

The Thick Edge of Quora - kahseng
http://semilshah.wordpress.com/2011/07/30/the-thick-edge-of-quora/

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pitchups
I too was an enthusiastic Quora user early on, but hardly visit the site any
more. It suffers from the same problem most sites that follow the social model
(of followers/following) - "celebrity" authors get substantially more upvotes
for even mediocre or poor answers - undermining the mission of the site. It
perpetuates the fallacy that the most "popular" answer is somehow the right
answer - which it seldom is.

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rexf
I browsed Quora briefly before, but I never got addicted to it.

A Q&A site like stack overflow is nice, because I end up there by searching
Google for programming questions. I'd probably only end up on Quora if it was
the result of a Google search.

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georgemcbay
I never made it as far as browsing on Quora. After hearing about it a few
times here, I went to the site and saw that you have to sign up before it lets
you see anything and so I just closed the tab.

Perhaps there's some value there that lifts it above stack-exchange sites, but
I can't be bothered to sign up for yet another website prior to even knowing
if I care about it.

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dmarquis
The author is totally unconvincing. Creating tags splits the problem of asking
or answering into 2 parts. First, search the space of tags to find the one you
need. Second, search the space of questions with that tag. Obviously, its an
easier problem if you already know which tags to use but in an extensive
taxonomy that won't be true 99% of the time.

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angryasian
the biggest problem with his assumption is that people will curate the best
answers, in this way the site can easily be gamed. He states machines and
human curation only monitor grammar but not content. Lets say a large active
right wing group organize so now the site has a clear bias, and are the
answers this group is voting up concerning politics really the best answers
anymore ? Especially when a lot of the questions are unverifiable or matters
of opinion at this point your are largely relying on the community to be an
educated of the topic and unbiased enough to vote on the real answer. In the
end quora is nothing different than another content farm.

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Detrus
The premise is intriguing but seems pretty far fetched. Quora is better
organized than the current web, so eventually it could become the framework of
the web.

Maybe, but if it's not centralized around Quora, may not do them much good.
The web itself will probably become better organized and Quora will just be
one of the pioneers. Google+ is also better than the current mess of blogs,
RSS feeds, twitters, facebooks in a way. But will it be the new web, instead
of hosting your own blog you use G+? Or post on Quora?

I don't see it. These services could creep in under the hood through APIs but
individual websites should be able to introduce new technologies faster and
have an edge of over centralized services.

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HaloZero
tl;dr Quora will become the next google search because you will have human
curation, the query can be more naturally structured, and discovery of related
topics all within the same site.

(I do recommend reading the article though, I probably didn't get all the
points across properly)

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hollerith
I would be more receptive to this argument if the author had resisted the
temptation to use metaphors like the thin edge of the wedge.

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ethnomusicolog
He is saying that Quora might be the next search and you are quibbering over
metaphor use. Did you read the article at least?

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hollerith
It is a lot harder to evaluate accurately an argument that uses certain
rhetorical techniques, so I stopped reading before the end.

If Quora is the next Google, there will be more posts on it.

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ristretto
Quora seems to me like a low quality mechanical turk. It's very cool for the
SV elite who like to give out advice to fellow entrepreneurs. That's all, for
most else it's neither useful nor interesting.

Example: I follow the neuroscience topic. Almost all of the answered questions
are google/wikipedia-able. Many of the "best questions/answers" are no better
than what any respectable newspaper has already written. The unanswered ones
are either:

a) Also easily googleable

b) Idiotic / funny (How many hobbies does motor cortex allow?)

c) Popsci /media trivialities that nobody will ever answer (Can StarCraft II
help with working memory in the same way that Dual-N-Back helps with it?)

d) Impossible to answer open questions, sometimes even rhetorical.

I don't see at this level how it is different from yahoo answers.

Answers are not constructed by review; having multiple answers is a mistake.
If you're a famous entrepreneur, your answer is "more right" than others.
Google is better at this: it provides an objective measure of authority that
indirectly relies on the impact of your contribution (the number of links is
still a signal). For most subjects, wikipedia has more up-to-date, succinct
and accurate information, while quora requires that you search among a
sizeable number of answers sometimes.

And lastly, how could quora ever solve the spam problem when it becomes big
enough? At this point, from my observations, googlebots beat humans.

~~~
jessedhillon
I would add an additional area of fail: interpersonal questions.

There is a question up there to the effect of What does it feel like to be
ugly? (or unloved, I think) One of the highest voted answers is from Yishan
Wong, and his advice includes waiting until the Singularity arrives so that
the asker can transplant into a more attractive body. And this answer was
highly lauded!

(IMO, the preponderance of his responses on the site has gone a long way in
creating a sterile culture of mechanical answers.)

