin Freeman in law enforcement) and you will have credits to promote content, including your own. Your standing in answers is based on votes, your power to elicit answers or promote questions is also based on it. Nothing that does not happen anywhere else. No one on Quora becomes a "superuser" over night, those who spent months giving insightful answers all have.
  - codezero 14y ago
    Admins and reviewers do have some special abilities -- you might have been made a reviewer (or topic admin) and not remember it happening!
kcl 14y ago
This article is false. (Regardless of whether Quora will or will not grow.) Many of the arguments should have been tested against Facebook: elitism didn't slow the spread of Facebook. In fact, it was likely a main driver of growth in the world's most popular website. It's not surprising Quora has been modeled after Facebook since Quora is made up of early Facebook alumni. Many of the rest of the arguments apply to discussion websites in general. If you consider Wikipedia, for instance, scaling doesn't seem to be a problem. Taking Wikipedia is a good idea, since, despite what's been said, Quora is or should be a direct competitor to Wikipedia. At a descriptive level, Quora isn't represented accurately. Judging from the slant of the article, it seems the author is reacting to a bad experience on the site.
- desbest 14y ago
  The difference between Quora and Facebook, is that me and my friends can upload photos of ourselves drunk and post wall posts of us swearing, and Facebook will be always a good product to the entire community despite this. With Quora, the community isn't tied down to who you are friends with. There are no friend requests. On Quora, everyone is technically your "friend". So with that said, it is not just enough to allow people to behave as bad as they want on Quora. If that happened, people would leave in disgust. If I was posting racist things on Facebook, only my friends would know and you would still be using Facebook regardless. On Quora it's not like that.
- mikeryan 14y ago
  Many of the arguments should have been tested against Facebook: elitism didn't slow the spread of Facebook Facebook wasn't elitist. It was exclusive. Its a pretty significant difference.
- Noldorin 14y ago
  A subjective article cannot be false, silly person. It is evidently well-research and supported by evidence; that's as much as one can ask. You may disagree with it's stance, but that's another point. Get over it.
  - pbreit 14y ago
mcphilip 14y ago
I'm still unable to get a clear answer to the basic question "Why should I use Quora?" I work at a startup in Austin, I read HN daily, I enjoy news about SV startups, etc. Still, I haven't found a compelling reason to spend any substantial time on Quora. I'm happy to read a particularly insightful answer when I see the occasional link pop up on another site, but that doesn't make me want to search Quora for other information. I wonder if my disinterest in Quora is common among developers outside of SV? If I, a tech savvy developer at a startup, don't find the idea of Quora particularly interesting, why would Average Joe be interested in joining the community?
- starpilot 14y ago
  Quora is just so much better than Ask MetaFilter, Reddit's Q&A/advice subreddits (/r/askreddit, /r/answers, /r/doesanybodyelse etc.), or (dare I say it) Yahoo Answers for nontrivial, factual answers dependent on expertise. Quora is for people who benefit from or enjoy such questions and answers. The longtime existence of all these Q&A communities shows that there is a market for it. There's the most overlap with Ask MeFi I think, but Quora is far better at zeroing in on a good answer, when it exists.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    " for nontrivial, factual answers dependent on expertise. " I would modify that to be "dependent on certain very limited areas of expertise". There are entire realms of questions not well served by Quora at present, and we have yet to see evidence that they're ever going to be.
  - TillE 14y ago
    I have a lot of bad things to say about Reddit, but certain focused subreddits are excellent for getting good answers from experts. AskHistorians and AskScience are among the best available forums of their kind on the internet.
    - littlegiantcap 14y ago
      /r/startups /r/entrepreneur among others are excellent as well.
lmg643 14y ago
If you consider yahoo answers as their competition, Quora seems like it has a great chance for success as a vehicle to serve ads on link-bait topics.
intellegacy 14y ago
Sigh. Here we go - bring it on Quorans... I wanted to like Quora. I really did. Theoretically, Quora should be a wet dream for me: insightful discussions, check. Answers from bright people, check. A place to learn, to read, to spend hours on soaking in information, check. I never could have guessed that spending time on Quora would turn out to be more of a nightmare. As the article points out, Quora is a dictatorship, which doesn't really care about what the community wants. Which would be fine, except that the dictators don't know what they're doing. Their policies, and the general vibe of the community, just aren't welcoming. I don't contribute to Quora because I self-moderate myself out of posting. Why shouldn't I post? I have insights to contribute, as much as any other person. The problem is that Quora allows so little room for free expression in a world that is crying out for originality. Don't use your real name? Your account is locked and you can't post. Didn't directly address the question? Your answer downvoted into oblivion. Spelled something wrong? Here let me edit your post. The community they've attracted doesn't help either. There are a lot of nice people they've somehow convinced to stay on Quora, but I can't help but get the vibe that a lot of users think they're the sh, and how dare you disagree with them. The founder of reddit once said that the philosophy he had towards running reddit was like hosting a party - he couldn't just allow users free reign to do whatever they pleased, but he had to make it an inviting and fun place for users. Otherwise the party would suck. Well, if reddit is a fun party with alcohol, humor, entertainment, and cat pictures, along with the occasional smart person to learn from, then Quora is like hanging out with a group of bitter, pretentious intellectuals who wield their answers like weapons, at a party with no alcohol allowed. [ answer continued ]
- intellegacy 14y ago
  Quora has found its niche among intellectuals who don't mind the stringent rules, and that's great. It's just not for me, and I suspect from what I've observed that it's not for a lot of other people too. Which means that "Quora will never grow to to the size of facebook or reddit". Let's temper our expectations, people. Quora is fine for what it is. Are there lessons to be learned from Quora? I think so. I've thought for a long time about what kind of site I would enjoy spending time on. It would definitely have intellectuals, like Quora has, but they'd need to be more of a reddit or HN variety. Ie. treating each other civilly and unpretentious. I've written up my thoughts here for a new startup that will fill a niche Quora and Wikipedia are not serving: http://pozium.com/vision.html http://pozium.com/vision.html Wikipedia doesn't allow pages about just any topic. See: Kate Middleton's dress. Also, it's incredibly hard to become a mod for them. Finally, there is no room for self-expression, as editors and contributors are mostly anonymized through its process. So Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia, but not a good place for a discussion. Quora fills the niche of intelligent communal discussion, only its vision doesn't allow wit, misspellings, anonymity, or humor, and seems to have been taken over by domineering powers-that-be, so much so that the party just isn't fun anymore. Pozium can attract not only intellectuals, but laymen looking to learn as well. First, there are all the ex-Quorans who were put off by the site. Pozium will be a party of intellectuals who don't have a stick up their behind. You will learn, as well as have fun. Everyone will be able to contribute, and no one will feel shamed or intimidated. This will attract the second type of user: the more casual intellectual. I remember a post from Quora by this college girl who, while obviously not an Einstein, could still have contributed insights of value. In what seemed to be her last post, the girl said she was intimidated by others and wondered if Quora "was for people like her". So there is a niche being unserved, filled with people like this girl who don't feel welcome. If Quoran's mean IQ is in the 130s and 140s then perhaps the 110-130 IQ crowd is not being served. Anyone interested in potentially starting something up? Read more here: http://pozium.com http://pozium.com
the_expert 14y ago
Anonymity (pseudo-anonymity) certainly has downsides but over the years I have found the better thoughts come from posters who are _not_ attaching themselves to a Real Name(TM) that is connected to a web site^W business that would love to attract more followers^W customers. Anonymous comments have to stand on their own. They can't rely on name association. The reader has to evaluate them for their content, not their author. This is a good thing. Another thing I have learned over many years of using the web is that intelligent people do not always make intelligent comments. We are all inconsistent; we're human. It's foolish to assume everything Joe the Self-Proclaimed Expert says is going to be worth reading. Sometimes he will say stupid things. By the same token people who in the real world might not be deemed intelligent can sometimes have some brilliant insights. It would be foolish to assume that every comment they make is worthless simply because of the name it's attached to. Anonymous commenting allows each comment to be evaluated individually. It addresses the inherent inconsistency of human comments and protects readers from making unwarranted assumptions. Unless of course they assume every anonymous post automatically falls into some category with respect to its content. IMO, that sort of thinking is the mark of web inexperience. The notion of "experts" is vastly overrated. This is an idea used to sell advice and services. Socrates figured this out hundreds of years ago. Read what Socrates learned and you too will learn something abut "experts" and earned reputations as "authorities" on given subjects. Learn how to form questions. In learning, it is my opinion that questions, knowing how to formulate them, are far more important than answers. The web is blissfully free from the hard sell of the "expert" while still being a great place to discover many types of "expertise". No one is demanding to see how many degrees or certifications anyone else has. No one cares about your "reputation". People are just interested in knowledge, no matter who it might come from. They can then evaluate it on their own. Without anyone telling them what to do or think. This is not stopping some from trying to force their own system, with "experts" and "reputation" and so forth. In my opinion, none of them will scale. The main attraction of the web is that it is free from those sort of restraints. There are plenty of experts on the web, but they do not have to self-promote. They might not be trying to sell anything; maybe they just share their thoughts for the joy of sharing. Anonymous posting is as close to pure thought, free from real world biases like identities, credentials and reputations, as we're going to get. Every thought can be evaluated on its own merits, irrespective of the submitter.
at-fates-hands 14y ago
After a friend told me about Quora, I spent some time lurking and after a month or so I decided to just skip it. I saw a lot of the same behavior mentioned in the article. If you want a obvious glimpse, just subscribe to the Politics group. I'm sure there's a core group of people who love and swear by it, it just seems most of the comments in the posts are usually one way traffic. You either agree or just get downvoted into oblivion. For someone looking for a welcoming community, this is not the sort of impression you want to give new users.
kmfrk 14y ago
There is a lot HN admin(s) could learn from this criticism. Opaque moderation is one of the really bad things about Hacker News.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Seeing as I live in New York, I am by definition not part of the Silicon Valley in-crowd. My experience on Quora has been extremely positive. Right now, it's one of the best online communities for quality of content. People who call Quora a nasty community because of downvoting have no idea what they're talking about. Wikipedia in 2004-5 was nasty. Personal attacks all over the place, edit wars and tag teaming (troll raids by influential people, justified by the "3 revert rule"). There was one guy who created a bunch of sock puppet accounts and attempted to attribute them to me on a still-infamous hate page, in which he claimed about 50 accounts, most nonexistent, were my sock puppets when many of them were later established to be his. (Half the accounts weren't used for anything but have obscene names.) That is what I call nasty. Downvotes on Quora aren't anywhere close to that. I haven't seen Quora get even on the same planet as what Wikipedia was when I last edited (which was more than 5 years ago). I don't agree with the decision to collapse answers based on 1 downvote, but if I'm really interested in a question, I'll usually read all the answers anyway, so I don't find it to be a major hindrance. Besides, being downvoted isn't a big deal: fewer people read your answer; so what? Quora's great, at least from my experience. It might be that I stay away from extremely charged topics (e.g. politics) but I've never encountered any of this stuff-- and I've seen it a lot on other internet communities.
- heretohelp 14y ago
  I'm a lurker on Quora, but would like to state that I've really enjoyed your answers on Quora. You're the only person I've actually bothered to go through the history of on Quora before.
  - HistoryInAction 14y ago
    Right, definitely an amazing answer from Mr. Church breaking down employee contributions and how to (if to) fire them! ++would recommend, answers do not contain bobcat
- misiti3780 14y ago
  I also live in NYC. I go on Quora a lot, and have contributed a decent amount of content, but I do feel that there is a lot of hype around it. The quality of the content is very good for some things (Machine Learning), for others (The Sopranos), not so much. I enjoy going on and reading content, but I cant see a situation where the site is ever mainstream. One thing that really surprises me is how much some people think the speed of the site matters to the average user. I think the technology they built is amazing, as a software engineer, I am constantly impressed with everything they are doing. I have recommended the site to most of my non-tech friends and they laugh when I try to explain how cool that technology is (I even taught a few of them what Comet is). For the site to become mainstream, I think assumes most people are actually interested in reading/creating quality content - but that is the minority.
freework 14y ago
This article applies to just about every single internet discussion community I've ever been a part of since I started using the internet back in 1999. First, a community is founded with a small handful of users. Those small handful of users all know the topic well, so good discussion arises. Those small number of users all know each other, and form a bond. Once word gets out that the community is a place where high quality discussion occurs, people start joining in droves. The small handful of people who were there since the beginning start feeling like that community "belongs" to them, and start acting hostile towards the "noobs". You also have this phenomenon where the new users desperately want to be "accepted" by the establishment, so they'll suck up to the core users, which results in cliquish behavior and it really kills the site for anyone who just wants to discuss and learn about he topic/hobby the community was founded on. It's happened to Something Awful, JetCareers, the entirety of usenet, and yes even Hacker News.
- richardjordan 14y ago
  Yup you nailed it. I've been doing online communities since 1990 in one shape or another. This pattern happens in them all. It is hard for owners / managers of such communities to avoid this.
- davidgerard 14y ago
  Clay Shirky "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html - the classic of the genre.
kimmiller 14y ago
People seem to be running in to the same problem everywhere - online communities degrade in quality as they scale. PG spoke of this (an essay perhaps?). Why should we be surprised? Culture is the most important thing in a business, morals to a person. Why would we be able to get it right online at scale without a few hiccups (and a lot of dissent). It's almost a law of social gravity.
- XiaoPing 14y ago
  Quora entered the soccer mom phase summer of 2011. The quality has plummeted since then.
zby 14y ago
Why you cannot link to Quora answers? There seems to be a way to 'include' them by the way of some javascript - but I am way more careful when pasting javascript then when just using the anchor tag.
dasil003 14y ago
I'm still on the fence about Quora. It has some of the best quality content anywhere according to my interests, but I'm naturally distrustful of Facebook mafia since I care about privacy and I find the auto-sharing stuff extremely irritating. But as to the elitist / insider's club / groupthink accusations, my inclination is to ask what the alternative is? I mean if you don't impose some form of social norms that someone (I'm not personally passing a judgement) will interpret as elitism then inevitably you will face the Eternal September which spirals out of control and leads to evaporative cooling as you grow. I suppose they could be nicer about it, but it's better to please the people who provide value than to try to make everyone happy and eventually degrade into Yahoo! Answers.
davidgerard 14y ago
This article is terrible. It starts with actual news and then descends into complaints about everything Clay Shirky talked about in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html , i.e. it's just like every computer network social space I've seen since 1988.
XiaoPing 14y ago
It was never a popular site outside its clique. http://startupjunkies.org/blog/2012/09/14/unlucky-little-quoras-troubles-grow/ http://startupjunkies.org/blog/2012/09/14/unlucky-little-quo...
kentpalmer 14y ago
http://www.quora.com/Quora/Why-wont-Quora-Scale http://www.quora.com/Quora/Why-wont-Quora-Scale
- desbest 14y ago
  More discussion on Quora about the article. http://www.quora.com/Quora/What-do-quora-admins-think-of-this-rather-scathing-attack http://www.quora.com/Quora/What-do-quora-admins-think-of-thi... <-- No answers. http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/What-do-Quora-users-think-of-this-article-Why-Quora-Won’t-Scale http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/What-do-Quora-users-think... http://www.quora.com/rage-against-quora/Why-Quora-Won’t-Scale http://www.quora.com/rage-against-quora/Why-Quora-Won’t-Scal... <-- Rage Against Quora post It's ironic how the article talks about how the admins engage in censorship and a "spiral of silence" for minority views, but when an article talks about the spiral of silence and gets press, the ALL the admins are silent themselves. Oh the irony! Guilty conscience, much?

129 points by desbest 14y ago

This article makes Quora sound almost like Digg back in the day, with a select few users who work together to ensure they control most of the content on the site.

webwanderings 14y ago
Quora has been a fine weekly newsletter. So what if most often you see a 25 year old millionaire against another 25 year old millionaire going about their gripe and appreciation of newly acquired money! As a weekly email newsletter, I get nicely curated content without participating a minute of my time at the site.
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  personally, i wish they would follow the legal guidelines for unsubscription that were posted here a few days ago. i've tried several times to unsubscribe, and failed.
  - creativityland 14y ago
    You are not alone...
  - desbest 14y ago
    I unsubscribed, and a few weeks later I automatically got subscribed again.
  - kstenerud 14y ago
    Remember to mark the emails as spam.
23david 14y ago
Sounds like Digg but also like Stackexchange. The inmates are running the asylum. :-) I don't mind any of the sites, but that's just because I understand their limitations. I can definitely understand being frustrated however if I wanted to contribute and felt like I was being continuously rebuffed for not being an 'insider'. That's pretty annoying.

andrewcooke 14y ago

we're still using the present tense? shouldn't this be "why quora did not scale"? or is exponential growth one more thing that isn't the same as it was back in the day?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

eslackey 14y ago

You should ask this question on Quora

XiaoPing 14y ago
Why? To waste time?

wilfra 14y ago

Sounds like the author got banned for excessive complaining on Quora and is exceptionally butthurt. I'm a hard core Quora addict and have never encountered most of the things in this post. He's way off about the "elite". Yes there are people who get tons of upvotes and have huge followings but in every case I've seen it's because they are well known off of Quora or they give consistently amazing answers, often both. It's not like Digg was where some random anonymous person has all this power. Quora power users don't even really have any power beyond knowing lots of people will read their answers, even then those answers still must be good to get upvotes.

tbatterii 14y ago
That is the exact impression i got right down to "butt-hurt". I don't use quora myself, but I do find it annoying when people with blogs project their standards on someone else's creation. It's like a more articulate "GUYZ Y THE DOWN VOTEZ??!!??"
ericdykstra 14y ago
Spot on. Maybe the author got banned, maybe the author just wanted to write an inciteful piece that would get a lot of pageviews. Either way, what's described in the article is nothing like my experience with Quora over the past year+
- Evbn 14y ago
  Nice head fake into correct use of "inciteful".
Noldorin 14y ago
And clearly you are sufficiently biased, likewise, that your opinion must be irrational. Oh no, wait, we've just fallen into several logical fallacies. Next time, please switch on your brain before posting.
pbreit 14y ago
The article was clearly well-researched so doesn't seem like a simple reaction to a bad experience. And I can attest to some of the experiences expressed in the article. There's a pretty bizarre ritual going on over at Quora that it's hard to pin down but I think the author did a reasonably good job. That said, Quora has obviously cracked a nut whereby it is getting very high quality/value content from well-placed individuals.

jcfrei 14y ago

>The Spiral of Silence I like the theory described by the spiral of silence and it somehow seems relevant to the continuing discussion about HNs apparent demise (in the eyes of some). it seems like quora successfully implemented a system, that leaves a community largely true to it's original state, by giving dominant admins/moderators the tools to block unwanted content and to promote their own views. left aside whether this fosters better or worse answers, it apparently doesn't help growing a noticeable community and I'm glad that HN didn't go that same way.

brokenloaw 14y ago
This seems to be a common misunderstanding. Admins and moderators have no different powers than anyone else. I (not an admin and not a moderator) can collapse answers with "improvements needed" any day of the week. So can most anyone else. It takes a special kind of person and insults being flung to become edit-blocked, something that happened to my knowledge and according to Bodnick less than ten times in the history of Quora. The author of the linked piece was one of those people because, alas, she could not be asked to act like a reasonable human among reasonable humans, that is treat everyone as an equal and debate on the merits, not the perception of standing. Promotion of views is the same. Spend six months on Quora and establish yourself as a knowledgeable person in one area (see: Michelin chef Jonas M Luster in food or former police officer Justin Freeman in law enforcement) and you will have credits to promote content, including your own. Your standing in answers is based on votes, your power to elicit answers or promote questions is also based on it. Nothing that does not happen anywhere else. No one on Quora becomes a "superuser" over night, those who spent months giving insightful answers all have.
- codezero 14y ago
  Admins and reviewers do have some special abilities -- you might have been made a reviewer (or topic admin) and not remember it happening!

kcl 14y ago

This article is false. (Regardless of whether Quora will or will not grow.) Many of the arguments should have been tested against Facebook: elitism didn't slow the spread of Facebook. In fact, it was likely a main driver of growth in the world's most popular website. It's not surprising Quora has been modeled after Facebook since Quora is made up of early Facebook alumni. Many of the rest of the arguments apply to discussion websites in general. If you consider Wikipedia, for instance, scaling doesn't seem to be a problem. Taking Wikipedia is a good idea, since, despite what's been said, Quora is or should be a direct competitor to Wikipedia. At a descriptive level, Quora isn't represented accurately. Judging from the slant of the article, it seems the author is reacting to a bad experience on the site.

desbest 14y ago
The difference between Quora and Facebook, is that me and my friends can upload photos of ourselves drunk and post wall posts of us swearing, and Facebook will be always a good product to the entire community despite this. With Quora, the community isn't tied down to who you are friends with. There are no friend requests. On Quora, everyone is technically your "friend". So with that said, it is not just enough to allow people to behave as bad as they want on Quora. If that happened, people would leave in disgust. If I was posting racist things on Facebook, only my friends would know and you would still be using Facebook regardless. On Quora it's not like that.
mikeryan 14y ago
Many of the arguments should have been tested against Facebook: elitism didn't slow the spread of Facebook Facebook wasn't elitist. It was exclusive. Its a pretty significant difference.
Noldorin 14y ago
A subjective article cannot be false, silly person. It is evidently well-research and supported by evidence; that's as much as one can ask. You may disagree with it's stance, but that's another point. Get over it.
- pbreit 14y ago

mcphilip 14y ago

I'm still unable to get a clear answer to the basic question "Why should I use Quora?" I work at a startup in Austin, I read HN daily, I enjoy news about SV startups, etc. Still, I haven't found a compelling reason to spend any substantial time on Quora. I'm happy to read a particularly insightful answer when I see the occasional link pop up on another site, but that doesn't make me want to search Quora for other information. I wonder if my disinterest in Quora is common among developers outside of SV? If I, a tech savvy developer at a startup, don't find the idea of Quora particularly interesting, why would Average Joe be interested in joining the community?

starpilot 14y ago
Quora is just so much better than Ask MetaFilter, Reddit's Q&A/advice subreddits (/r/askreddit, /r/answers, /r/doesanybodyelse etc.), or (dare I say it) Yahoo Answers for nontrivial, factual answers dependent on expertise. Quora is for people who benefit from or enjoy such questions and answers. The longtime existence of all these Q&A communities shows that there is a market for it. There's the most overlap with Ask MeFi I think, but Quora is far better at zeroing in on a good answer, when it exists.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  " for nontrivial, factual answers dependent on expertise. " I would modify that to be "dependent on certain very limited areas of expertise". There are entire realms of questions not well served by Quora at present, and we have yet to see evidence that they're ever going to be.
- TillE 14y ago
  I have a lot of bad things to say about Reddit, but certain focused subreddits are excellent for getting good answers from experts. AskHistorians and AskScience are among the best available forums of their kind on the internet.
  - littlegiantcap 14y ago
    /r/startups /r/entrepreneur among others are excellent as well.

lmg643 14y ago

If you consider yahoo answers as their competition, Quora seems like it has a great chance for success as a vehicle to serve ads on link-bait topics.

intellegacy 14y ago

Sigh. Here we go - bring it on Quorans... I wanted to like Quora. I really did. Theoretically, Quora should be a wet dream for me: insightful discussions, check. Answers from bright people, check. A place to learn, to read, to spend hours on soaking in information, check. I never could have guessed that spending time on Quora would turn out to be more of a nightmare. As the article points out, Quora is a dictatorship, which doesn't really care about what the community wants. Which would be fine, except that the dictators don't know what they're doing. Their policies, and the general vibe of the community, just aren't welcoming. I don't contribute to Quora because I self-moderate myself out of posting. Why shouldn't I post? I have insights to contribute, as much as any other person. The problem is that Quora allows so little room for free expression in a world that is crying out for originality. Don't use your real name? Your account is locked and you can't post. Didn't directly address the question? Your answer downvoted into oblivion. Spelled something wrong? Here let me edit your post. The community they've attracted doesn't help either. There are a lot of nice people they've somehow convinced to stay on Quora, but I can't help but get the vibe that a lot of users think they're the sh, and how dare you disagree with them. The founder of reddit once said that the philosophy he had towards running reddit was like hosting a party - he couldn't just allow users free reign to do whatever they pleased, but he had to make it an inviting and fun place for users. Otherwise the party would suck. Well, if reddit is a fun party with alcohol, humor, entertainment, and cat pictures, along with the occasional smart person to learn from, then Quora is like hanging out with a group of bitter, pretentious intellectuals who wield their answers like weapons, at a party with no alcohol allowed. [ answer continued ]

intellegacy 14y ago
Quora has found its niche among intellectuals who don't mind the stringent rules, and that's great. It's just not for me, and I suspect from what I've observed that it's not for a lot of other people too. Which means that "Quora will never grow to to the size of facebook or reddit". Let's temper our expectations, people. Quora is fine for what it is. Are there lessons to be learned from Quora? I think so. I've thought for a long time about what kind of site I would enjoy spending time on. It would definitely have intellectuals, like Quora has, but they'd need to be more of a reddit or HN variety. Ie. treating each other civilly and unpretentious. I've written up my thoughts here for a new startup that will fill a niche Quora and Wikipedia are not serving: http://pozium.com/vision.html http://pozium.com/vision.html Wikipedia doesn't allow pages about just any topic. See: Kate Middleton's dress. Also, it's incredibly hard to become a mod for them. Finally, there is no room for self-expression, as editors and contributors are mostly anonymized through its process. So Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia, but not a good place for a discussion. Quora fills the niche of intelligent communal discussion, only its vision doesn't allow wit, misspellings, anonymity, or humor, and seems to have been taken over by domineering powers-that-be, so much so that the party just isn't fun anymore. Pozium can attract not only intellectuals, but laymen looking to learn as well. First, there are all the ex-Quorans who were put off by the site. Pozium will be a party of intellectuals who don't have a stick up their behind. You will learn, as well as have fun. Everyone will be able to contribute, and no one will feel shamed or intimidated. This will attract the second type of user: the more casual intellectual. I remember a post from Quora by this college girl who, while obviously not an Einstein, could still have contributed insights of value. In what seemed to be her last post, the girl said she was intimidated by others and wondered if Quora "was for people like her". So there is a niche being unserved, filled with people like this girl who don't feel welcome. If Quoran's mean IQ is in the 130s and 140s then perhaps the 110-130 IQ crowd is not being served. Anyone interested in potentially starting something up? Read more here: http://pozium.com http://pozium.com

the_expert 14y ago

Anonymity (pseudo-anonymity) certainly has downsides but over the years I have found the better thoughts come from posters who are _not_ attaching themselves to a Real Name(TM) that is connected to a web site^W business that would love to attract more followers^W customers. Anonymous comments have to stand on their own. They can't rely on name association. The reader has to evaluate them for their content, not their author. This is a good thing. Another thing I have learned over many years of using the web is that intelligent people do not always make intelligent comments. We are all inconsistent; we're human. It's foolish to assume everything Joe the Self-Proclaimed Expert says is going to be worth reading. Sometimes he will say stupid things. By the same token people who in the real world might not be deemed intelligent can sometimes have some brilliant insights. It would be foolish to assume that every comment they make is worthless simply because of the name it's attached to. Anonymous commenting allows each comment to be evaluated individually. It addresses the inherent inconsistency of human comments and protects readers from making unwarranted assumptions. Unless of course they assume every anonymous post automatically falls into some category with respect to its content. IMO, that sort of thinking is the mark of web inexperience. The notion of "experts" is vastly overrated. This is an idea used to sell advice and services. Socrates figured this out hundreds of years ago. Read what Socrates learned and you too will learn something abut "experts" and earned reputations as "authorities" on given subjects. Learn how to form questions. In learning, it is my opinion that questions, knowing how to formulate them, are far more important than answers. The web is blissfully free from the hard sell of the "expert" while still being a great place to discover many types of "expertise". No one is demanding to see how many degrees or certifications anyone else has. No one cares about your "reputation". People are just interested in knowledge, no matter who it might come from. They can then evaluate it on their own. Without anyone telling them what to do or think. This is not stopping some from trying to force their own system, with "experts" and "reputation" and so forth. In my opinion, none of them will scale. The main attraction of the web is that it is free from those sort of restraints. There are plenty of experts on the web, but they do not have to self-promote. They might not be trying to sell anything; maybe they just share their thoughts for the joy of sharing. Anonymous posting is as close to pure thought, free from real world biases like identities, credentials and reputations, as we're going to get. Every thought can be evaluated on its own merits, irrespective of the submitter.

at-fates-hands 14y ago

After a friend told me about Quora, I spent some time lurking and after a month or so I decided to just skip it. I saw a lot of the same behavior mentioned in the article. If you want a obvious glimpse, just subscribe to the Politics group. I'm sure there's a core group of people who love and swear by it, it just seems most of the comments in the posts are usually one way traffic. You either agree or just get downvoted into oblivion. For someone looking for a welcoming community, this is not the sort of impression you want to give new users.

kmfrk 14y ago

There is a lot HN admin(s) could learn from this criticism. Opaque moderation is one of the really bad things about Hacker News.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Seeing as I live in New York, I am by definition not part of the Silicon Valley in-crowd. My experience on Quora has been extremely positive. Right now, it's one of the best online communities for quality of content. People who call Quora a nasty community because of downvoting have no idea what they're talking about. Wikipedia in 2004-5 was nasty. Personal attacks all over the place, edit wars and tag teaming (troll raids by influential people, justified by the "3 revert rule"). There was one guy who created a bunch of sock puppet accounts and attempted to attribute them to me on a still-infamous hate page, in which he claimed about 50 accounts, most nonexistent, were my sock puppets when many of them were later established to be his. (Half the accounts weren't used for anything but have obscene names.) That is what I call nasty. Downvotes on Quora aren't anywhere close to that. I haven't seen Quora get even on the same planet as what Wikipedia was when I last edited (which was more than 5 years ago). I don't agree with the decision to collapse answers based on 1 downvote, but if I'm really interested in a question, I'll usually read all the answers anyway, so I don't find it to be a major hindrance. Besides, being downvoted isn't a big deal: fewer people read your answer; so what? Quora's great, at least from my experience. It might be that I stay away from extremely charged topics (e.g. politics) but I've never encountered any of this stuff-- and I've seen it a lot on other internet communities.

heretohelp 14y ago
I'm a lurker on Quora, but would like to state that I've really enjoyed your answers on Quora. You're the only person I've actually bothered to go through the history of on Quora before.
- HistoryInAction 14y ago
  Right, definitely an amazing answer from Mr. Church breaking down employee contributions and how to (if to) fire them! ++would recommend, answers do not contain bobcat
misiti3780 14y ago
I also live in NYC. I go on Quora a lot, and have contributed a decent amount of content, but I do feel that there is a lot of hype around it. The quality of the content is very good for some things (Machine Learning), for others (The Sopranos), not so much. I enjoy going on and reading content, but I cant see a situation where the site is ever mainstream. One thing that really surprises me is how much some people think the speed of the site matters to the average user. I think the technology they built is amazing, as a software engineer, I am constantly impressed with everything they are doing. I have recommended the site to most of my non-tech friends and they laugh when I try to explain how cool that technology is (I even taught a few of them what Comet is). For the site to become mainstream, I think assumes most people are actually interested in reading/creating quality content - but that is the minority.

freework 14y ago

This article applies to just about every single internet discussion community I've ever been a part of since I started using the internet back in 1999. First, a community is founded with a small handful of users. Those small handful of users all know the topic well, so good discussion arises. Those small number of users all know each other, and form a bond. Once word gets out that the community is a place where high quality discussion occurs, people start joining in droves. The small handful of people who were there since the beginning start feeling like that community "belongs" to them, and start acting hostile towards the "noobs". You also have this phenomenon where the new users desperately want to be "accepted" by the establishment, so they'll suck up to the core users, which results in cliquish behavior and it really kills the site for anyone who just wants to discuss and learn about he topic/hobby the community was founded on. It's happened to Something Awful, JetCareers, the entirety of usenet, and yes even Hacker News.

richardjordan 14y ago
Yup you nailed it. I've been doing online communities since 1990 in one shape or another. This pattern happens in them all. It is hard for owners / managers of such communities to avoid this.
davidgerard 14y ago
Clay Shirky "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html - the classic of the genre.

kimmiller 14y ago

People seem to be running in to the same problem everywhere - online communities degrade in quality as they scale. PG spoke of this (an essay perhaps?). Why should we be surprised? Culture is the most important thing in a business, morals to a person. Why would we be able to get it right online at scale without a few hiccups (and a lot of dissent). It's almost a law of social gravity.

XiaoPing 14y ago
Quora entered the soccer mom phase summer of 2011. The quality has plummeted since then.

zby 14y ago

Why you cannot link to Quora answers? There seems to be a way to 'include' them by the way of some javascript - but I am way more careful when pasting javascript then when just using the anchor tag.

dasil003 14y ago

I'm still on the fence about Quora. It has some of the best quality content anywhere according to my interests, but I'm naturally distrustful of Facebook mafia since I care about privacy and I find the auto-sharing stuff extremely irritating. But as to the elitist / insider's club / groupthink accusations, my inclination is to ask what the alternative is? I mean if you don't impose some form of social norms that someone (I'm not personally passing a judgement) will interpret as elitism then inevitably you will face the Eternal September which spirals out of control and leads to evaporative cooling as you grow. I suppose they could be nicer about it, but it's better to please the people who provide value than to try to make everyone happy and eventually degrade into Yahoo! Answers.

davidgerard 14y ago

This article is terrible. It starts with actual news and then descends into complaints about everything Clay Shirky talked about in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html , i.e. it's just like every computer network social space I've seen since 1988.

XiaoPing 14y ago

It was never a popular site outside its clique. http://startupjunkies.org/blog/2012/09/14/unlucky-little-quoras-troubles-grow/ http://startupjunkies.org/blog/2012/09/14/unlucky-little-quo...

kentpalmer 14y ago

http://www.quora.com/Quora/Why-wont-Quora-Scale http://www.quora.com/Quora/Why-wont-Quora-Scale

desbest 14y ago
More discussion on Quora about the article. http://www.quora.com/Quora/What-do-quora-admins-think-of-this-rather-scathing-attack http://www.quora.com/Quora/What-do-quora-admins-think-of-thi... <-- No answers. http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/What-do-Quora-users-think-of-this-article-Why-Quora-Won’t-Scale http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/What-do-Quora-users-think... http://www.quora.com/rage-against-quora/Why-Quora-Won’t-Scale http://www.quora.com/rage-against-quora/Why-Quora-Won’t-Scal... <-- Rage Against Quora post It's ironic how the article talks about how the admins engage in censorship and a "spiral of silence" for minority views, but when an article talks about the spiral of silence and gets press, the ALL the admins are silent themselves. Oh the irony! Guilty conscience, much?