18 ms·

Quora collects $80 million in funding

80 points by tweakz 13y ago

allsystemsgo 13y ago
Wasn't there some sort of issue where they were mining user data without our consent? Many of us were having to send emails directly to Quora support requesting that our accounts be deleted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#Privacy_concerns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#Privacy_concerns
adventured 13y ago
Am I the only one that suspects Quora's future is more likely to be similar to an About.com (to be sold off for $300m in the future when a great business fails to materialize) than a Wikipedia? It seems like they latched on to the Q&A space originally when it was hot, and are now pivoting because competing with Answers.com et al. has a lot less of a runway than they previously expected.
- josh-wrale 13y ago
  My guess is that Yahoo will buy it in a broad "upgrade" to Yahoo Answers.
leobabauta 13y ago
I also really dislike their model of making you sign in to see more than one answer. Annoying your potential users is a bad policy.
- rokhayakebe 13y ago
  I had a content site from January 2011 until September 2013. From the first day until June 2013 I had less than 100 sign ups. Then I forced people to enter their email before the opaque screen is removed to allow click-through. The result: 8000+ emails from June to September..... Then I accidentally deleted my database (without backup).
- wpietri 13y ago
  Depends on the economics of your business. It could be more profitable to lose some of the easily annoyed if you can get the rest to come back on a more regular basis via email contact. But yeah, that's a big bone of contention both inside and outside Quora. The people who write a lot on Quora generally hate it, because it limits their audience. The Quora management, though, believe it is strongly to their advantage. They've never published stats or even their full reasoning, but they are quite firm in their belief that their data shows it working for them.
- boobsbr 13y ago
  I just open Firebug or Chrome's developer console and delete the overlay. Annoying as fuck.
- skolos 13y ago
  Or you can just add ?share=1 to the end of a Quora link to remove overlay. I had an account with them, but removed it after they started showing others what questions I was reading. Does Quora still do this?
- Rynant 13y ago
  As skolos mentioned you can add '?share=1' to a Quora URL to view all the answers.[1] To make this easier for myself, I use a bookmarklet with: javascript:(function(){window.location=window.location.toString()+"?share=1";})() [1] https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better
golergka 13y ago
I didn't follow them for a while; but that's curious: what happened in the middle of 2013? https://www.dropbox.com/s/w68v2r2a3xq4c6c/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%88%D0%BE%D1%82%202014-04-09%2018.36.44.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/w68v2r2a3xq4c6c/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80...
- andyjohnson0 13y ago
  "Quora launched full text search of questions and answers on its website on March 20, 2013, and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013. It also announced in May 2013 that all its metrics had grown 3X relative to the same time last year." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#History
- codezero 13y ago
  It was a Google Panda update. It affected a lot of sites similarly.
dchuk 13y ago
Good, maybe they can spend some of that on fixing their god awful UX.
startupranks 13y ago
Likely worth $800MM given typical late stage funding multiples. #54 on www.thestartup100.com and notably most valuable company without any revenue.
- startupranks 13y ago
  Update Techcrunch is now reporting the valuation at $900MM.
  - ulfw 13y ago
    Just make it 9 Billion. Seems the way the valley goes these days.
    - rezistik 13y ago
      I just want to take everyone in the Valley aside and sit them down, look into the crowd and calmly say "Hey guys, if we could please stop overvaluing every company that manages to set up a simple CRUD site with no revenue model, that would be great. Let's do ourselves a favor and not re-do the DotCom bubble. Thanks all and have a good night."
      - ulfw 13y ago
        I think it's too late for that. We obviously are redoing said bubble. Just hope it won't burst as violently again. 2001 sucked.
m52go 13y ago
I love the service, but it's about time Quora tested ways to monetize its site.
yalogin 13y ago
Can someone explain how there a place for Quora? The only niche I can think of is generic technical advise. Stackoverflow answers all the tech questions but they are overly pedantic to the point of ridiculous when it comes to generic tech questions. Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we don't see questions of that nature here. May be as far as tech advise goes people from startups would rather write blog posts and get some credibility for their companies rather than contribute anonymously. So how is Quora relevant or can be? On top of that they only show you one question. So that boggles my mind as to why it can become popular if its gated to begin with.
- wiremine 13y ago
  > The only niche I can think of is generic technical advise. I think that's their main thrust at this point. However, I've recently seen Q&As regarding my home town: - What are the best restaurants? - What is parking like? - What are the hidden gems in the city? - Etc. The quality of the answers is higher than what you'd see on Yahoo Answers, and more timely. So, I can envision a Quora that is valuable outside of technical questions. But that assumes they can retain the quality and keep the timeliness, IMHO. To use SO as an example: StackOverflow is running into the timeliness issue: I've been building a Rails 4 app recently, and a LOT Of SEO questions are out-of-date on. I can google around that problem due to my professional needs, but I doubt a general Q&A site would retain an audience in the long-term if the same problem emerged.
- pmorici 13y ago
  "Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we don't see questions of that nature here." In my experience HN isn't a great place to ask questions like that, at least not any more. I tried to post an "Ask HN" question about pricing hardware and working with re-sellers the other day. First, under a newly created account so I could share more details; that submission was immediately killed I assume as a preventative measure against spam. So then I posted a much more generic version asking the same question under my typical username it floated to the bottom of the new page w/o getting any votes or responses. So I went over to Quora posted the same thing anonymously and had a reasonable answer and pointers to things to read up on in a couple hours. I like HN and have been reading it regularly for years but it isn't a replacement for Quora
feintruled 13y ago
Quora seems to have taken a strange turn recently - their email digest is full of creepy racial questions like "do white girls find Indian men disgusting?" and "do Asian men mind if Asian girls date white men?" I guess you can't stop such questions being asked, but they frequently appear as the top question in the digest and thus in the subject line. I deregistered off the back of that. (Come to think of it, not sure exactly when I registered in the first place!)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mccr8 13y ago
  The digest seems to be custom created based on topics that you follow. If you decided to follow the generic "Relationships" topic, you'll end up with things like that in your digest. I'd guess questions like those attract a lot of controversy, so they will have a lot of voting and answers, which their algorithms may decide indicate that it is a topic people would be interested in.
- seizethecheese 13y ago
  I just scanned some updates in my inbox and none had anything like this. What's going on is that these updates are custom for each user, so either you haven't used the site and are getting the least common denominator, or for some reason you've lead Quora to believe that you're interested in such questions.
  - feintruled 13y ago
    Well, that's interesting, and even more concerning if somehow a site has profiled me to think I have an interest in such things! I haven't used the site very much though, so perhaps it is the lowest common denominator.
- balladeer 13y ago
  Never mind. It seems Indians[1] are using Quora more than others :-) [1] https://www.quora.com/Quora/Which-country-has-the-highest-number-of-users-on-Quora https://www.quora.com/Quora/Which-country-has-the-highest-nu...
buzaga41 13y ago
"Now, you folks better give me my damn acquisition, understood!?" - VC
zxcvvcxz 13y ago
>Founded in 2009 by former Facebook engineers, Quora is a revenue-less, question-and-answer service with 500,000 topics and an unknown number of users. >Quora has now collected more than $140 million in funding from investors. How could this possibly end well for the investors? EDIT - besides a FB acquisition.
- rezistik 13y ago
  Apparently they admit they have no revenue source and as such going public doesn't make sense. Maybe they are aiming to be more like Wikipedia than Yahoo?
- sireat 13y ago
  No, it is brilliant (in the SV way) that they have no revenue. The sky is the limit and you can get funded for pretty much any amount. Seriously, if they had been actually monetizing, they would not be able to collect the funding. There was that photo site a few months back which closed much discussed on HN. The problem with them was that they actually tried to make money and thus VCs could see that they would not be the big hit needed. I am only half-kidding with this.
hitchhiker999 13y ago
I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost <1 million :D - 1 million, even saying that makes me laugh. Completely coded by us from the ground up. This says https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong. My question: What in pickled f*s are these people doing with 80 million on a Q&A site? How far out of the reach of reality is this industry?
- not_paul_graham 13y ago
  I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. </sarcasm> On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily. Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora. Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true). It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.
  - hitchhiker999 13y ago
    That all makes sense, I would disagree on one point: "topics on Quora are limitless" The thing (only based on my experience) is that when you grow/diversify too much on a Q&A site, quality tends to dilute, and the audience tends to drop off. I don't know if this is true for Quora; I merely suspect it might be (as it has been for all the others who tried). In many ways our focus on just one topic has been our saving grace. Many 'globals' try to compete (even S.E.) few manage to top 'specialisation'. Not sure why.
gagaga 13y ago
What would happen if we valued forums the way we value tech sites? What would SomethingAwful's valuation be in today's tech world when it had the engagement and content creation power it held in the early 2000s ? To me, Quora is really nothing more than a glorified forum.
orky56 13y ago
From personal experience, Quora started off really hot. Many influential tech people were answering very basic questions with highly impactful answers. It really was an honest look into how some great minds think. Peer voting really separated the noise and allowed smart contributors to rise up through the answers. And then, the content got dry. It was the same questions with relatively similar answers. The newsfeed became more about showcasing content from months or even years ago to make it look more fresh. It really became a brand recognition and marketing tool to allow individuals to answer any industry-related question with their product/service/company in the context. And then, posts came about. It made sense that authors would want to contribute their own insights without it being an answer to an already posed question. However, new sites like Medium, Svbtle, and Posthaven are much better tools for this although they each have their own content niche. Quora has become a redundant tool where people repost their blogs. So where does that leave Quora? They have always had an issue going past the iron curtain of Silicon Valley. It's been difficult for them to engage the average, non-techie consumer. Even if they don't care about this demographic, it will be hard for them to sustain growth among techies. They must be quickly approaching a ceiling for unique users so then they must capitalize on engagement and retention. I'm curious how they decide to go about this.
- davedx 13y ago
  I missed the early Quora. By the time I stumbled onto it it resembled a "modern" Experts Exchange.
  - orky56 13y ago
    It really felt like a televised red carpet even for an awards show. You get a chance to see all the celebrities and connect with them in the moment. In SV, it's more about becoming them through learnings rather than dreaming about being them through spectating.
username223 13y ago
Given that Demand Media is valued over a billion, $80 million to a low-rent content farm seems reasonable.
rrrazdan 13y ago
My experience with Quora has been pretty bad, but that has mostly to do with my topic selection and network being Indian. Quora got popular in India because of widespread adoption in IIT circles, who by virtue of being influencers spread it across India. So much so that, I saw a statistic which said that most visits on Quora are from India. However for me what that has meant is that a rash of new registrants have appeared who have destroyed any topic related to my alma mater and India. EDIT - Also shouldn't this 'Indian Invasion' have had an effect on the valuation? EDIT - I am also an Indian and mean no disrespect. But the fact is that one of the side effects of Quora getting popular so fast is that it is often the first Internet forum for many students. I know it because I have talked to them. And that ends up in usual newbie mistakes.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  That's basically what I'm thinking. The demographic is becoming more and more Indian, which drives away Westerners, who are the people Quora can make money on.
droogie 13y ago
My Quora experience has been a sad one. I created an account just to be able to see answers to a question I was interested in. Then I tried to delete my account and their account removal policy stated that you have to send them an email for them to delete your account. Really, who still does that in 2014.
mbesto 13y ago
My thoughts on the success of Quora are consistent with that of Joel Spolsky's take on cultural anthropology: http://vimeo.com/37309773 http://vimeo.com/37309773 Watch from 9:30 on. "The idea of Stack Overflow is to attract anyone who is an expert programmer and repel anyone who's not" My prediction - Google/Facebook (someone in that arena) will buy Quora.
- taybin 13y ago
  Isn't Stack Overflow the opposite of that though?
  - mbesto 13y ago
    That's my point. Sorry I was actually making two distinct points that probably got intertwined. One - that Quora will not succeed like SO has. Two - Someone will buy Quora. Reason? Because, Silicon Valley.
  - hadoukenio 13y ago
    That's the problem with gamifying something. Eventually you'll get people who are only there for karma. The other day I found an incorrect answer that was chosen, but directly below it was the correct answer. The kicker? The OP commented on the correct answer saying that his was correct but the guy other guy had less karma than him and "needed it". WTF. These days, you really have to take Stack Overflow answers with a grain of salt.
Jedd 13y ago
Jesus Christ Silicon Valley[1] did a beautiful breakdown of the lunacy of Quora a year ago. JCSV's style isn't for everyone (much sarcasm, so profanity, very rude) but he/she makes some compelling points "Quora has raised $61 million dollars for this life-altering question-and-answer-cum-blogging site. Let’s break that down a bit: SpaceX, a company that sends rockets into motherfucking space, has raised $230 million and employs more than 3000 people (source: the world’s second-best source for knowledge). Quora, which lets you ask other people questions on the computer, has raised more than a quarter of that amount and employs 50 individuals." [1] http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/48962035819/quoraquoraquora http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/48962035819/...
Im_Talking 13y ago
Who the fuck cares? Do your own startup, bootstrap it, answer to no one, feel the freedom to innovate as you see fit, eliminate the politics, remain true to your own calling. Fuck the VCs... fuck'm in the ass.

80 points by tweakz 13y ago

Wasn't there some sort of issue where they were mining user data without our consent? Many of us were having to send emails directly to Quora support requesting that our accounts be deleted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#Privacy_concerns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#Privacy_concerns

adventured 13y ago

Am I the only one that suspects Quora's future is more likely to be similar to an About.com (to be sold off for $300m in the future when a great business fails to materialize) than a Wikipedia? It seems like they latched on to the Q&A space originally when it was hot, and are now pivoting because competing with Answers.com et al. has a lot less of a runway than they previously expected.

josh-wrale 13y ago
My guess is that Yahoo will buy it in a broad "upgrade" to Yahoo Answers.

leobabauta 13y ago

I also really dislike their model of making you sign in to see more than one answer. Annoying your potential users is a bad policy.

rokhayakebe 13y ago
I had a content site from January 2011 until September 2013. From the first day until June 2013 I had less than 100 sign ups. Then I forced people to enter their email before the opaque screen is removed to allow click-through. The result: 8000+ emails from June to September..... Then I accidentally deleted my database (without backup).
wpietri 13y ago
Depends on the economics of your business. It could be more profitable to lose some of the easily annoyed if you can get the rest to come back on a more regular basis via email contact. But yeah, that's a big bone of contention both inside and outside Quora. The people who write a lot on Quora generally hate it, because it limits their audience. The Quora management, though, believe it is strongly to their advantage. They've never published stats or even their full reasoning, but they are quite firm in their belief that their data shows it working for them.
boobsbr 13y ago
I just open Firebug or Chrome's developer console and delete the overlay. Annoying as fuck.
skolos 13y ago
Or you can just add ?share=1 to the end of a Quora link to remove overlay. I had an account with them, but removed it after they started showing others what questions I was reading. Does Quora still do this?
Rynant 13y ago
As skolos mentioned you can add '?share=1' to a Quora URL to view all the answers.[1] To make this easier for myself, I use a bookmarklet with: javascript:(function(){window.location=window.location.toString()+"?share=1";})() [1] https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better

golergka 13y ago

I didn't follow them for a while; but that's curious: what happened in the middle of 2013? https://www.dropbox.com/s/w68v2r2a3xq4c6c/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%88%D0%BE%D1%82%202014-04-09%2018.36.44.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/w68v2r2a3xq4c6c/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80...

andyjohnson0 13y ago
"Quora launched full text search of questions and answers on its website on March 20, 2013, and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013. It also announced in May 2013 that all its metrics had grown 3X relative to the same time last year." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#History
codezero 13y ago
It was a Google Panda update. It affected a lot of sites similarly.

dchuk 13y ago

Good, maybe they can spend some of that on fixing their god awful UX.

startupranks 13y ago

Likely worth $800MM given typical late stage funding multiples. #54 on www.thestartup100.com and notably most valuable company without any revenue.

startupranks 13y ago
Update Techcrunch is now reporting the valuation at $900MM.
- ulfw 13y ago
  Just make it 9 Billion. Seems the way the valley goes these days.
  - rezistik 13y ago
    I just want to take everyone in the Valley aside and sit them down, look into the crowd and calmly say "Hey guys, if we could please stop overvaluing every company that manages to set up a simple CRUD site with no revenue model, that would be great. Let's do ourselves a favor and not re-do the DotCom bubble. Thanks all and have a good night."
    - ulfw 13y ago
      I think it's too late for that. We obviously are redoing said bubble. Just hope it won't burst as violently again. 2001 sucked.

m52go 13y ago

I love the service, but it's about time Quora tested ways to monetize its site.

yalogin 13y ago

Can someone explain how there a place for Quora? The only niche I can think of is generic technical advise. Stackoverflow answers all the tech questions but they are overly pedantic to the point of ridiculous when it comes to generic tech questions. Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we don't see questions of that nature here. May be as far as tech advise goes people from startups would rather write blog posts and get some credibility for their companies rather than contribute anonymously. So how is Quora relevant or can be? On top of that they only show you one question. So that boggles my mind as to why it can become popular if its gated to begin with.

wiremine 13y ago
> The only niche I can think of is generic technical advise. I think that's their main thrust at this point. However, I've recently seen Q&As regarding my home town: - What are the best restaurants? - What is parking like? - What are the hidden gems in the city? - Etc. The quality of the answers is higher than what you'd see on Yahoo Answers, and more timely. So, I can envision a Quora that is valuable outside of technical questions. But that assumes they can retain the quality and keep the timeliness, IMHO. To use SO as an example: StackOverflow is running into the timeliness issue: I've been building a Rails 4 app recently, and a LOT Of SEO questions are out-of-date on. I can google around that problem due to my professional needs, but I doubt a general Q&A site would retain an audience in the long-term if the same problem emerged.
pmorici 13y ago
"Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we don't see questions of that nature here." In my experience HN isn't a great place to ask questions like that, at least not any more. I tried to post an "Ask HN" question about pricing hardware and working with re-sellers the other day. First, under a newly created account so I could share more details; that submission was immediately killed I assume as a preventative measure against spam. So then I posted a much more generic version asking the same question under my typical username it floated to the bottom of the new page w/o getting any votes or responses. So I went over to Quora posted the same thing anonymously and had a reasonable answer and pointers to things to read up on in a couple hours. I like HN and have been reading it regularly for years but it isn't a replacement for Quora

feintruled 13y ago

Quora seems to have taken a strange turn recently - their email digest is full of creepy racial questions like "do white girls find Indian men disgusting?" and "do Asian men mind if Asian girls date white men?" I guess you can't stop such questions being asked, but they frequently appear as the top question in the digest and thus in the subject line. I deregistered off the back of that. (Come to think of it, not sure exactly when I registered in the first place!)

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mccr8 13y ago
The digest seems to be custom created based on topics that you follow. If you decided to follow the generic "Relationships" topic, you'll end up with things like that in your digest. I'd guess questions like those attract a lot of controversy, so they will have a lot of voting and answers, which their algorithms may decide indicate that it is a topic people would be interested in.
seizethecheese 13y ago
I just scanned some updates in my inbox and none had anything like this. What's going on is that these updates are custom for each user, so either you haven't used the site and are getting the least common denominator, or for some reason you've lead Quora to believe that you're interested in such questions.
- feintruled 13y ago
  Well, that's interesting, and even more concerning if somehow a site has profiled me to think I have an interest in such things! I haven't used the site very much though, so perhaps it is the lowest common denominator.
balladeer 13y ago
Never mind. It seems Indians[1] are using Quora more than others :-) [1] https://www.quora.com/Quora/Which-country-has-the-highest-number-of-users-on-Quora https://www.quora.com/Quora/Which-country-has-the-highest-nu...

buzaga41 13y ago

"Now, you folks better give me my damn acquisition, understood!?" - VC

zxcvvcxz 13y ago

>Founded in 2009 by former Facebook engineers, Quora is a revenue-less, question-and-answer service with 500,000 topics and an unknown number of users. >Quora has now collected more than $140 million in funding from investors. How could this possibly end well for the investors? EDIT - besides a FB acquisition.

rezistik 13y ago
Apparently they admit they have no revenue source and as such going public doesn't make sense. Maybe they are aiming to be more like Wikipedia than Yahoo?
sireat 13y ago
No, it is brilliant (in the SV way) that they have no revenue. The sky is the limit and you can get funded for pretty much any amount. Seriously, if they had been actually monetizing, they would not be able to collect the funding. There was that photo site a few months back which closed much discussed on HN. The problem with them was that they actually tried to make money and thus VCs could see that they would not be the big hit needed. I am only half-kidding with this.

hitchhiker999 13y ago

I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost <1 million :D - 1 million, even saying that makes me laugh. Completely coded by us from the ground up. This says https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong. My question: What in pickled f*s are these people doing with 80 million on a Q&A site? How far out of the reach of reality is this industry?

not_paul_graham 13y ago
I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. </sarcasm> On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily. Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora. Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true). It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.
- hitchhiker999 13y ago
  That all makes sense, I would disagree on one point: "topics on Quora are limitless" The thing (only based on my experience) is that when you grow/diversify too much on a Q&A site, quality tends to dilute, and the audience tends to drop off. I don't know if this is true for Quora; I merely suspect it might be (as it has been for all the others who tried). In many ways our focus on just one topic has been our saving grace. Many 'globals' try to compete (even S.E.) few manage to top 'specialisation'. Not sure why.

gagaga 13y ago

What would happen if we valued forums the way we value tech sites? What would SomethingAwful's valuation be in today's tech world when it had the engagement and content creation power it held in the early 2000s ? To me, Quora is really nothing more than a glorified forum.

orky56 13y ago

From personal experience, Quora started off really hot. Many influential tech people were answering very basic questions with highly impactful answers. It really was an honest look into how some great minds think. Peer voting really separated the noise and allowed smart contributors to rise up through the answers. And then, the content got dry. It was the same questions with relatively similar answers. The newsfeed became more about showcasing content from months or even years ago to make it look more fresh. It really became a brand recognition and marketing tool to allow individuals to answer any industry-related question with their product/service/company in the context. And then, posts came about. It made sense that authors would want to contribute their own insights without it being an answer to an already posed question. However, new sites like Medium, Svbtle, and Posthaven are much better tools for this although they each have their own content niche. Quora has become a redundant tool where people repost their blogs. So where does that leave Quora? They have always had an issue going past the iron curtain of Silicon Valley. It's been difficult for them to engage the average, non-techie consumer. Even if they don't care about this demographic, it will be hard for them to sustain growth among techies. They must be quickly approaching a ceiling for unique users so then they must capitalize on engagement and retention. I'm curious how they decide to go about this.

davedx 13y ago
I missed the early Quora. By the time I stumbled onto it it resembled a "modern" Experts Exchange.
- orky56 13y ago
  It really felt like a televised red carpet even for an awards show. You get a chance to see all the celebrities and connect with them in the moment. In SV, it's more about becoming them through learnings rather than dreaming about being them through spectating.

username223 13y ago

Given that Demand Media is valued over a billion, $80 million to a low-rent content farm seems reasonable.

rrrazdan 13y ago

My experience with Quora has been pretty bad, but that has mostly to do with my topic selection and network being Indian. Quora got popular in India because of widespread adoption in IIT circles, who by virtue of being influencers spread it across India. So much so that, I saw a statistic which said that most visits on Quora are from India. However for me what that has meant is that a rash of new registrants have appeared who have destroyed any topic related to my alma mater and India. EDIT - Also shouldn't this 'Indian Invasion' have had an effect on the valuation? EDIT - I am also an Indian and mean no disrespect. But the fact is that one of the side effects of Quora getting popular so fast is that it is often the first Internet forum for many students. I know it because I have talked to them. And that ends up in usual newbie mistakes.

RivieraKid 13y ago
That's basically what I'm thinking. The demographic is becoming more and more Indian, which drives away Westerners, who are the people Quora can make money on.

droogie 13y ago

My Quora experience has been a sad one. I created an account just to be able to see answers to a question I was interested in. Then I tried to delete my account and their account removal policy stated that you have to send them an email for them to delete your account. Really, who still does that in 2014.

mbesto 13y ago

My thoughts on the success of Quora are consistent with that of Joel Spolsky's take on cultural anthropology: http://vimeo.com/37309773 http://vimeo.com/37309773 Watch from 9:30 on. "The idea of Stack Overflow is to attract anyone who is an expert programmer and repel anyone who's not" My prediction - Google/Facebook (someone in that arena) will buy Quora.

taybin 13y ago
Isn't Stack Overflow the opposite of that though?
- mbesto 13y ago
  That's my point. Sorry I was actually making two distinct points that probably got intertwined. One - that Quora will not succeed like SO has. Two - Someone will buy Quora. Reason? Because, Silicon Valley.
- hadoukenio 13y ago
  That's the problem with gamifying something. Eventually you'll get people who are only there for karma. The other day I found an incorrect answer that was chosen, but directly below it was the correct answer. The kicker? The OP commented on the correct answer saying that his was correct but the guy other guy had less karma than him and "needed it". WTF. These days, you really have to take Stack Overflow answers with a grain of salt.

Jedd 13y ago

Jesus Christ Silicon Valley[1] did a beautiful breakdown of the lunacy of Quora a year ago. JCSV's style isn't for everyone (much sarcasm, so profanity, very rude) but he/she makes some compelling points "Quora has raised $61 million dollars for this life-altering question-and-answer-cum-blogging site. Let’s break that down a bit: SpaceX, a company that sends rockets into motherfucking space, has raised $230 million and employs more than 3000 people (source: the world’s second-best source for knowledge). Quora, which lets you ask other people questions on the computer, has raised more than a quarter of that amount and employs 50 individuals." [1] http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/48962035819/quoraquoraquora http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/48962035819/...

Im_Talking 13y ago

Who the fuck cares? Do your own startup, bootstrap it, answer to no one, feel the freedom to innovate as you see fit, eliminate the politics, remain true to your own calling. Fuck the VCs... fuck'm in the ass.