4 ms·

We still have ridiculously high engagement rate for 8% of our users, but that number hasn't gone up and nothing else we've done has managed to move the needle t

We still have ridiculously high engagement rate for 8% of our users, but that number hasn't gone up and nothing else we've done has managed to move the needle to get further users hooked. This leads me to think: does the needle really have to go up? According to pg's latest awesome essay on growth, the answer seems to be yes. But as the hacker news site has shown, no can also be a valid answer. pg's goal with hacker news is to keep a high quality of discussion, and not to grow the site to more users. As you bring in more users, you are bound to reduce engagement of existing users; this is justified if the growth is an order of magnitude higher (eg. when Facebook went from ivy leagues to colleges to high school to public). But for a site like Quora, I doubt if growth at the cost of pissing off existing users is justified at all.

moocow01 14y ago
All depends on your financials and business model - For most consumer internet startups the path to profitability is directly tied to user growth and user engagement. If your unprofitable and your not moving those numbers up all you have is a liability from an investment standpoint.
- dude_abides 14y ago
  User growth and user engagement often tend to be mutually conflicting goals.
ganjianwei 14y ago
Growth matters because Quora raised a ton of venture capital and needs to eventually generate revenue to justify the high valuation, and there's a limit on revenue/user they expect to generate. Simplified version of web apps' revenue calculation: Total revenue = revenue per user * no. of users There's an upper bound on how much each user generates in revenue (either through ads, subscriptions), e.g. imagine paying > $200/yr to use Quora, unlikely that more than 100,000 people are willing to do that. So the fastest way to grow is through having more users. On top of pure revenue/user number, there's the network effects of having more users, as well as becoming a key part of cultural fabric e.g. most celebrities have Twitter accounts now.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  imagine paying > $200/yr to use Quora, unlikely that more than 100,000 people are willing to do that It's unlikely that more than ten persons are willing to pay $200 per year to use Quora in its current condition, and it's even less likely that those ten would stick around once everyone else left. In other words, your example has even more force than you suggested. AFTER EDIT: By the way, user droithomme nails it with his user's-eye-view description of Quora elsewhere in this thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603653 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603653 AFTER FURTHER EDIT: I just did some specific searches on Google, site-restricted to Quora, which breaks through Quora's wall of obscurity and allows me to see current highly voted answers to questions on topics of known controversy in online discussion. The answers are crap. They don't even cite good sources, but are mostly anecdotes of lower quality than the typical anecdotes found on HN, and in some cases the anecdotal answers directly contradict what careful scientific research has found to be the general correct answer for the same question. But on many issues, Quora is just the opinionated leading the opinionated, and no one makes the effort to LOOK UP better, more reliable sources. I like the user culture here on Hacker News much better. I read whole books, for fun, after learning about those books on factual topics here on HN. I see no reason to put up with Quora's annoying user interface to get into a community with such poor quality control on the answers to the submitted questions.
  - witoldc 14y ago
    All of these online communities face the same problem: As they get bigger, the quality of the membership becomes severely diluted. Eventually, the crud fills the pages, the 'good' members leave, and all that remains is the crud. This is happening on Quora too. Look at up-voted answers on non-tech questions. All it takes is a bunch of nicely formatted paragraphs, lists, bolded text, and a bunch of nice pictures. Tons of posters are commenting on places they have never visited and things they know nothing about.
cube13 14y ago
But let's be serious about the purpose of HN. It's to give PG and YC a direct advertising channel to people who care about the startup world. Maintaining a high level of discussion is just a tool to further that end, especially because as an advertising vehicle, a site's reputation is hugely important. Also, HN by itself is not a money-making product. Quora is. The problem with Quora is that, more than any other social network in existence, their product is their customers. Quora doesn't have a product without high quality discussion on their site. The problem is that the steps required in maintaining that high level of discussion(active moderation, good community policing, etc.) often directly opposes actively getting more users because of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. While I'm sure that Quora can grow their userbase more, I'm pretty sure that they're seeing a dropoff in total hits. At a certain point, they need to start improving their conversion rate in order to make more money.
- dude_abides 14y ago
  HN by itself is not a money-making product. Quora is. Quora is not a money-making product, it wants to be one. In their present incarnations, if they just inserted ads (just for argument sake), it is not clear that Quora would make more money than HN. You can be a profitable company by just focusing on user engagement, and not on user growth. Quora's problem is that they raised too much money and now have to give their investors a return on their investment.
  - cube13 14y ago
    I probably should have been a bit more clear about what I meant. I meant that HN's purpose isn't to directly generate revenue for YC. Quora, on the other hand, is supposed to be a product that makes money.
- MrMan 14y ago
  upvote!!!!
- zevyoura 14y ago
  > Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory For those who missed this reference: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
diego 14y ago
HN is not a business. Y Combinator is. HN is useful to Y Combinator as long as the discussion is interesting and attracts the right people. Quora is a business. They are not making any money. Like Twitter, they can only hope to make money if they grow big enough. If the only way to grow requires pissing off existing users (or developers, in Twitter's case), the choice is clear.
- lmm 14y ago
  >Quora is a business. They are not making any money. Like Twitter, they can only hope to make money if they grow big enough. If the only way to grow requires pissing off existing users (or developers, in Twitter's case), the choice is clear. I'm struggling to see how growth is going to make them more profitable. While there's a bit of constant overhead, at that kind of scale I'd expect most expenditures to scale linearly or faster with number of users, and I don't see how more users will make income scale faster than linear.
  - diego 14y ago
    "at that kind of scale I'd expect most expenditures to scale linearly or faster with number of users" That just doesn't make any sense. Have you ever built any internet infrastructure? Costs grow much less than linearly as you scale.
    - lmm 14y ago
      I used to work at last.fm. While there's a region in the middle where that's true, as you get to a scale where mature technologies don't cut it my feeling is costs then grow faster-than-linearly. E.g. while your data fits into a single database your cost is obviously linear in the number of users, but once you start having to split it you've now got O(n^2) pair interactions to worry about.
      - diego 14y ago
        That's still pretty early. I worked at Inktomi, LookSmart and LinkedIn. Once your database is distributed, you can optimize the hell out of your systems. Not everything interacts with everything. If you cannot make your costs grow slower than your users, you have either a technical problem or a product problem (this happened at Friendster, long story).
untog 14y ago
Welcome to startupland, where perfectly successful ideas fail because too much is expected of them. Quora has taken on too much funding to do "OK". But if it hadn't, it could end up thriving as a successful business. IMO, too many startups go down the road of taking on a ton of funding and expanding very fast. It's very easy to decide that you have the next Google on your hands, but you probably don't. There's nothing wrong with that.
codinghorror 14y ago
startups are like cancers, remember? they have to grow because they have to grow.
- ericpete 14y ago
  http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpionandtheFrog http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpiona... ... grin
- Mvandenbergh 14y ago
  Or like rockets. Being in a stable orbit is fine, now you can alter your orbit at leisure. Seeming to be on the way up to a stable orbit is fine too, as long as the fuel lasts. Running out of fuel before you reach orbit means that the party is about to end.
anigbrowl 14y ago
pg's goal with hacker news is to keep a high quality of discussion, and not to grow the site to more users. True, but HN strikes me as a pretty small expense, and its existence certainly helps the growth of YC.
- larrys 14y ago
  "pretty small expense" Probably one of the reason they don't invest in upgrading the software/hardware to improve the speed. Keep friction in the experience so only the most hardy put up with the delays. Having snappier response would encourage more comments with the resulting comments being of lesser quality.

moocow01 14y ago

All depends on your financials and business model - For most consumer internet startups the path to profitability is directly tied to user growth and user engagement. If your unprofitable and your not moving those numbers up all you have is a liability from an investment standpoint.

dude_abides 14y ago
User growth and user engagement often tend to be mutually conflicting goals.

ganjianwei 14y ago

Growth matters because Quora raised a ton of venture capital and needs to eventually generate revenue to justify the high valuation, and there's a limit on revenue/user they expect to generate. Simplified version of web apps' revenue calculation: Total revenue = revenue per user * no. of users There's an upper bound on how much each user generates in revenue (either through ads, subscriptions), e.g. imagine paying > $200/yr to use Quora, unlikely that more than 100,000 people are willing to do that. So the fastest way to grow is through having more users. On top of pure revenue/user number, there's the network effects of having more users, as well as becoming a key part of cultural fabric e.g. most celebrities have Twitter accounts now.

tokenadult 14y ago
imagine paying > $200/yr to use Quora, unlikely that more than 100,000 people are willing to do that It's unlikely that more than ten persons are willing to pay $200 per year to use Quora in its current condition, and it's even less likely that those ten would stick around once everyone else left. In other words, your example has even more force than you suggested. AFTER EDIT: By the way, user droithomme nails it with his user's-eye-view description of Quora elsewhere in this thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603653 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603653 AFTER FURTHER EDIT: I just did some specific searches on Google, site-restricted to Quora, which breaks through Quora's wall of obscurity and allows me to see current highly voted answers to questions on topics of known controversy in online discussion. The answers are crap. They don't even cite good sources, but are mostly anecdotes of lower quality than the typical anecdotes found on HN, and in some cases the anecdotal answers directly contradict what careful scientific research has found to be the general correct answer for the same question. But on many issues, Quora is just the opinionated leading the opinionated, and no one makes the effort to LOOK UP better, more reliable sources. I like the user culture here on Hacker News much better. I read whole books, for fun, after learning about those books on factual topics here on HN. I see no reason to put up with Quora's annoying user interface to get into a community with such poor quality control on the answers to the submitted questions.
- witoldc 14y ago
  All of these online communities face the same problem: As they get bigger, the quality of the membership becomes severely diluted. Eventually, the crud fills the pages, the 'good' members leave, and all that remains is the crud. This is happening on Quora too. Look at up-voted answers on non-tech questions. All it takes is a bunch of nicely formatted paragraphs, lists, bolded text, and a bunch of nice pictures. Tons of posters are commenting on places they have never visited and things they know nothing about.

cube13 14y ago

But let's be serious about the purpose of HN. It's to give PG and YC a direct advertising channel to people who care about the startup world. Maintaining a high level of discussion is just a tool to further that end, especially because as an advertising vehicle, a site's reputation is hugely important. Also, HN by itself is not a money-making product. Quora is. The problem with Quora is that, more than any other social network in existence, their product is their customers. Quora doesn't have a product without high quality discussion on their site. The problem is that the steps required in maintaining that high level of discussion(active moderation, good community policing, etc.) often directly opposes actively getting more users because of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. While I'm sure that Quora can grow their userbase more, I'm pretty sure that they're seeing a dropoff in total hits. At a certain point, they need to start improving their conversion rate in order to make more money.

dude_abides 14y ago
HN by itself is not a money-making product. Quora is. Quora is not a money-making product, it wants to be one. In their present incarnations, if they just inserted ads (just for argument sake), it is not clear that Quora would make more money than HN. You can be a profitable company by just focusing on user engagement, and not on user growth. Quora's problem is that they raised too much money and now have to give their investors a return on their investment.
- cube13 14y ago
  I probably should have been a bit more clear about what I meant. I meant that HN's purpose isn't to directly generate revenue for YC. Quora, on the other hand, is supposed to be a product that makes money.
MrMan 14y ago
upvote!!!!
zevyoura 14y ago
> Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory For those who missed this reference: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

diego 14y ago

HN is not a business. Y Combinator is. HN is useful to Y Combinator as long as the discussion is interesting and attracts the right people. Quora is a business. They are not making any money. Like Twitter, they can only hope to make money if they grow big enough. If the only way to grow requires pissing off existing users (or developers, in Twitter's case), the choice is clear.

lmm 14y ago
>Quora is a business. They are not making any money. Like Twitter, they can only hope to make money if they grow big enough. If the only way to grow requires pissing off existing users (or developers, in Twitter's case), the choice is clear. I'm struggling to see how growth is going to make them more profitable. While there's a bit of constant overhead, at that kind of scale I'd expect most expenditures to scale linearly or faster with number of users, and I don't see how more users will make income scale faster than linear.
- diego 14y ago
  "at that kind of scale I'd expect most expenditures to scale linearly or faster with number of users" That just doesn't make any sense. Have you ever built any internet infrastructure? Costs grow much less than linearly as you scale.
  - lmm 14y ago
    I used to work at last.fm. While there's a region in the middle where that's true, as you get to a scale where mature technologies don't cut it my feeling is costs then grow faster-than-linearly. E.g. while your data fits into a single database your cost is obviously linear in the number of users, but once you start having to split it you've now got O(n^2) pair interactions to worry about.
    - diego 14y ago
      That's still pretty early. I worked at Inktomi, LookSmart and LinkedIn. Once your database is distributed, you can optimize the hell out of your systems. Not everything interacts with everything. If you cannot make your costs grow slower than your users, you have either a technical problem or a product problem (this happened at Friendster, long story).

untog 14y ago

Welcome to startupland, where perfectly successful ideas fail because too much is expected of them. Quora has taken on too much funding to do "OK". But if it hadn't, it could end up thriving as a successful business. IMO, too many startups go down the road of taking on a ton of funding and expanding very fast. It's very easy to decide that you have the next Google on your hands, but you probably don't. There's nothing wrong with that.

codinghorror 14y ago

startups are like cancers, remember? they have to grow because they have to grow.

ericpete 14y ago
http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpionandtheFrog http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpiona... ... grin
Mvandenbergh 14y ago
Or like rockets. Being in a stable orbit is fine, now you can alter your orbit at leisure. Seeming to be on the way up to a stable orbit is fine too, as long as the fuel lasts. Running out of fuel before you reach orbit means that the party is about to end.

anigbrowl 14y ago

pg's goal with hacker news is to keep a high quality of discussion, and not to grow the site to more users. True, but HN strikes me as a pretty small expense, and its existence certainly helps the growth of YC.

larrys 14y ago
"pretty small expense" Probably one of the reason they don't invest in upgrading the software/hardware to improve the speed. Keep friction in the experience so only the most hardy put up with the delays. Having snappier response would encourage more comments with the resulting comments being of lesser quality.