
Why Quora Won't Scale - desbest
http://socialtimes.com/why-quora-wont-scale_b104711
======
mcphilip
I'm still unable to get a clear answer to the basic question "Why should I use
Quora?"

I work at a startup in Austin, I read HN daily, I enjoy news about SV
startups, etc. Still, I haven't found a compelling reason to spend any
substantial time on Quora. I'm happy to read a particularly insightful answer
when I see the occasional link pop up on another site, but that doesn't make
me want to search Quora for other information.

I wonder if my disinterest in Quora is common among developers outside of SV?

If I, a tech savvy developer at a startup, don't find the idea of Quora
particularly interesting, why would Average Joe be interested in joining the
community?

~~~
starpilot
Quora is just so much better than Ask MetaFilter, Reddit's Q&A/advice
subreddits (/r/askreddit, /r/answers, /r/doesanybodyelse etc.), or (dare I say
it) Yahoo Answers for nontrivial, factual answers dependent on expertise.
Quora is for people who benefit from or enjoy such questions and answers. The
longtime existence of all these Q&A communities shows that there is a market
for it. There's the most overlap with Ask MeFi I think, but Quora is far
better at zeroing in on a good answer, when it exists.

~~~
TillE
I have a lot of bad things to say about Reddit, but certain focused subreddits
are excellent for getting good answers from experts. AskHistorians and
AskScience are among the best available forums of their kind on the internet.

~~~
littlegiantcap
/r/startups /r/entrepreneur among others are excellent as well.

------
intellegacy
Sigh. Here we go - bring it on Quorans...

I wanted to like Quora. I really did. Theoretically, Quora should be a wet
dream for me: insightful discussions, check. Answers from bright people,
check. A place to learn, to read, to spend hours on soaking in information,
check. I never could have guessed that spending time on Quora would turn out
to be more of a nightmare.

As the article points out, Quora is a dictatorship, which doesn't really care
about what the community wants. Which would be fine, except that the dictators
don't know what they're doing. Their policies, and the general vibe of the
community, just aren't welcoming. I don't contribute to Quora because I self-
moderate myself out of posting. Why shouldn't I post? I have insights to
contribute, as much as any other person. The problem is that Quora allows so
little room for free expression in a world that is crying out for originality.
Don't use your real name? Your account is locked and you can't post. Didn't
directly address the question? Your answer downvoted into oblivion. Spelled
something wrong? Here let me edit your post. The community they've attracted
doesn't help either. There are a lot of nice people they've somehow convinced
to stay on Quora, but I can't help but get the vibe that a lot of users think
they're the sh __, and how dare you disagree with them.

The founder of reddit once said that the philosophy he had towards running
reddit was like hosting a party - he couldn't just allow users free reign to
do whatever they pleased, but he had to make it an inviting and fun place for
users. Otherwise the party would suck. Well, if reddit is a fun party with
alcohol, humor, entertainment, and cat pictures, along with the occasional
smart person to learn from, then Quora is like hanging out with a group of
bitter, pretentious intellectuals who wield their answers like weapons, at a
party with no alcohol allowed.

[ answer continued ]

~~~
intellegacy
Quora has found its niche among intellectuals who don't mind the stringent
rules, and that's great. It's just not for me, and I suspect from what I've
observed that it's not for a lot of other people too. Which means that "Quora
will never grow to to the size of facebook or reddit". Let's temper our
expectations, people. Quora is fine for what it is.

Are there lessons to be learned from Quora? I think so. I've thought for a
long time about what kind of site I would enjoy spending time on. It would
definitely have intellectuals, like Quora has, but they'd need to be more of a
reddit or HN variety. Ie. treating each other civilly and unpretentious. I've
written up my thoughts here for a new startup that will fill a niche Quora and
Wikipedia are not serving:

<http://pozium.com/vision.html>

Wikipedia doesn't allow pages about just any topic. See: Kate Middleton's
dress. Also, it's incredibly hard to become a mod for them. Finally, there is
no room for self-expression, as editors and contributors are mostly anonymized
through its process. So Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia, but not a good
place for a discussion.

Quora fills the niche of intelligent communal discussion, only its vision
doesn't allow wit, misspellings, anonymity, or humor, and seems to have been
taken over by domineering powers-that-be, so much so that the party just isn't
fun anymore.

Pozium can attract not only intellectuals, but laymen looking to learn as
well. First, there are all the ex-Quorans who were put off by the site. Pozium
will be a party of intellectuals who don't have a stick up their behind. You
will learn, as well as have fun. Everyone will be able to contribute, and no
one will feel shamed or intimidated.

This will attract the second type of user: the more casual intellectual. I
remember a post from Quora by this college girl who, while obviously not an
Einstein, could still have contributed insights of value. In what seemed to be
her last post, the girl said she was intimidated by others and wondered if
Quora "was for people like her". So there is a niche being unserved, filled
with people like this girl who don't feel welcome. If Quoran's mean IQ is in
the 130s and 140s then perhaps the 110-130 IQ crowd is not being served.

Anyone interested in potentially starting something up? Read more here:
<http://pozium.com>

~~~
starpilot
You describe some dire, humorless Quora, not the one I use. I've seen _plenty_
of misspellings. Founder (and Harvard grad) Charlie Cheever used "its" instead
of "it's" several times in one answer. I've made typos that I went back and
corrected myself.

Humor:

[https://www.quora.com/Ultimate-Frisbee/Is-it-possible-to-
pla...](https://www.quora.com/Ultimate-Frisbee/Is-it-possible-to-play-
ultimate-with-a-MacBook-Air)

[https://www.quora.com/Marc-Bodnick-1/Does-Marc-Bodnick-
ever-...](https://www.quora.com/Marc-Bodnick-1/Does-Marc-Bodnick-ever-sleep)

[https://www.quora.com/Chief-Executive-Officers/Who-is-the-
mo...](https://www.quora.com/Chief-Executive-Officers/Who-is-the-most-
likeable-CEO-in-the-tech-industry)

Casual subjects:

<https://www.quora.com/Hipsters>

<https://www.quora.com/What-Ani-Is-Wearing>

You can answer anonymously, but you have to register.

There's sheer irreverence in some of the boards (new feature, non-Q&A posts):

<https://www.quora.com/DeathByPuns>

For something completely freeform and casual, Yahoo Answers exists (I've
actually found useful answers in it too, rarely).

~~~
Magenta
"I've made typos that I went back and corrected myself."

Gee, Quora _does_ sound like a really great party!

------
jcfrei
> _The Spiral of Silence_

I like the theory described by the spiral of silence and it somehow seems
relevant to the continuing discussion about HNs apparent demise (in the eyes
of some). it seems like quora successfully implemented a system, that leaves a
community largely true to it's original state, by giving dominant
admins/moderators the tools to block unwanted content and to promote their own
views. left aside whether this fosters better or worse answers, it apparently
doesn't help growing a noticeable community and I'm glad that HN didn't go
that same way.

~~~
brokenloaw
This seems to be a common misunderstanding. Admins and moderators have no
different powers than anyone else. I (not an admin and not a moderator) can
collapse answers with "improvements needed" any day of the week. So can most
anyone else. It takes a special kind of person and insults being flung to
become edit-blocked, something that happened to my knowledge and according to
Bodnick less than ten times in the history of Quora. The author of the linked
piece was one of those people because, alas, she could not be asked to act
like a reasonable human among reasonable humans, that is treat everyone as an
equal and debate on the merits, not the perception of standing.

Promotion of views is the same. Spend six months on Quora and establish
yourself as a knowledgeable person in one area (see: Michelin chef Jonas M
Luster in food or former police officer Justin Freeman in law enforcement) and
you will have credits to promote content, including your own. Your standing in
answers is based on votes, your power to elicit answers or promote questions
is also based on it. Nothing that does not happen anywhere else. No one on
Quora becomes a "superuser" over night, those who spent months giving
insightful answers all have.

~~~
codezero
Admins and reviewers do have some special abilities -- you might have been
made a reviewer (or topic admin) and not remember it happening!

------
freework
This article applies to just about every single internet discussion community
I've ever been a part of since I started using the internet back in 1999.

First, a community is founded with a small handful of users. Those small
handful of users all know the topic well, so good discussion arises. Those
small number of users all know each other, and form a bond. Once word gets out
that the community is a place where high quality discussion occurs, people
start joining in droves. The small handful of people who were there since the
beginning start feeling like that community "belongs" to them, and start
acting hostile towards the "noobs". You also have this phenomenon where the
new users desperately want to be "accepted" by the establishment, so they'll
suck up to the core users, which results in cliquish behavior and it really
kills the site for anyone who just wants to discuss and learn about he
topic/hobby the community was founded on.

It's happened to Something Awful, JetCareers, the entirety of usenet, and yes
even Hacker News.

~~~
richardjordan
Yup you nailed it. I've been doing online communities since 1990 in one shape
or another. This pattern happens in them all. It is hard for owners / managers
of such communities to avoid this.

------
kcl
This article is false. (Regardless of whether Quora will or will not grow.)

Many of the arguments should have been tested against Facebook: elitism didn't
slow the spread of Facebook. In fact, it was likely a main driver of growth in
the world's most popular website. It's not surprising Quora has been modeled
after Facebook since Quora is made up of early Facebook alumni.

Many of the rest of the arguments apply to discussion websites in general. If
you consider Wikipedia, for instance, scaling doesn't seem to be a problem.
Taking Wikipedia is a good idea, since, despite what's been said, Quora is or
should be a direct competitor to Wikipedia.

At a descriptive level, Quora isn't represented accurately.

Judging from the slant of the article, it seems the author is reacting to a
bad experience on the site.

~~~
Noldorin
A subjective article cannot be false, silly person. It is evidently well-
research and supported by evidence; that's as much as one can ask. You may
disagree with it's stance, but that's another point. Get over it.

~~~
pbreit
I agree but I think I would have stated it more politely (even though the OP
was a bit impolite).

As you note, the article was obviously well-researched.

------
at-fates-hands
After a friend told me about Quora, I spent some time lurking and after a
month or so I decided to just skip it. I saw a lot of the same behavior
mentioned in the article. If you want a obvious glimpse, just subscribe to the
Politics group.

I'm sure there's a core group of people who love and swear by it, it just
seems most of the comments in the posts are usually one way traffic. You
either agree or just get downvoted into oblivion.

For someone looking for a welcoming community, this is not the sort of
impression you want to give new users.

------
agscala
This article makes Quora sound almost like Digg back in the day, with a select
few users who work together to ensure they control most of the content on the
site.

~~~
webwanderings
Quora has been a fine weekly newsletter. So what if most often you see a 25
year old millionaire against another 25 year old millionaire going about their
gripe and appreciation of newly acquired money!

As a weekly email newsletter, I get nicely curated content without
participating a minute of my time at the site.

~~~
andrewcooke
personally, i wish they would follow the legal guidelines for unsubscription
that were posted here a few days ago.

i've tried several times to unsubscribe, and failed.

~~~
desbest
I unsubscribed, and a few weeks later I automatically got subscribed again.

------
kmfrk
There is a lot HN admin(s) could learn from this criticism. Opaque moderation
is one of the really bad things about Hacker News.

------
andrewcooke
we're still using the present tense? shouldn't this be "why quora did not
scale"?

or is exponential growth one more thing that isn't the same as it was back in
the day?

------
dasil003
I'm still on the fence about Quora. It has some of the best quality content
anywhere according to my interests, but I'm naturally distrustful of Facebook
mafia since I care about privacy and I find the auto-sharing stuff extremely
irritating.

But as to the elitist / insider's club / groupthink accusations, my
inclination is to ask what the alternative is? I mean if you don't impose some
form of social norms that someone (I'm not personally passing a judgement)
will interpret as elitism then inevitably you will face the Eternal September
which spirals out of control and leads to evaporative cooling as you grow. I
suppose they could be nicer about it, but it's better to please the people who
provide value than to try to make everyone happy and eventually degrade into
Yahoo! Answers.

------
lmg643
If you consider yahoo answers as their competition, Quora seems like it has a
great chance for success as a vehicle to serve ads on link-bait topics.

------
davidgerard
This article is terrible. It starts with actual news and then descends into
complaints about everything Clay Shirky talked about in A Group Is Its Own
Worst Enemy, <http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html> , i.e. it's just
like every computer network social space I've seen since 1988.

------
kimmiller
People seem to be running in to the same problem everywhere - online
communities degrade in quality as they scale.

PG spoke of this (an essay perhaps?).

Why should we be surprised? Culture is the most important thing in a business,
morals to a person. Why would we be able to get it right online at scale
without a few hiccups (and a lot of dissent).

It's almost a law of social gravity.

~~~
XiaoPing
Quora entered the soccer mom phase summer of 2011. The quality has plummeted
since then.

------
zby
Why you cannot link to Quora answers? There seems to be a way to 'include'
them by the way of some javascript - but I am way more careful when pasting
javascript then when just using the anchor tag.

------
the_expert
Anonymity (pseudo-anonymity) certainly has downsides but over the years I have
found the better thoughts come from posters who are _not_ attaching themselves
to a Real Name(TM) that is connected to a web site^W business that would love
to attract more followers^W customers.

Anonymous comments have to stand on their own. They can't rely on name
association. The reader has to evaluate them for their content, not their
author. This is a good thing.

Another thing I have learned over many years of using the web is that
intelligent people do not always make intelligent comments. We are all
inconsistent; we're human. It's foolish to assume everything Joe the Self-
Proclaimed Expert says is going to be worth reading. Sometimes he will say
stupid things. By the same token people who in the real world might not be
deemed intelligent can sometimes have some brilliant insights. It would be
foolish to assume that every comment they make is worthless simply because of
the name it's attached to. Anonymous commenting allows each comment to be
evaluated individually. It addresses the inherent inconsistency of human
comments and protects readers from making unwarranted assumptions. Unless of
course they assume every anonymous post automatically falls into some category
with respect to its content. IMO, that sort of thinking is the mark of web
inexperience.

The notion of "experts" is vastly overrated. This is an idea used to sell
advice and services. Socrates figured this out hundreds of years ago. Read
what Socrates learned and you too will learn something abut "experts" and
earned reputations as "authorities" on given subjects. Learn how to form
questions. In learning, it is my opinion that questions, knowing how to
formulate them, are far more important than answers.

The web is blissfully free from the hard sell of the "expert" while still
being a great place to discover many types of "expertise". No one is demanding
to see how many degrees or certifications anyone else has. No one cares about
your "reputation". People are just interested in knowledge, no matter who it
might come from. They can then evaluate it on their own. Without anyone
telling them what to do or think.

This is not stopping some from trying to force their own system, with
"experts" and "reputation" and so forth. In my opinion, none of them will
scale. The main attraction of the web is that it is free from those sort of
restraints. There are plenty of experts on the web, but they do not have to
self-promote. They might not be trying to sell anything; maybe they just share
their thoughts for the joy of sharing.

Anonymous posting is as close to pure thought, free from real world biases
like identities, credentials and reputations, as we're going to get. Every
thought can be evaluated on its own merits, irrespective of the submitter.

~~~
demione
This is the best answer I've seen on here so far as to why Quora isn't ready
for prime time, and why sites like Reddit will end up delivering better
content over time. Sure, all of the atrocities mentioned (downvoting into
oblivion, banning, etc) happen on Reddit too. However, when it happens there,
I'll remain butthurt only as long as it takes to switch to any of my other
accounts. The concept of karma exists there only to validate one's reputation
to _self_ , and not to validate one's reputation to others. By creating a more
ephemeral concept of identity, Reddit has solved the 'ego' problem.

In the future, I see social networking sites dividing into one of two camps :
sites like facebook, which are about vanity, and sites like Reddit, which are
about content. It would be best for future entrepreneus to decide up front
which camp they're in, long before they face the pickle Quora is currently
suffering from.

------
kentpalmer
<http://www.quora.com/Quora/Why-wont-Quora-Scale>

~~~
desbest
More discussion on Quora about the article.

[http://www.quora.com/Quora/What-do-quora-admins-think-of-
thi...](http://www.quora.com/Quora/What-do-quora-admins-think-of-this-rather-
scathing-attack) <\-- No answers.

[http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/What-do-Quora-users-
think...](http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/What-do-Quora-users-think-of-
this-article-Why-Quora-Won’t-Scale)

[http://www.quora.com/rage-against-quora/Why-Quora-
Won’t-Scal...](http://www.quora.com/rage-against-quora/Why-Quora-Won’t-Scale)
<\-- Rage Against Quora post

It's ironic how the article talks about how the admins engage in censorship
and a "spiral of silence" for minority views, but when an article talks about
the spiral of silence and gets press, the ALL the admins are silent
themselves. Oh the irony! Guilty conscience, much?

------
michaelochurch
Seeing as I live in New York, I am by definition not part of the Silicon
Valley in-crowd.

My experience on Quora has been extremely positive. Right now, it's one of the
best online communities for quality of content.

People who call Quora a nasty community because of downvoting have no idea
what they're talking about. Wikipedia in 2004-5 was nasty. Personal attacks
all over the place, edit wars and tag teaming (troll raids by influential
people, justified by the "3 revert rule"). There was one guy who created a
bunch of sock puppet accounts and attempted to attribute them to me on a
still-infamous hate page, in which he claimed about 50 accounts, most
nonexistent, were my sock puppets when many of them were later established to
be his. (Half the accounts weren't used for anything but have obscene names.)
_That_ is what I call nasty. Downvotes on Quora aren't anywhere close to that.

I haven't seen Quora get even on the same planet as what Wikipedia was when I
last edited (which was more than 5 years ago).

I don't agree with the decision to collapse answers based on 1 downvote, but
if I'm really interested in a question, I'll usually read all the answers
anyway, so I don't find it to be a major hindrance. Besides, being downvoted
isn't a big deal: fewer people read your answer; so what?

Quora's great, at least from my experience. It might be that I stay away from
extremely charged topics (e.g. politics) but I've never encountered any of
this stuff-- and I've seen it a lot on other internet communities.

~~~
heretohelp
I'm a lurker on Quora, but would like to state that I've really enjoyed your
answers on Quora. You're the only person I've actually bothered to go through
the history of on Quora before.

~~~
HistoryInAction
Right, definitely an amazing answer from Mr. Church breaking down employee
contributions and how to (if to) fire them! ++would recommend, answers do not
contain bobcat

------
XiaoPing
It was never a popular site outside its clique.

[http://startupjunkies.org/blog/2012/09/14/unlucky-little-
quo...](http://startupjunkies.org/blog/2012/09/14/unlucky-little-quoras-
troubles-grow/)

------
wilfra
Sounds like the author got banned for excessive complaining on Quora and is
exceptionally butthurt.

I'm a hard core Quora addict and have never encountered most of the things in
this post. He's way off about the "elite". Yes there are people who get tons
of upvotes and have huge followings but in every case I've seen it's because
they are well known off of Quora or they give consistently amazing answers,
often both.

It's not like Digg was where some random anonymous person has all this power.
Quora power users don't even really have any power beyond knowing lots of
people will read their answers, even then those answers still must be good to
get upvotes.

~~~
jlgreco
_"Sounds like the author got banned for excessive complaining on Quora and is
exceptionally butthurt. I'm a hard core Quora addict and have never
encountered most of the things in this post."_

 _"He's way off about the "elite"."_

You know, I think I can see where she may be coming from with some of these
complaints.

~~~
HistoryInAction
She, actually.

------
eslackey
You should ask this question on Quora

~~~
XiaoPing
Why? To waste time?

