
Why Quora is in trouble - sgdesign
http://www.attackofdesign.com/why-quora-is-in-trouble/
======
cletus
You can count me as one of the long-term Quora detractors. To me, it's a good
example of the "bubble effect". Everyone in the Valley thinks its huge because
everyone in the Valley uses it.

No one outside the Valley does (figuratively speaking).

It's a thin social layer on what's just a Q&A site not that different to Yahoo
Answers, which I guess is fine but I just don't see it going mainstream.

As an aside, I've always said--and I maintain--that I don't see
Stackoverflow/StackExchange going mainstream either.

Ultimately I see the end for both companies being a Google or Facebook buyout
in the $X00,000,000 range, which I think says more about the overall market
than it does their inherent value.

EDIT: let me add regarding SO/SE that I think the SO model works great for
programmers but my point--which I didn't put very well--was that I don't see
that same tagging/voting/self-organizing model necessarily translating that
well to other verticals. I guess time will tell.

~~~
macavity23
Although I agree that Stack[Overflow|Exchange] will never been a mainstream
site, I think there's an important difference in that SO is _very_ useful to
the community that it does support.

They've really nailed the technical question 'problem' to the point that my
day-to-day job would be measurably harder without it, and so as the poster
says I can easily imagine paying for added-value features there.

Quora, not so much. Although I really doubt the solution is to add more eye-
candy to the page design. Sheesh, web designers. ;-)

~~~
codingthebeach
From the article:

"The site is visually bland: there’s barely any color or images, and you won’t
find any effect fancier than rounded corners."

Somebody please save us from the attack of web design. If I see another
gradient rounded flashing Javascript-enabled button for gradient rounded
flashing Javascript-enabled buttons' sake, I'm gonna hurl, Wayne's World
style.

~~~
mgkimsal
agreed. look at craigslist - about as unsexy a design as you could imagine,
but it solves real problems for people, and they use it constantly. quora -
not so much, and fancier buttons and UI won't really change that.

~~~
jamesteow
His point wasn't about making it more fancy but rather, less sterile. Even
Craigslist has more character.

------
localhost3000
I was once a heavy quora user. Here's what drove me away (I do still use it
but I no longer 'hang out' there): the overwhelming pretentiousness and self-
righteousness of many within the very early core userbase who, because I was
in that early group, dominate my feed (don't know if they dominate for
others...). You can only read so many "what does it feel like to be dumb" or
"if i went to Harvard how should I respond to 'where did you go to school?'
without offending the asker?" without rolling your eyes and writing the entire
thing off as a circle-jerk for the self-appointed hipster elite. These people
suck and unfortunately quora has rewarded them with upvotes and therefore
influence. Otherwise I think the site is great and useful for very
niche/obscure questions that google cannot answer well.

~~~
jdp23
Several people also mentioned the "Quora elite's" attitude as a big problem in
a thread that Thomas Hawk started on Google+ a couple of weeks ago:
[https://plus.google.com/104987932455782713675/posts/XXp28NN4...](https://plus.google.com/104987932455782713675/posts/XXp28NN4ori)

------
edanm
Here's what I don't understand about Quora - at the end of the day, all of the
arguments in favor of why Quora is so good, especially arguments put forward
by Robert Scoble, boil down to one thing: lots of interesting people post to
it.

Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily bad or easy to pull off - hell, Hacker
News itself is the same, in that I only use it because of the great people
here.

 _I just don't see how you can take it mainstream._

It's not so much that no one outside of the valley uses it, it's that, if
people outside of the Valley DID use it, no one would like it anymore!

That's not a good position to be in.

~~~
code_duck
It's a decent position to be in - perhaps not if you have dreams of mass
market grandeur, but otherwise, Quora is a success.

~~~
anncaryn
Totally agree. It's about direct "to the source" answers, not about the
functionality. Adoption versus adaptation.

------
nc
Quora is _extremely_ useful. It eliminates a lot of my visits to about.com
style websites and replaces them with structured q&a. It also adds a layer of
transparency (you can see who has answered a question, their 'credentials')
and get a feel for who to trust.

It's quick and the answers to any questions so far have been insightful. I
fail to see how structuring all q&a dispersed over the web to a centralised
site is a bad thing?

In addition Quora facilitates learning over time for topics and even
individual questions I am interested. I absolutely love the follow topic &
question features, i've learned a lot about topics I am passionate about using
them. Information I probably would never have been able to find in any other
way prior to Quora.

------
joe_the_user
I think this leaves the question-space STILL open.

I've never tried Quora and never would use it because I never use my main
Facebook profile for anything else (I like Facebook, I hate Facebook's idea of
non-privacy).

Stackoverflow once was useful but has basically died as far as I can tell
(answer quality plummeting as users become addicted to easy-low-quality-
answers-as-a-way-quick-Karma and thus let any hard question sink fast).

Googling to answer technical questions has gotten less rewarding as well as
Google becomes less literal and thus prevents me from doing fine-tuned filter
when I don't immediately get the right answer.

So what could appear in the answer domain? (and think this domain is still
quite large).

~~~
mjbellantoni
I've also felt in the last couple of months that the quality of answers on
StackOverflow seem to be degrading and that the site seems to be becoming less
... tidy.

+1 regarding the Google searches as well.

------
knowtheory
While i agree with the thrust of the post, the argument is severely undercut
at the point where the author writes that Quora's problem is that it doesn't
solve a problem, and then immediately turns to observation that twitter
doesn't solve a problem either, and is wildly successful.

This is not cogent writing :P

~~~
sgdesign
True, that was not very well written. I meant to say that not solving a well-
defined problem is not always a death sentence (see: Twitter, Reddit, etc.),
but that it's still not a very encouraging sign.

~~~
jsavimbi
> Twitter didn’t solve any real problem

I automatically discounted your entire argument based on those six words. If
you're still unable to see the problem that Twitter solved, then you shouldn't
be writing about tech, media or related.

~~~
1va
Ok. I'll bite: What problem do you feel Twitter solved?

~~~
jsavimbi
To date, it's the most reliable, worldwide accesible, short-messaging, real-
time propagation system that we've developed. Hands down, it has no
competition. Not radio, not TV, not satellite communication and certainly not
through any corporate-owned mouthpiece. It discounts trends, rumors,
celebrity-induced Mass Sociogenic Illness or cheap propaganda.

It solved the problem of truthful dissemination through independent social
verification.

If you did no not know that there was a problem with the truth as it was
delivered to us prior to 2009 (which is when Twitter got its wheels) then you
are one ignorant summbitch. Downvote for stupidity.

~~~
redthrowaway
>then you are one ignorant summbitch. Downvote for stupidity.

You couldn't have answered the question without that bit?

------
faruken
I've tried to use Quora couple of times but I really don't see the point of
it. If you want to ask a programming question, you get an answer on
Stackoverflow immediately and Stackoverflow is designed specifically for that
purpose whereas Quora's design isn't good enough for programming questions. It
doesn't even do syntax highlighting. For me, Quora is one step away from a
forum.

------
ivanzhao
His reference article (on Evaporative Cooling Effect) is a lot more
enlightening: [http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/)

------
gojomo
I've found Quora very useful. I love its visual/functional design.

However, the vulcan/robot approach to quality, and hints of a esoteric level
of people and rules that really controls things, are off-putting. They limit
its mass-appeal, as a place to participate.

Maybe that's not a problem. Maybe there's a niche for the 'elite-university'
of question-answering, creating evergreen quality content and attracting a
large read-only audience across many years, and any number of Google ranking
updates. That's a different outcome from some of the Quora-triumphalism that
accompanied its early popularity... but still a good outcome, for the web and
for Quora's users/employees/investors.

------
Hovertruck
Interesting. I always felt Quora was overdesigned, as if I couldn't move my
mouse anywhere on the page without triggering some sort of hover effect. Drove
me absolutely crazy.

~~~
code_duck
I've had serious problems with the flow for things like signing in and
password recovery. I signed in with Twitter - I think - now when I go back,
they're asking for an email? No idea which I used and I can't find any emails
from Quora, so my account is lost. I've never had such a problem with any
other site.

~~~
Hovertruck
I'm stuck in the same pit. I've tried logging in a few times and can never
seem to get back in.

------
kungfu71186
I think SE can go mainstream. I don't say SO because that's more for
programmers. I see lots of activity in say photography and cooking. I can see
lots of academia using SE as well, just look at all the theory related
exchanges. I think the biggest downfall of Quora is the login and sign up
process. I don't even want to deal with it because SE makes it so easy. I can
sign in with my google account and then go to another exchange and click a few
times and sign up there. I automatically get 100 points because i am signed up
on SO with over 100 points. This makes it so i don't even have to start all
the way over. I just think because it's so easy to sign up and login on SE,
that it could be mainstream. You can use any login service.

Only problem with SE are the rules. I know why they are there, but for a new
user it can be intimidating. A lot of people may not ask a question because
they are afraid they will get "bullied", "trolled" or whatever you want to
call it.

------
statictype
Correct me if I'm wrong but Quora seems to be useful only to those who have
been invited to join it. It's not really a public-facing site in the way every
other Q&A site on the internet is.

So I'd say it's even less useful than Yahoo Answers. I can't remember even
once, googling for a question and getting a Quora page in the search results.

~~~
thecabinet
This is my experience too. All the people who are members have no idea how
useless the site is to the rest of us. The only time I ever visit Quora is by
direct link from HN. It never comes up in search engine responses, and they
have no native search feature. To me, it's just a box with a login form (which
I don't have) and a signup page (which tells me to sod off). How will the
world live without it!?

------
robjohnson
I see a lot of comments about how Quora is only providing value or attracting
users in the valley and while I hate anecdotal premises that are used as
support for arguments, I live in the midwest and over three quarters of my
friends use Quora on a daily basis.

I don't see it as a direct competitor to Facebook or Stackoverflow, but
instead as filling a niche unto itself. I can't speak to the value it adds for
all subject matter categories, but for the ones that I am most interested in
(startup entrepreneurship, technology, mathematics) it has some incredibly
thought-provoking questions and answers.

The biggest value that I get from Quora is not when I am looking for a
specific answer, but the serendipity of scrolling through my favorite topics
to find questions that I wouldn't have thought to ask.

If Quora died, it would be a sad day for the world's intellectual curious.

------
vaksel
i think the biggest problem with Quora is that it was hyped up to be more than
it was. It's just a Q&A site, and it was hyped up as being a Facebook killer.

------
jetz
Quora is hardly going mainstream because mainstream cannot ask the questions
that Quora elite would answer. Not that they don't have the ability but they
don't care! If it does ever it'll be called Yahoo Answers.

------
ForrestN
I'm agnostic about the longterm prospects for Quora, but this article is not
compelling at all.

"It's not the next big thing anymore" is silly and could be applied to
anything other than Google+ (according to this analyst). Web startups aren't
zero-sum and there's no evidence provided that Google+ has harmed Quora's
momentum. They aren't even direct competitors.

"It doesn't solve a problem" is a strange objection. Quora attempts to solve a
few problems, perhaps most prominently that some questions that you want
answered can't be answered with a google search. A lot of the other
functionality is built around facilitating their solution to that problem.
They foster a community and social features in order to keep quality answerers
engaged.

The last two are just ways of saying "I don't like this" and don't amount to
threats to Quora's success. They have a serious brand, and this guy likes
playful brands. It's not interesting to him because he hasn't added
interesting topics to follow, and that's Quora's fault because they haven't
suggested those topics to him. The subset of users who insist on playful
brands and who just can't think of topics their interested in isn't big enough
to bring down a company like Quora.

The suggestion, to turn Quora into Hacker News, would basically mean forgoing
their purpose and vision in a last-ditch effort to leverage the community
they've built. Not a smart idea (or a likely one).

------
skrebbel
Sorry to nitpick, but is this guy really making a point that a site with a
bland design ( = no rounded corners and gradients) isn't fun to use?

~~~
sgdesign
My point is that some sites are fun to use because of their visual design,
some because of their interactions, some because of game mechanisms… but Quora
has none of these.

~~~
skrebbel
I can imagine that sites _appear_ to be fun to use, initially, because of a
great design, but I really have a hard time believing that they really
_become_ fun to use.

Like a game with awesome graphics and sucky gameplay, people play them for a
day and then get rid of it.

------
jaredmck
The thing that annoys me most about Quora is how many of the questions are
leading questions.

~~~
blasdel
…and they're usually asked anonymously too!

I always just assumed that most of them are rhetorical setups asked using a
sockpuppet by the user that made the long and involved answer ranked at the
top of the page.

------
ivankirigin
"twitter solves no problem"

I stopped reading there. staying informed is a real problem. It is just one
twitter solves. Entertainment is not a problem but a desire, and another one
that twitter satisfies. Quora works for both as well. I trust what I read on
quora

------
melvinmt
To me, Quora felt like a big blog site, where nitty people spent hours of
writing nitty comments and the 'question' just set the topic. Quora was never
that interesting as a pure Q&A site. If you ask practical, unsexy questions
you will get a hard time getting answers from anyone - because writing blog-
like comments for trivial questions isn't worth it.

I think that G+ has the advantage over Quora in that it skips the whole Q&A
dance but still allows these early adopters to do what they really care about:
to be heard.

------
barce
The author wrote, 'Facebook solves the problem of how to stay in contact with
your 250 "friends". Twitter solves... well, ok, Twitter didn’t solve any real
problem, but has still grown to become extremely useful.'

How can something be useful and not solve a problem? Twitter is such a great
soapbox for complaints that many companies have felt the need to create
twitter accounts and respond directly to their customers. Personally, I can
find last minute tickets to a baseball game easier on Twitter than on
Craigslist.

------
code_duck
Nobody in the circles I talk in has ever mentioned Quora. Ever. Google+ has
come up about 50 times a day since last week, so I don't think it's quite that
it's replaced Quora.

------
adrianwaj
Quora: look at the homepage (without being signed in) and tell me it's not the
web's proudest gated community.

"New Users. Sorry, you must have an invitation to create an account on Quora."

I'm not upset. Every time I visit the site through a backlink I feel
alienated, and don't want to contribute to those feelings in others by signing
up with an invitation if I had one. I'll just be content occasionally peering
in at people who want to be seen.

Not even a search box on the homepage.

------
bauchidgw
[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all...](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0)
well, the hype is over - now they must show if they are great - or not. but a
startup that does not have hard times is probably not trying hard enough

------
hammock
I find myself asking, who is this guy? Honestly who ever thought that Quora
was a facebook killer - or anything more than another Yahoo answers with
different userbase? Also, who makes a thesis, then gives examples to show that
their thesis is wrong (the twitter example etc)? The whole thing seems
incredible and contrived.

------
johnx123-up
Quora is very useful with real entrepreneurs contributing (similar to HN). SO
is nowhere near to Quora on quality of startup topics. The UI is also pleasing
and friendly for FB users.

The only threat to Quora as of now is Prizes.org from Google.

------
beaumartinez
I think the biggest problem Quora faces is that it's invite-only. A question-
and-answer website needs as many users as possible to provide as many answers
as possible.

~~~
djhworld
Really? I don't remember getting an invite to Quora, in fact I think I just
signed up on the site

------
malandrew
My comments that I posted in the comments on the original blog post, slightly
modified:

===

Quora most certainly does solve a problem: “Tacit knowledge extraction”

I have a question, whose answer may not exist anywhere in written form (e.g.
no reference book, no wiki, no manual, no whitepaper, etc.). The answers do
however lie in the heads of people, very very smart knowledgable people. Quora
has created a system whereby a user with a question can pose it in a forum
where those with the answer will see it and feel compelled to answer.

Quora is performing tacit knowledge extraction at the macro-level. However,
there is no reason that this same problem can’t be solve at the institutional
level as well, using only a slightly modified version of the solution the
Quora team has built.

===

On the issue of badges and traditional game mechanics, I wholly disagree that
Quora needs such features, and I would even argue that it would be a worse
product if it did have them. For the most part, the game mechanics you are
referring to are almost all behavioral game mechanics, whereby intrinsic
motivation is replaced with extrinsic motivation in the form of totems and
tokens (badges, mayorships, in-game money, etc.).

When you apply extrinsic motivators where intrinsic motivators already exist,
you get three results: (1) An increase in short-to-medium term user
engagement, but this comes as a cost of (2) Losing intrinsic motivators that a
difficult to regain once lost, and (3) A possible loss of contribution
quality, because users are now engineering their answers for upvotes and not
focusing on answering the original question. Oftentimes these two will be
aligned, but not always.

The correct type of game mechanics to apply (and that for the most part are
already part of Quora in some ways already) are combinatorial game mechanics
that don’t reward individual achievement, but collaboration and cooperation.
These types of game mechanics are far more subtle than the behavioral game
mechanics used by companies like Zynga.

StackOverflow is unique in that it is largely based on combinatorial game
mechanics, with the use of some behavioral game mechanics to guide the user
into exploring the webapp. Notice that I said __exploring __. As webapps get
larger, you need to establish “exploration patterns” to the app to make sure
the user gets the most out of the app. SO uses badges for this. Many other
sites use single-use tooltips such as those that can be created with
guiders.js. Here they are using extrinsic motivators for a behavior that will
only be performed once (exploration by definition is only done once), thus
there is no product risk from usurping/deadening the value of intrinsic
motivators using extrinsic motivators.

There is however one exception on SO where they use behavioral game mechanics
to solicit user behavior that should be performed in perpetuity, which is to
hand out depth of knowledge badges for contributions to certain topic
verticals. There is a serious possible long-term consequence of these badges
for tasks in perpetuity, but it may be a long-time before we find out whether
the risks outweighs the benefit.

For example, SO hands out bronze, silver and gold badges for topic X. This is
replacing an intrinsic motivation (helping your fellow developer with the
problem; reciprocal altruism) with an extrinsic motivator (bronze/silver/gold
badges. A possible consequence of this approach is that some people (how many
as a percentage, we don’t yet know) may only actively participate in the site
until they achieve the badges they want in that vertical as part of their
reputation. So the first risk here is the possibility of a drop in topic
engagement after the user has achieved all totems for that topic.

And example of a better game mechanic, that is typically viewed as traditional
game mechanic, but has been implemented in Quora as a combinatorial game
mechanic is the notion of a topic leaderboard titled “Top Answerers”, which I
believe is ___upvote weighted._ __. First, the upvote weighting makes sure
that quality of answers is more important than quantity of answers for a topic
in determining who is ranked most highly. Second, there are no notifications
alerting top answerers that they’ve become top answerers. It’s not like the
user wakes up one day, checks Quora and sees a feed item saying
“Congratulations, you are now a top answerer for the Javascript topic.” Doing
so would shift the focus from intrinsic motivation via reciprocal altruism to
extrinsic motivation via the fostering of competition among top answerers.

Finally, Quora’s product management approach of only displaying just enough
quantity/quality metrics to the end users prevents misplaced emphasis on
competition and PeopleRank. The only places you really see competition metrics
in the interface are upvotes on an answer and number of answers in the top
answerers leaderboard.

I could even be argued that Quora may want to experiment with not listing
these two numbers at all. For example, Hacker News recently did away with
displaying the number of upvotes alongside topic comments. This removal of
competition metric from the interface effectively turns a mixed
behavioral/combinatorial game mechanic to a pure combinatorial game mechanic.
I forget the exact thread where Paul Graham discussed the benefits of removing
upvote count from comments, but the fact that his change has stuck is proof
that a combinatorial approach that is subtle and may not look like game
mechanics at all to the untrained eye is better than a behavioral approach
that rewards undesirable behavior.

===

Ultimately, Quora is fun for people who would rank highly on high-need-for-
cognition. That’s it’s target audience. It does not and would not want to
modify the product to target people with a low need for cognition, since doing
so would reduce contribution quality and drive away the users who have a high
need for cognition and contribute heavily.

References: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition>
<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1951356>

===

The only point in this article that I agree with is the “echo chamber” effect
and feed utility problem. However, feed utility is not a problem unique to
Quora. Twitter and Facebook both suffer from feed utility issues due to signal
to noise ratios in the feeds. This is one of the biggest problems in social
network design and each social network, by virtue of catering to a different
audience with different needs will have to find their own solutions to improve
signal-to-noise. I know, I’m working on a startup with a feed with a very
focused task and all feed improvements revolve around serving the needs
associated with that one task. (FYI We’re not in stealth, since if you know me
personally, I’ll gladly share it with you, but I’m not about to post our
product design on the web just yet.)

On this last problem it may be interesting to have two feeds. A feed of all
the stuff I like and find interesting via follows of people and topics. This
is the serendipitous, consumption focused feed. And a second feed that
includes all the topics that the user contributes most often to. This second
feed should help solid contributors get back to contributing instead of having
their time sucked up with consumption of all sorts of useful and useless
knowledge.

------
markkat
I never really 'got it'. Having to frame discussions in the form of a question
seemed limiting, and a bit of a barrier.

It's useful as a Q&A, but I don't see it as a social network. Quora does seem
better than Yahoo Answers though.

------
tzury
Few questions:

1\. Does the author know that Quora traffic is decreasing dramatically (a fact
which states a web service "in trouble") or just he assumes that "since I
left, all others left with me"?

2\. What does he means "Not solving a problem"?

If I want to know how many NICs I can stuff into a single server machine [1]
or how to build a 10Gbs wire-tapping monster[2] or why programmers so
fanatical about their text editors[3] where will I go and ask those questions?
attackofdesign.com? shall I start gambling which of the 4 sites of stack
exchange is the best site to get the answer and not getting it migrated 5
times before getting and answer?

BTW, the first two questions were real world problems I solved and quora
helped me a lot.

I simply cannot stand this anymore, smart people are spending time and energy
to build things we can use for free, and we, instead of thanking them, talking
about their "troubles" and giving them advice.

The easiest thing for a _blogger_ to do is to write where did Bill Gates gone
wrong, or why is Google failing going social time after time (hey, people,
until two weeks ago, this was the mainstream state-of-mind).

I do not believe in critics, I do not read critics before I buy a boo, watch a
film or go to a restaurant, and ever since I did so, I failed less, while by
the time I was relying on critics I failed much more. The fact is simple, can
you mister opinion do any better? Can you? If you can't, stay still, if you
can, stay still and do instead of talk. But, no, those who cannot compose a
jingle for the local radio station write music reviews, and people who cannot
make a decent omelet blogs about restaurants and those who cannot do start-ups
blogs about start-ups.

Michael Arrington build an empire by writing about startups, yet when he gave
it a shot with that tablet and the Singaporean company , he failed at the spot
one would not expect him to fail at (he's a lawyer, mind you).

I am not saying there is no room for blogging about start-ups, all I am saying
is that I would rather be on the side of those who _make_ the news, rather
than the side of those who _write_ the news, let alone those who _read_ news.

If ideas are dime a dozen, advice is dime a dozen kilograms.

[1] [http://www.quora.com/How-many-ethernet-ports-can-I-build-
int...](http://www.quora.com/How-many-ethernet-ports-can-I-build-into-a-
single-computer)

[2] [http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-build-a-high-performance-
serv...](http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-build-a-high-performance-server-to-
fully-capture-and-record-traffic-over-a-20-GB-s-link-with-no-losses-and-no-
bottlenecks)

[3] [http://www.quora.com/Why-are-most-programmers-so-
fanatical-a...](http://www.quora.com/Why-are-most-programmers-so-fanatical-
about-their-text-editors)

~~~
jdp23
I'm not the author but there is plenty evidence that Quora's traffic has
decreased significantly since January (almost certainly by their choice). The
results since April depend on who you believe; Google Trends says it's flat,
Comscore says that it's increasing month-on-month and is back to February's
level.

<http://bit.ly/imitates#comment-151083>

------
NHQ
"Why [The Author Believes] Quora is in Trouble"

~~~
jpeterson
Isn't this true of basically any post (the author expressing his belief)?

------
suking
Most VCs are sheep and follow trends. They see stuff being pimped out on TC
hardcore and think they're going to miss out. I think QWIKI & QUORA are 2 big
example of that. Hopefully they prove me wrong and are wildly successful, but
not looking good...

------
clobber
Quora fell apart when Ashton Kutcher and other celebs started posting.

------
jeffreymcmanus
It is not necessary for one tool to lose in order for another tool to win.

Plenty of people outside Silicon Valley use Quora. If you aren't seeing them,
that's a sign that you aren't paying sufficient attention, or that you don't
follow many people outside Silicon Valley.

------
rch
I think it is a relatively simple matter of Quora developers not understanding
what their product could ultimately become.

Someone with influence and vision needs to step in and set s course.

