
Quora Plans To Expand Beyond Q&A - nileshd
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/quora-beyond-qanda/
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Irregardless
> Quora's mission is to share and grow the world's knowledge

By hiding that knowledge from everyone who doesn't sign up or log in with
Facebook/Twitter? Sorry, but I'll be celebrating the day Quora dies, hopefully
at the hands of StackExchange.

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btipling
When Experts Exchange does this, everyone loathes and ridicules this, but some
how Quora is better? It is the same tactic. For a time I found the community
on Quora enjoyable, but the site is aimless, demands too much like real names,
makes it too difficult to delete and manage your content. Quora comes from the
school of Facebook and its product is the content others have created, and its
users. Whatever the outcome, I doubt users will see a happy ending in their
use of Quora.

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spatten
I think you're vehemently agreeing with Irregardless.

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VonGuard
LOL. Quora is such a Crunch-whore. I swear, the only people who know of it or
use it are Arrington junkies. Why is this still a "hot" startup? It's just
Yahoo! answers with VC and less illiterates.

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clicks
> _I swear, the only people who know of it or use it are Arrington junkies._

Reading that was such a coming-of-age moment for me. In having me realize that
HN is not the place I always thought of it as: of adults so much smarter than
me, who hold nuanced take on things and discussed issues thoughtfully.

No, Quora is not full of 'Arrington junkies' -- or whatever else you want to
call it to feel superior over another part of the web. Questions answered, and
answers questioned are often so full of insight that I just very often browse
around to pass time. It's like reading an interesting book.

I thought the description ' _Jimmy Wales’ site serves as an objective
reference guide for the world, while Quora offers subjective answers to
popular questions._ ' was quite fitting -- Quora serves its purpose quite
well, and I do think it can comfortably grow and evolve into its newly stated
goal of becoming a platform for users to publish their writings on. Tone down
the knee-jerk cynicism please.

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VonGuard
LOL. OK, simple question: Do your parents know what Quora is? Do they know
what Wikipedia is? Quora is unknown outside of the valley. Is there some
switch they're going to hit to open the flood gates into this site, and
suddenly overnight the entire country know what it is? Honestly, I don't know
anyone outside of the valley who's even heard of Quora.

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charlesju
"South Korean Internet portal Naver (<http://naver.com>), illustrates the
potential of Q&A sites. As of July, 2007, Naver handled 77% of internet
searches originating inSouth Korea, dwarfing worldwide leaders Yahoo! (4.4%)
and Google (1.7%) [19]. One of the reasons for this disparity is the
relatively small Korean language corpus available for crawling. To address
this shortcoming, Naver built a Q&A site called Knowledge iN that encourages
users to type questions for others to answer, rather than relying on search
results [2]. Since their 2002 launch of Knowledge iN, Naver has accumulated 70
million questions and answers, and continues to receive over 40,000 questions
and 110,000 answers per day [19]."

The source: <http://bit.ly/12EHYUp>

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VonGuard
OK, but again, it's the only source of this info in South Korea. Here, we have
a very robust Wikipedia, endless health sites (for those "How I get
pregnant?!" Yahoo! Answers style questions, and an infinite array of other
very chatty, very dedicated sites.

I just feel like this ship has sailed. Quora reminds me of Everything2.
Remember that site? It's still around, but does anyone really use it much
anymore? It's another attempt to put all the info in one big pile. I just
don't see that type of effort working anymore outside of a Wikipedia setting.

Also, you know what else is huge in South Korea? Starcraft. But that hasn't
helped Activision's stock too much in the States since the merger with
Blizzard. South Korea also has insane bandwidth to yer home. I'd much rather
investors emulated THAT success than some nebulous info site's.

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daigoba66
While it might be counter intuitive, I think the best way for Quora to grow
would be allowing reading without logging in. It doesn't even have to be as
open as Stackoverflow where you can ask/answer without an account, I just want
to read the answers. Maybe then, ironically, I'll sign up.

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sarah2079
Yeah, in general the pattern for getting me to sign up for a site is something
like this is:

1\. Click links to a website that come up while searching for something or
reading other sites 2. Notice that you are starting to see consistently good
results from that particular site 3. Start to go there directly for content,
and maybe even sign up & participate

For Quora this is what happens:

1\. Click links to Quora that come up while searching for something or reading
other sites 2. See the blurred text, immediately click the back button 3.
Start to equate Quora links with this mini hassle, stop clicking on them

Maybe their content is fantastic, but it is very unlikely that I will sign up
for a site of this type that can't prove that to me first.

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dexter313
>> Quora and Wikipedia have long been seen as complementary <<

How is that true? I can't even search on quora without loging in.

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marekmroz
>> Quora and Wikipedia have long been _seen_ as complementary <<

That depends on who is _looking_ ...

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kmfrk

        But Quora has had trouble continuing to grow, and has yet to 
        announce or implement monetization schemes. Broadening its 
        scope could help.
    

Profound.

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sayemm
The beginning of the end. Reminds me of how Foursquare, Airtime, Color, etc...
have all been struggling amidst these crazy times.

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andrewcooke
_The company would need to be sure the community is onboard, and even involve
them in the development process_ \- has it changed? when i was there it was
very much us (most users) v them (the famous few + mods). in fact the division
and general hierarchical approach was more or less a feature, i thought -
diversity and inclusion meant dilution; elitism was going to drive the top
content.

also, does d'angelo still look like that? surely it's been a while now since
his voice broke?

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mikeleeorg
Unless I've misread these companies, I don't quite think Medium and Quora are
aiming for the same thing. Medium is more of a creative platform for
storytellers (fiction) while Quora is more of a factual platform for
information (non-fiction).

That's not to say Medium couldn't have non-fiction as well, just as bloggers
could write about fiction and non-fiction on the same blog, though bloggers
tend to stick with one format or the other within the same site.

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weisser
Quora should have users post answers and then others respond with what the
question should be. Jeopardy-style.

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seunosewa
I think Quora's founders just need to take SEO seriously for a few weeks.
Successful Q&A sites like Stackoverflow and Yahoo Answers rely on search
engines for their traffic. Quora should embrace this and stop trying to be
Facebook.

