
Show HN: Review my startup: Quora, a topic based question and answer site - ccheever
Link to sign up: http://quora.com/hackernews<p>Quora is a question and answer site focused on getting really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.<p>The big idea is to try to get every question page to be the best possible resource for anyone who wants to know about the answer.  One way to think about it is as a cache for the research that people compile by searching the web or asking others.  The feeling you get when you see a Wikipedia article and you think "Oh, that's going to have all the information I want about that" is the feeling we want to create across a much broader space.<p>The best things you can do are asking and following questions you're interested in, answering other people's questions, and voting or commenting on answers.<p>Right now, you need to use your Facebook account to sign up.  We might add other ways to join later on.<p>We're still in beta and are making a lot of changes and have a lot of work to do but wanted to get some feedback.<p>Thanks
======
dangelo
Why did Google Checkout fail?

<http://www.quora.com/q/Why_did_Google_Checkout_fail>

What are some good reasons to take a technology company public?

[http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_some_good_reasons_to_take_a_...](http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_some_good_reasons_to_take_a_startup_public)

How did Mint acquire 1.5m+ users without a high viral coefficient, scalable
SEO strategy, or paid customer acquisition channel?

[http://www.quora.com/q/How_did_Mint_acquire_1_5m_users_witho...](http://www.quora.com/q/How_did_Mint_acquire_1_5m_users_without_a_high_viral_coefficient_scalable_SEO_strategy_or_paid_customer_acquisition_channel)

Are most Y Combinator founders happy that they used Y Combinator?

[http://www.quora.com/q/Are_most_Y_Combinator_founders_happy_...](http://www.quora.com/q/Are_most_Y_Combinator_founders_happy_that_they_used_Y_Combinator)

What is the significance of the ordering of author names on an academic paper?

[http://www.quora.com/q/What_is_the_significance_of_the_order...](http://www.quora.com/q/What_is_the_significance_of_the_ordering_of_author_names_on_an_academic_paper)

Why aren't all girls blonde?

<http://www.quora.com/q/Why_aren_t_all_girls_blond>

~~~
earle
Adam:

Site is good, easy to use. Fix your e-mail validator (you can, afterall have a
domain name that starts with a number). The facebook only signup thing is a
bit of a hiccup (especially with the HN crowd) even with your priors.

As for the site itself, I would recommend ditching this whole "tagging"
system. For example:

[http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_the_typical_amounts_of_equit...](http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_the_typical_amounts_of_equity_offered_to_engineers_by_startups_of_different_sizes)

Having these tags: Compensation, Engineering in Silicon Valley, Salaries,
Startup Compensation,Startups, Stock Options, ....

Is just going to be very overwhelming, and if you're letting users define
these, it seems you're going to have a big problem with trying to eventually
police the content, and thats just an endless can of worms..

How about some term extraction, fancy analysis, and leaving that to automated
semantics?

On a side note, some of the main topic landing pages are pretty sensible, easy
to use, and well defined. Some of the indexing pages seem to have an awful lot
going on...

Mainly, the homepage once you're logged in. Very busy here, not even sure
exactly what is going on, and its awfully repetitive..

There also seems to be topics/categories broken down, but no real way to
browse them effectively -- although there is a "browse" tab which is really
more of a "feed", adding a bit more confusion. It'd be nice to be able to
consume these "Topics" in more of a directory type of style.. (eg, being able
to look up "Dog Breeds" and seeing a list of breeds to click through/browse
leading into the particular Quora for a specific breed itself..)

All in all, I think its an excellent start, but there's a definitive need to
establish a much clearer picture of the companies identity.. Is this a new
E-How, or is it a Wikipedia? More importantly, how is it really different from
either? Right now there is a ton of grey area here for the end user, but
hopefully a lot of this will work itself out as the ideas mature.

Best, earle.

EDIT:

Now that I really look at that homepage again (logged in), I really dont like
it. There's almost no meanginful content on it -- everything is metadata! This
needs to be rethought more in tune with identity/branding of the problem
you're trying to solve. I dont think an end user ever wants to see a giant
feed of a bunch of meta data if you're delivering a 'really high quality,
authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.' that should
translate to content.

""" Follow-up question added to topic Programming. 8:22pm What are the
disadvantages of having a degree in Math and working as a programmer? This is
a follow-up question to What are advantages of having a degree in Math and
working as a programmer?. 2 Answers • Follow • 2 Topics """

This "feed" stuff may work well for your news feed on Facebook, but it doesnt
translate well to a Q&A site when I'm typing in something specific and you're
dumping a giant list of unrelated meta-data with links all over the place. If
someone is looking for advice on their health issue or tax problem, this is
going to have to scale -- to potentially millions of questions and billions of
answers. This feed and tagging system dumped into a "feed" just ain't going to
get it done. This needs to be rethought, to better effectively deliver your
stated vision of 'really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that
people are interested in.' and that should translate to content thats relevant
and easy to find.

~~~
ccheever
Can you send the e-mail address you tried to use to bugs@quora.com? Our
validator allows for domains that start with numbers so I think it was
rejecting the e-mail based on something else.

------
luchak
In approximately inverse order of importance (sorry about that):

* Misc.:

\- Don't like using my Facebook account.

* UI:

\- Always find myself hunting for the "follow" button.

\- Front page is a visually undifferentiated mishmash of 20ish different
questions, most of which contain no more than a few sentences of content.
Also: do we really need number of answers, number of topics, follow, star,
time, topics (selected arbitrarily?), profile picture, answer snippet,
answerer name, answerer description, and answer votes for every single one of
these questions? You're making me sort through way too much stuff to decide
whether I'm interested in the question or not.

\- The options menu is cryptic and poorly located. Ex.: If I want to answer
something anonymously, why do I go hunting at the right-hand side of the
screen by all the navigational / related links stuff? Put that by the text
box.

* Community:

\- The personality types on the site are not substantially different from
people I already know. Most of the questions (both from my feed and via "All
Questions") drip Silicon Valley techie. I'd love to see intelligent
questions/answers from people who have lives very different from mine. As
things stand, I'm not sure whether, if I were to ask a question, I'd be
getting a range of opinions or an echo chamber.

\- Answers tend pithy. On the other hand, some of the questions encourage
that. Is there some way to see only questions/answers with meat?

Summary: Right now I feel like Quora has a lot of features (too many features)
and not enough content, even in what look to be active topics. I don't know
how you get people to invest in writing high-quality answers, but that's the
question you really need to be focusing on. I would say that you should try to
to cultivate a sense of sitewide community, but the siloing of the site into a
bunch of semi-intersecting topics could make that tricky.

But then, the only Q&A site I've ever really liked has been Ask Metafilter, so
maybe I'm looking for the wrong thing here -- but I don't think so, since, for
me, it's the first site that comes to mind when I think of your mission. (Put
together a better-indexed version of Ask Metafilter and you'll have a winner
in my book.) If I need to ask a short question that can be answered quickly,
I'll consider Quora. If I'm looking for significant thought, longer
meditations, a diverse range of opinions, or interesting browsing material,
though, I'll head elsewhere.

~~~
ccheever
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One thing we do need to work on for sure
is making the good content that is already on the site get surfaced better.

------
Zak
No.

Facebook already has enough of my data inside its walled garden. It's not
getting control of my logins to other services. Add another signup method and
I'll give your site due consideration.

~~~
ccheever
We have our own login system. We just use Facebook to connect you to people
you know and get your photo. Having real identities for people and having
people connected to other people who know them are important for the system to
work, and we found that the best way to get those things was to require
Facebook to sign up.

We might add other ways to sign up later.

~~~
kylec
Your service sounds awfully lot like Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange, which
seems to work just fine without the need to "verify" users or require users to
login via Facebook. Why does your service need it? Also, I have no desire for
a site (yours or otherwise) to take my picture and friend list from Facebook,
and it's a little presumptuous for Quora to require me to provide this
information.

~~~
zackattack
Also, what's the main diff between this and Stack Exchange other than that
this is all-purpose? Are you gonna let search engines index answers?

------
plinkplonk
I got an invite to Quora from a friend of mine a few months ago but the need
for the FaceBook id was a killer. As long as they have this requirement, I
won't use the product. Too bad really, because I hear good things about it.

~~~
nishantmodak
I did sign up using my FB account, just to try it out.

After signing-up I could easily disconnect my FB account from quora account.

So, the logic of asking to sign-up using FB, does not really make a lot of
sense - if its affecting user sign-ups.

------
charliepark
I've seen Quora referenced a bunch lately, and have been excited to try it
out. The design (from the outside) looks really good, and I suspect that your
team has crafted a really polished UX. I'd love to check it out. But ...

I'm not going to sign up via Facebook Connect, but it's not because I don't
like linking that profile. It's because the Facebook ID approval page notes
that you'd be publishing content to my wall. I'm not comfortable with that.
Maybe that's a templated display that's shown on all Facebook Connect pages. I
don't know. But it's enough to stop me from signing up.

Just another datapoint.

------
markbao
Quora is one of those really amazing sites that you really enjoy using a lot
because the UI and UX are impeccable. Things are responsive, actions have
weight, and it's just overall very pleasant to use. Congratulations on
that—it's nothing short of a masterpiece.

I really like the concept of following topics. I think something that could be
worked on is the following questions thing—last time I used it, it was
difficult to figure out that a question I'm following has received a follow-
up.

------
fuzzmeister
This is very well made, great job. A few things:

\- Why do I have to choose the best square thumbnail picture? Facebook already
provides you with pic_square through their API.

\- Profile thumbnails are not loading unless I view the user's profile page
first. Here's an example, where I have clicked through to Adam's profile but
not the others: <http://grab.by/36FP>

\- The main feed seems a little too text-heavy to me. Have you considered
putting profile thumbnails next to questions and answers that appear in the
feed, as you do for comments on question pages?

\- Your buttons are awesome. As are your tooltips.

~~~
ccheever
\- re: profile pics. pic_square pics are only 50x50 (iirc?), and we needed
square pics that were bigger than that.

\- re: thumbnails not loading. i've never seen that before. it might be a
problem with S3. If you e-mail a link to your profile to bugs@quora.com, I can
look through our logs and try to debug more.

\- re: feed.

We're making a lot of changes to the feed all the time. Thanks for the
feedback.

\- re: buttons.

All @artypapers.

------
teyc
I'll explain what the problem with FB sign-in is. Remember Eric Ries's IMVU,
where people didn't want to link their IM accounts to IMVU because they don't
want to endorse a piece of technology that they aren't sure of.

Similarly, I don't want to tell my friends on FB about Quora just in case it
stinks.

Usually, FB login's do not pull in friends details. However, it appears that
you are doing that.

I'd be happy to review your app if you can put some kind of assurance around
the FB Connect logon to the effect that you are not going to announce on my FB
status that I'm using Quora.

------
needadvice
I'm not really sure why others are so paranoid about logging in via FB
Connect. Honestly, going forward, I think FB connect / Twitter etc. are going
to emerge as the primary means for logging in -

check out Dave mcclure's post about password friction below:

[http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/02/subscriptions-
ar...](http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/02/subscriptions-are-the-new-
black.html)

------
phatbyte
I like it, seems very cohesive and simple. May I ask how do you got people
making questions and answer them ? I ask this, because I'm also creating a
startup that will need user input in order to grow, so I'm trying to get some
tips from others.

~~~
ccheever
Try looking at these:
[http://www.quora.com/q/What_s_my_incentive_to_post_answers_o...](http://www.quora.com/q/What_s_my_incentive_to_post_answers_on_Quora)
[http://www.quora.com/q/What_s_the_strongest_incentive_on_Quo...](http://www.quora.com/q/What_s_the_strongest_incentive_on_Quora)

------
imajes
@ccheever:

Your signup form email validator is broken; i have a .es domain and it refuses
it....

------
jasonlbaptiste
Awesome! I've heard great things about it so far. On my iPhone but will give
it a whirl when I get back home.

~~~
ccheever
Signup from it is a little tricky but we do have an iPhone (+ Android, Palm,
etc.) site that works pretty well.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
It worked pretty well with fb connect. Moreso, I'm at the gym and I want to
spend some decent time with the app that's uninterrupted.

------
ronnier
Clickable link: <http://quora.com/hackernews>

------
pibefision
Quora rocks. It's a great product, i'm using it a lot. Once you start to
using, it's addictive.

~~~
ccheever
Thanks!

------
sri
signed up. "Click on the best photo" showed me my profile photo (the same
photo) 5 times.

~~~
ccheever
Your photo was probably small enough that different croppings didn't matter,
or at least weren't different enough for you to notice. Thanks for the
feedback.

