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I think Quora has a Quora problem. It's Quora. The bait and switch yahoo answers with the anti-user attitude. Why the hell are people using this service?

Havoc 13y ago
It seemed so promising initially, but has really gone down the drain.
- rdl 13y ago
  It had awesome content originally, but really all the great content was of the form "Specific person who did something, what did you do when x and y", or where e.g. an ER medicine student would answer ER medicine questions. The downfall of Quora was when generalists ("polymath" being the popular self-style on Quora...) would wikipedia some shit to write an authoritative-seeming answer, and ended up being promoted above topic experts. And, when they gave up and allowed pointless survey questions. And, when people with big external audiences (Robert Scoble being the star example) arrived on Quora and brought a bunch of upvoters with them. Instead of pushing back against these trends, Quora doubled down on them -- with a "credit" system which rewarded gaming voting, etc. The influx of Indians was more a sign that the site itself had already died.
  - codezero 13y ago
    Scoble quickly faded, his relevance is not even a blip on Quora -- we should chat about this -- I am honestly curious about your perspective.
maqr 13y ago
It's not like there aren't people competing in this space either (like StackExchange). I would love to understand why people use Quora and how they got to the level of popularity that they seem to enjoy.
- saurik 13y ago
  StackExchange does not compete in this space as they do not provide vertical instances of their site for general questions and answers like Quora, and have the overall attitude that such things are too open-ended and not handled well by their format (so when you see such questions on any of the larger StackExchanges, while there is always a flurry or really great and really valuable user contributions, the question is always quickly closed by moderators). If StackExhange wanted this space, they could probably own it very quickly.

Havoc 13y ago

It seemed so promising initially, but has really gone down the drain.

rdl 13y ago
It had awesome content originally, but really all the great content was of the form "Specific person who did something, what did you do when x and y", or where e.g. an ER medicine student would answer ER medicine questions. The downfall of Quora was when generalists ("polymath" being the popular self-style on Quora...) would wikipedia some shit to write an authoritative-seeming answer, and ended up being promoted above topic experts. And, when they gave up and allowed pointless survey questions. And, when people with big external audiences (Robert Scoble being the star example) arrived on Quora and brought a bunch of upvoters with them. Instead of pushing back against these trends, Quora doubled down on them -- with a "credit" system which rewarded gaming voting, etc. The influx of Indians was more a sign that the site itself had already died.
- codezero 13y ago
  Scoble quickly faded, his relevance is not even a blip on Quora -- we should chat about this -- I am honestly curious about your perspective.

maqr 13y ago

It's not like there aren't people competing in this space either (like StackExchange). I would love to understand why people use Quora and how they got to the level of popularity that they seem to enjoy.

saurik 13y ago
StackExchange does not compete in this space as they do not provide vertical instances of their site for general questions and answers like Quora, and have the overall attitude that such things are too open-ended and not handled well by their format (so when you see such questions on any of the larger StackExchanges, while there is always a flurry or really great and really valuable user contributions, the question is always quickly closed by moderators). If StackExhange wanted this space, they could probably own it very quickly.