
Quora’s Demise - delwin
http://delw.in/quoras-demise/
======
sthatipamala
My problem with Quora is that it is very difficult to penetrate the inner
sanctum and feel welcome in the community.

You used to be able to gain recognition with thorough answers to domain-
specific questions. But if you take a look at a lot of the "trending" answers
on Quora, they all seem to be written by the same 10 Quora power users (Mark
Bodnick, Garrick Saito, Venkatesh Rao, etc..)

The problem not so much the existence of these power users but the fact that
they seem to only upvote amongst themselves and contribute to each others
boards, creating a very exclusive feeling.

~~~
rdl
I don't think the low-quality general answers from some of the high volume
contributors really matter; I'm a lot more into the niche experts, and Quora
makes it easy to find those people. (Marc Bodnick upvotes are so common as to
be essentially content free, although his answers are great; there are a lot
of users who contribute lots of crap with no actual knowledge, across a range
of categories, and a number of users who are only contributing in very well
defined areas of expertise. e.g. Gus Fuldner's PCI related answers are great,
and there are a lot of domain experts and people with first-hand knowledge who
post on Quora.

If you have a problem with Quora, follow better users and better topics.

The boards product is IMO pretty ill advised. Quora is doing it because they
want to be a repository, easily searched, of a lot of interesting information,
but they didn't take into account the second order effects of attracting a lot
of boards users to Quora.

The funny thing for me is that the OP joined Quora (I think) during the big
wave of idiots in December 2010. ("Scoblegate"). People said all the same
things about death of Quora then, and in June 2010 when it opened up to the
public. I suspect the average IQ of Quora users has been in strict decline
ever since the first user was added after Charlie and Adam.

~~~
delwin
I joined Quora soon after it launched, thought it was kinda cool, forgot about
it, and yes, then rejoined again sometime in the fall of 2010. There was a
nice linguistics community built up for a while (I'm a linguistics undergrad)
until everything kind of fell apart. Quora didn't know how to separate people
very well, so people interested in memes gradually crowded everything out.

BUT I didn't actually have any problems at all with Quora (at least, nothing
notable) until the launch of Boards. In fact, I really enjoyed the
linguistics, philosophy, chemistry, biology, theology, travel, and cooking
communities. I mostly ignored the Quora superusers and focused on niche
experts, like you mentioned, but eventually it was just too much.

Perhaps I will revamp my profile when I get the time, start from scratch, and
things will work out better the second time around.

~~~
rdl
Ah, I shouldn't have assumed; although even Feb 2011 is early enough to see
before and after boards.

Have you seen any positive use of Boards? I haven't -- even Marc Bodnick's
boards are pretty mediocre, although I don't think they drag the site down
like the others.

Survey questions are a worse thing than boards, though, I think. Getting rid
of both would be great, but if I could only get rid of one...

~~~
delwin
Agreed. Survey questions are terrible. So are "joke questions", which are now
legitimated by an official designation...

~~~
rdl
Joke questions by people who are already on the site, if they're a small
percentage of the total, and easily filtered out, aren't that big a problem
for me. Survey questions basically attract and retain the formspring crowd.
Better filtering should prevent you from seeing content you don't like, but in
the long run, the second order effects will take over :(

------
_delirium
There's quite a lot of self-promotion going on as well. I haven't done a real
survey, so my perception might be off, but I feel like I run across more not-
that-great self-cites/self-links in answers than at, for example,
StackExchange. I mean, it's fine to link to something of yours (text,
software, startup) that is high-quality and directly relevant to the question,
but Quora has a lot of answers where the blog/company/self promotion feels
pretty blatant.

(An alternate hypothesis is that StackExchange has just has much of that
_submitted_ , but that its voting/moderation works better.)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Quora.com has slightly higher link authority than 'new to the internet' site
X, so putting as many links to X in Quora boards is a form of search engine
optimization (SEO).

~~~
_delirium
Aren't the links nofollowed, though?

~~~
jaredmck
Yeah, but there's likely at least some slight benefit from nofollowed links,
especially if there are positive social signals.

------
lincolnwebs
As a longtime online community manager, this piece strikes me as another entry
in the time-honored tradition of "this place changed and now I don't like it"
complaints. Yes, everything changes. No, it's not the same as when you joined.
That's not Quora, that's life.

~~~
tptacek
This comment doesn't actually say anything. Yes, things change. Yes, that's a
part of life. That doesn't automatically make all change for the better.

~~~
akkartik
It reflects the lack of content in the article, which boils down to, "things
changed so I'm leaving." Lincoln isn't claiming that Quora is doing fine. (At
least not in this comment.)

I find it useful to be reminded that as a species mankind hasn't figured out
how to grow things without changing them (and so exposing them to the
possibility of decline).

~~~
pepve
I'd like to put that stronger: it's impossible to grow things without changing
them.

------
the_rara_avis
Slightly off-topic: Forcing sign-in to read full answers strikes me as an odd
path to take - reminds me of expertsexchange.

~~~
radikalus
Why did I read that as expert-sex-change?

~~~
mark_story
Because that's how it reads, and you can never unsee/unthink it now. :)

------
machrider
...and Ask MetaFilter quietly carries on being fantastic.

~~~
zackattack
$5 + one-week filter weeds out people without sufficient prefrontal cortex
size (i.e., they don't have patience and can't understand the value of a
future payout).

~~~
unalone
Oh, there're plenty of idiots on MetaFilter. $5 curbs growth but is no
indicator of intelligence. Trust me.

Give credit where credit is due: MeFi's moderation team is hands-down the best
on the Internet. It's astonishing how much shit they have to deal with and how
good they are at keeping the site civil and high-quality without pushing too
many buttons.

------
tatsuke95
>"It was a turning point I happened to catch at its birth."

Really? Because I'm pretty sure myself and many others caught it when the
T-echo Chamber was trying to sell us on this new message board system that was
going to make a lot of money and change the game.

Quora was an online community that happened to be "cool", so it attracted
intelligent people which made the content fantastic. But nothing they were
doing, in my opinion, was especially original. And as has been pointed out, if
you try to scale up an online community, you deal with more and more noise.
Predictably, that happened.

I apologize for the past tense; I realize Quora still exists, and nothing I or
the author says has any real bearing on where it goes from here, or whether or
not it is successful in the future. But I _do_ know that _I've_ gone from
using it occasionally to using it never.

~~~
dasil003
You pretty much nailed it. Quora was a fad for the valley's elite. It was
launched with a critical mass of the right people that pretty much everyone in
tech had reason to jump on board right away.

But if you grow this quickly you're also likely to implode this quickly,
especially with the fundamental conflict of interest between startup vs
community curation. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to make a great
community is to prioritize _that_ over profit and growth. That's why HN,
MetaFilter, and countless smaller communities and boards can thrive long-term,
but "community" startups like Digg, Reddit and Quora tend to go to shit. The
closest I've seen to bucking the trend is Stack Overflow, but that's due to
subject matter focus, phenomenal long-term utility, and abysmal competition,
and even there it's hard to argue it's still as great as it was a couple years
ago.

~~~
delwin
It was a fad for the Silicon elite but it COULD have been so much more. There
were actual scientists, historians, etc. getting involved and _those_ people
could have made it awesome. The reason Quora faltered was because of
startup/investor interests. They didn't seem to be curious intellectual types
actually interested in the knowledge curation, they just seemed to have hit
upon a good business idea.

------
fufulabs
Boards had a high cost/benefit in the wrong vectors. While they acquired a
very low-barrier (i mean low IQ requirement) feature that has great SEO and
pageviews benefits, it had a high cost of increasing noise and diluting the
Q&A DNA of the product. What i didn't understand was why didn't they go into
more related and deeper dimensions of Q&A like interviews, product FAQs,
debate, surveys and polls. These are branches of the same tree with lesser
noise penalty than a 'board that you can cram ANY kind of content'.

There is one explanation for this move though. Pinterest-envy.

~~~
jcc80
That's a really good point I hadn't considered - diving into Q&A deeper. When
boards were announced I was not a fan at all and don't use them. Your
suggestions would definitely fit better, imho.

~~~
fufulabs
Thanks. Theres plenty of evidence that these are popular. Reddit's Ask me
Anything, poll apps (real-time) and the rest are ripe for a market leader to
emerge.

------
espeed
There seems to be an over-active "troll" patrol on Quora as well.

If you ask a question or present a point of view that's outside of
conventional thinking, its common to see those views lambasted in the
comments. Quora is definitely not a place for "things you can't say"
(<http://paulgraham.com/say.html>).

~~~
pitchups
I

------
aerosmile
I still find a lot of value in Quora, but I guess directionally speaking,
you're probably right that the mainstream audience is lowering the standard.
Not sure if I heard you point that out, but you probably meant to say that
it's possible to build a horizontal site that fits the needs of niche
audiences - it's all just a question of product decisions. Twitter is a good
example of how it can be done the right way: my stream is completely different
from my wife's, and we both love using Twitter.

I recognize that user segmentation is easier to implement on a site that's
focused on the social graph as opposed to on the interest graph, but I am not
convinced that it's impossible. Ie, how about requiring social credit in a
certain vertical before being able to ask a question in that same vertical?
That credit could be earned with good answers to existing questions, or
inherited from relevant 3rd party sites with applicable currency.

------
Shank
The problem was that there was no barrier to entry, and therefore there was no
way to prevent people from misusing it.

The intellectual value of Quora dropped as more and more people who had no
reservations about posting inherently useless questions joined. If there was a
system for filtering out questions from less authoritative or knowledgeable
figures, they could have prevented this.

~~~
phwd
Ah, now how does one find the sweet spot between this and say Stack Exchange?
Many times, I have heard users complain about the barrier for Stack Exchange
and overzealous moderators. There is not really a way to please everyone.

I never really understood how moderation works on Quora so I assumed there was
none. Not to say that I hate Quora (I like it a lot), I just feel there is
nothing preventing it from becoming Yahoo Answers in a couple years time. No
barrier, no moderation.

~~~
codezero
Moderation is pretty active on the site, in fact, users who have interacted
with Quora moderation consider the site to be heavily moderated... you are
right -- there is a sweetspot somewhere, but even that is just a sweetspot for
a small subset of users. Nobody will ever please everyone.

------
glesica
I found the comment about Quora being an encyclopedia of sorts really
interesting.

This sort of site would actually fill a niche between something like
StackExchange and Wikipedia: thorough, comprehensive articles (although, to be
fair, these can be found on SE as well) but with more relaxed editorial
standards (no notability requirements or ban on original research).

That being said, a for-profit start-up is probably the wrong medium for such a
site. Imagine if Wikipedia were for-profit. There's a good chance that the
pressure to monetize all those raw page views would have degraded the quality
of the actual content.

For example, I've been using Wikipedia basically since it started. However, I
never created an account until about a week ago (to fix a typo). I would have
contributed sooner, but I never had anything important to say, and I knew that
if I broke the rules or failed to uphold the editorial standards my edits
would be removed anyway (admittedly, Wikipedia may have gone too far with the
rules in some cases, but that's not really the point).

Contrast that with Reddit, where I've had an account for some time and comment
regularly. I do so even knowing I might be down-voted because that's what the
site encourages. Making a dopey comment on Reddit once in awhile (accidentally
or on-purpose) is just part of Reddit. Making a dopey edit on Wikipedia
destroys the value of the site.

In order for Quora to fill the role the OP wanted it to fill it probably would
have had to be non-profit.

tldr; Quora could have been Wikipedia-lite. But Wikipedia works because profit
isn't important, so quality can be put before monetizing traffic and creating
non-essential "engagement".

------
codezero
Since it may not be obvious, questions like
[http://www.quora.com/Communication/If-you-had-a-
conversation...](http://www.quora.com/Communication/If-you-had-a-conversation-
with-bread-at-the-grocery-store-how-would-it-go) won't show up in feeds unless
you follow the Joke Questions topic. There are several other topics applied to
content that doesn't have broad appeal like Quora Community. The alternative
is to actively delete questions like this but the reality is that the site is
too active for that to be feasible, also, regular users aren't doing the same
kind of content curation that they used to. Questions used to get quickly
edited or flagged, now they just sit there until they get activity and users
just answer them without fixing grammar, punctuation etc... so part of the
problem is that the number of people who care about curating content hasn't
scaled with the over-all population.

------
stephenhandley
i fucking hate posts like this.

"<power user> has gripes" => "<site> is dead".

you're either following the wrong topics, people, or just don't have a sense
of humor (that bread question was funny as fuck)

there's still tons of high quality content on quora

i.e.

\- [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-best-architecture-
practic...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-best-architecture-practices-
when-designing-a-nodejs-system)

\- [http://www.quora.com/Jeremy-Lin-1/Whats-it-like-to-play-
on-t...](http://www.quora.com/Jeremy-Lin-1/Whats-it-like-to-play-on-the-same-
basketball-team-as-Jeremy-Lin)

\- [http://www.quora.com/Design/Is-there-a-science-to-picking-
th...](http://www.quora.com/Design/Is-there-a-science-to-picking-the-colors-
that-work-well-together-in-a-design-or-is-it-just-subjective)

ETC. ETC. ETC.

~~~
delwin
Just to clarify, I am not a power user. If anything, I'm less active than the
average Quora user. My problem isn't really with the content of Quora, that's
just a manifestation of a larger change that is happening — a shift from a Q&A
site to a social network.

------
padobson
ABC - Always Be Curating.

A successful social network is always going to have a lot of content you don't
want. That's why you need to be filtering the sources of that content
constantly.

Quora is an interesting case because it plays nicely with Twitter. I've found
if you keep your Twitter feed curated, your Quora feed will be well curated
too.

If someone is consistently tweeting junk, unfollow. If there's a Quora board
that has a ton of lousy questions, unfollow.

Don't feel committed to following someone once you have, and don't worry about
whether your observations about a person's or board's signal to noise ratio
are accurate or not - if a content creator belongs in your content world,
they'll get back in one way or another.

Start right now. If you find useful comments in this thread, follow all
commenters on Twitter and Quora. Best way to curate is to add more quality to
differentiate from junk.

------
jonah
Quora was mentioned in an LA Times piece[1] today as one of the new FB mafia
offspring along with Asana and Path.

[1] [http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-facebook-
friends-20120...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-facebook-
friends-20120407,0,7412652,full.story)

------
leoedin
Power users, ranking users or in any way giving precedence to users with a
history of popularity has been the death knell for a number of online
communities. It's consistently a poor way of identifying users who make
positive contributions to the site, and it's a consistently good way to
alienate new and occasional users.

I suspect there's two reasons for this. The first is that popularity is not
necessarily indicative of quality. Take a look at Reddit's front page today,
and you'll have a hard time picking out anything worth reading from the memes
and jokes. Popularity normally reflects the lowest common denominator.
Rewarding users for being popular inevitably leads to users rewarded for
pandering to popular opinion, rather than for making insightful or meaningful
contributions.

The second is that engagement level rarely is indicative of comment quality.
The internet is a vast place with a huge number of users, and as a number of
studies (particularly on Wikipedia [1]) have shown, a users commitment to the
project or website doesn't correlate with contribution quality. Essentially,
contributions from a new or rarely commenting user are just as likely to be
worthy as those from long standing members.

[1]: [http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/10/anonymous-good-
sa...](http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/10/anonymous-good-samaritans-
may-produce-wikipedias-best-content.ars)

I've been actively commenting and engaging forums, social news sites and other
online communities which allow commenting on topics since 2002, and time and
time again I've seen sites grow in popularity and decrease in quality. My
personal desire in a site is one with a fairly active membership which both
introduces interesting topics and news stories and provides interesting
commentary on them. I enjoy engaging in discussion about a wide range of
things, and I do my best to find websites that allow and encourage that. I
think perhaps the most interesting thing I've observed is that communities
with a fairly high barrier for entry - perhaps a payment of some sort - and
aggressive moderation policies manage to maintain a consistently good level of
discussion over much longer periods of time.

------
sitkack
Two issues ...

There shouldn't be "a community" there should be multiple communities,
otherwise there will always be an 'in crowd'

Second issue: quora has a multidimensional filtering problem and this goes
back to point 1. There will always be an element of digg/reddit/4chan in
everything. To try and remove it is futile, just try to keep it discernable
from the content you _care_ about, maybe the 4chan stuff is your bag and you
don't want the high brow shit, so be it ...

------
Naushad
They want more and more engagement, to gain more page views to become another
successful website of daily use.

Thats the reason they initiated Quora Credits, based on the Variable Rewards
[http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/25/want-to-hook-your-users-
dri...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/25/want-to-hook-your-users-drive-them-
crazy/)

------
pw
"The business of startups is a sketchy subject, and I don’t intend to
associate myself with it."

That's an unusual sentiment around here.

------
jasonkolb
Same complaints here. You nailed it:

I came to Quora to find _cool_ information.

Quora used to do a good job of surfacing that, now it's turned into mostly
people trying to advertise in a sneaky way or asking inane questions.

They should put it back the way it was before it becomes a ghost town.

------
jaredmck
Did anyone else get an email survey from the Quora Data Team asking for
feedback on the site? I got this the other day, seems like maybe it was
targeted at people who hadn't used Quora much in a while but had recently
logged in?

------
samaraga
Introduction of boards made me to move away from browsing Quora for long
hours. Now, to get the best of Quora would be to read the weekly digest sent
out in e-mail and the Forbes column where the best Quora answers are posted.

------
somewhere1
I wonder how much money has been sunk into it already.

------
carguy1983
My complaints about Quora:

    
    
      * You have to use a "real" name.  
      * Their members are predominantly white upper middle class tech/finance/marketing professionals - occasionally some Asians, but mainly from California or NY.
      * There's no good way to browse the site - if there is, it's not easy to find.  
      * Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems for high-IQ communities.

~~~
olalonde
> Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems
> for high-IQ communities.

That's what I like about HN. Groupthink is indeed present (especially when it
comes to technical topics such as programming languages or OSes - we all have
a strong incentive to promote what we use), but not nearly as much as any
other online community I'm aware of. There's a recurring pattern that I like
here: usually, when a submission argues X, the top comment in the comment
thread criticizes/refutes X. By hearing the two sides of an argument, one can
better form an opinion.

~~~
alecco
HN groupthink is getting out of control. No answers but donwvotes to any
dissenting comment.

~~~
unalone
I think it's actually better now than it was. There are a number of contrarian
voices in each contentious thread arguing firmly that there's more to an issue
than perhaps simple analysis would give credit for. There used to be more of
an Ayn Randian/"supermen" feel, more people patting each other on the backs
for being superior creatures cos entrepreneurs are the end point of evolution.
The site seems a fair deal saner, from my point of view.

The nature of systematic conversation ensures there will always be groupthink.
Systems are designed to function in certain ways and deny other approaches to
get their desired result. The result is that people who want this system flock
to it, and people who want to somehow act counter to this system are going to
be a minority that's possibly chased away by the system itself. Options like
downvoting and "ranking" comments" and flagging inappropriate topics basically
say that there _is_ a right way to behave or talk, there _are_ topics that are
better than others. Then either people are attracted to the sites that
reinforce their worldview or they're conditioned by these rules to decide
there're right and wrong ways to think or to be – I'm not sure which it is.
Probably a little of both.

~~~
olalonde
That's why I don't think down votes should be used to express disagreement
(although pg doesn't share this opinion). I personally frequently up vote
comments I disagree with if I feel they are thoughtful and bring an
interesting perspective. The variety of ideas is important and should be
encouraged.

~~~
sitkack
Up/down is the wrong direction for the arrows I think. Left <\--> right,
meaning on-topic/off-topic ? One of the problems I think is that there are so
many dimensions represented by two simple little arrows that it is difficult
for the system (the web software itself) to discern the intent, so it turns
into a popularity (I agree,I disagree) button.

But if you had a button for each piece of information it would look like

    
    
       [] well written
       [] well thought out
       [] agree
       [] disagree
       [] poorly written
       [] funny
       [] off topic
    

For bonus points they would be in a random order in the UI so people wouldn't
develop muscle memory voting on comments.

~~~
skore
I have thought about the On/Off-Topic button as well for some time now. I
think it's a good concept to try out, mainly because it is not judgmental -
Sometimes I like following an Off-Topic discussion and I've had a couple of
good ones on HN. But most of the time, it can be very distracting - separating
it from the main discussion is worth a shot.

As for more detailed buttons - I think that would make it too complex.
Slashdot has established the same concept, probably based on the same
reasoning (mostly to distinguish between "just" funny and actually insightful
comments). Can't speak that much about how successful it is, maybe somebody
else has more insight here.

~~~
sitkack
Yeah, the buttons get out of hand, but the information they would represent is
greatly needed. And how do you encourage people to rate what they read and
interacted with? Based on the stats people post about the amount of traffic
driven by an HN or Reddit submission ... the __vast __majority of users don't
interact via any sort of voting mechanism at all.

I am working on a site now that is heavily based on passive activity voting,
users have no idea how their actions are being used by the site to rank
itself. Their inputs have much less _weight_ than purposeful actions where
both parties are aware of the event.

It is almost like you need an agent that votes in certain public ways
(sentiment analysis,summarization,etc) to decide if comments snarky, funny,
off topic, etc.

~~~
skore
I guess that would fall down once you get to mixed comments - something can be
snarky, funny, off- and on-topic at the same time. Human conversational
interaction is just bloody hard to quantify. The first few steps are always
simple and then it gets hard fast.

Passive voting sounds interesting, though - would that work via Javascript?
How would you determine what the user is focused on?

Finally - I think it's important not to get ahead of ourselves - because I
think that's what happened at Slashdot. Talking about new classifications is
all nice and well, but it's useless when you don't have a clear plan what it
should result in and how it would engage people. You need a clear use case.

For instance - my proposal about an off-topic discussion button is pretty
straight forward. People would see the immediate benefit: Hey, this can help
us make conversation less wasteful and save me scanning time as it separates
the cream from the crop. I think it wouldn't have a problem enticing
engagement, too - nothing drives engagement in nerds like being annoyed, so
they'd click that button.

On Slashdot, I can theoretically reduce a conversation to exclude all the
funny-only comments so I'm left with just the cream. But seriously - how often
does anybody use that? Once you give people elaborate personal filters, you
actually end up having them worry whether they're missing something. Which is
why they can only be consistent and transparent. If I reduce a comment thread
on Slashdot to exclude the funny business and see that one of the nodes has a
HUGE conversation, I wonder whether I should check it out and maybe end up
annoyed because it's just a chain of memes after all. If there was a way in HN
to mark things as off-topic and have that a clear process that is always
applied, I think I would be more confident in skipping. Mainly because if it
was broken, the community would complain until it is fixed.

