
Quora Details Their New Answer Ranking Scheme; Their “PageRank”, Of Sorts - atularora
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/05/quora-ranking/
======
huhtenberg
Blogspam-free link - [http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/On-Quora-what-is-the-
algo...](http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/On-Quora-what-is-the-algorithm-
formula-for-determining-the-ordering-ranking-of-answers-on-a-question)

Ta-da!

~~~
tzs
That's misleading. Generally "blogspam" refers to a blog entry that has just
copied something from somewhere else, so nothing is gained by reading the blog
copy instead of the original.

In this case, the link you give says nothing about the possible connection
between these changes and the Scoble incident. The blog link gives us a lot
more information, and is by far the more useful link to those of us who have
not been closely following this.

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amaranand
It seems like they put in a ton of work to prevent one person, Robert Scoble,
from 'gaming' the system and having his sub-optimal answers go to the top. (As
implied by original link and the SV drama-fest of the past couple weeks)

I think this is interesting for two reasons.

1) Based on the post by Adam D'Angelo, I don't think the changes will cause
Robert Scoble's sub-optimal answers to be placed lower on the page. Scoble's
past answers are interpreted to be 'high quality' by an algorithm because they
get so many up votes. Every answer he posts from now on, will get a higher
'quality score' because of all the upvotes he has already included (See:
"Answers written by users who have written good answers in the past will be
ranked higher.")

2) This seems like a ton of work to battle the habits of one extremely unique
user. It strikes me that Quora's resources could have been better used by
controlling the spam caused by the social media crowd infestation (i.e astro-
turfers). Or by encouraging more experts from fields other than SV start-ups
to join and contribute at a high level.

Having been extremely harsh to Quora so far, I do really like that "A vote
from a user who has written good answers in the past carries more weight (both
upvotes and downvotes)" And this change will admittedly knock down Scoble's
answers a bit.

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mattdeboard
I knew the initial greatness of Quora was dead first on Twitter. I saw a few
social media and PR people I follow on Twitter starting to write "pithy"
tweets about how PR and social media people were missing the boat if they
weren't at Quora promoting their product. Whenever the social media and PR
professionals start flocking to a thing, its usefulness is gone for me,
generally speaking.

~~~
sskates
Could you elaborate why having these people on Quora makes its usefulness go
to zero for you?

~~~
mattdeboard
Because they raise the signal:noise ratio to levels that I don't want to deal
with.

------
flipside
Quora seems to think that scaling votes will allow it to preserve the status
quo of "high quality" answers.

Is it just me or does that seem pretty naive?

