Quora's problems today are a direct result of what made them popular: celebrity.<p>They made a great big splash when the media genuflected to the idea that "You can ask a question about Facebook, <i>and Mark Zuckerberg could answer!</i>" So regardless of the question or answer there will always be dominance by celebrities and their celebrators gleefully upvoting anything they post regardless of underlying fact.<p>I prefer Stack Exchange. The site is less about being the best person to answer and more about the answer itself. There is far less correlation the number of fans a given user has to their number of up votes and likeliness to be accepted by OP as correct or most helpful. I find real discussion occurs when we lose our preoccupations with who we are and focus on the subject matter instead.
I actually like Quora a lot. I see that it gets a lot of hate on HN and I've never felt it was wholly deserved. I understand Quora had some hostile practices in the past towards users and has made some bad decisions at times, and I've even spoken against their login policy here on more than one occasion, but I have to say that I'm still fond of the overall product and experience. It's exceptionally polished and it certainly has succeeded in producing a valuable resource which improved upon or fixed many of the issues of Yahoo! Answers. I hope Quora continues to find success for years to come.<p>I see others are mentioning Stack Exchange, but I think the two communities are entirely different. Stack Exchange is good when you have a very precise question which likely has a very precise answer and can easily be categorized into a very precise topic. If any of those three conditions fails, you're more likely to just meet hostility there than to get an enjoyable discussion.
Ah changing the world here we go.<p>A lot of Quora answers look like this nowadays:<p><pre><code> By Johnny Johnson - Chief Ninja Growth Hacker at SaaS HQ
Disclaimer: I work at hip SaaS business.
{ fluff about how there are multiple choices and everyone is friends with each other }
{ pitch, keyword SEO and links }
{ pretend you are oh so genuine }</code></pre>
Quora has accumulated a great collection of personal-opinion essays. Even if all of their uses quit in disgust today, they've got enough well-written content, acquired on the cheap, to sell ads for years to come. They may actually break even some day. Which, to paraphrase another commenter, is every Harvard grad's dream.
I don't understand this. Every company I've worked with has struggled with the problem of making it easy for new people to learn the answers to the sort of detailed questions that Quora excels at. Since 2007, I've wished I could pay them money to deploy quora.internal.piedpiper.com, but no.<p>Why?<p><a href="https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Quora-sell-its-product-to-other-companies/answer/Adam-DAngelo" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Quora-sell-its-product-to-o...</a>
Quora has become a collection of loaded and low-effort questions (the answers are still good though)<p>But there wouldn't be much loss if it closed
Advertising is where business ideas go to die.
(but with obvious exceptions).<p>Answers on Quora are really good its the Question quality that bothers me. Its like people ask for things just for the sake of asking.
I'm curious of how many of those 50 million visits are people like me who click on the links hoping for instant information occasionally or accidentally if it's top result but then leave because it's Quora. Then we go to StackExchange or some other Google result.<p>I'd like to see page views from logged-in members and number of active users instead of general hits. I think that would give us a more honest picture of its uptake. Anyone have that information?
So much dislike for Quora! I love it. Well, I don't love it, but I have noticed recently that it's the only site that I actually click through on their e-mail marketing. They put serious energy into their targeted marketing software. So, from a marketer's perspective, I double love it.<p>Adam D'Angelo has to be one of the smartest people I've ever met, and there is a lot of very interesting content on Quora; I rarely read just one Q/A thread when I end up on the site.<p>As compared to a site that mostly shows friends pictures of people's lunch, I propose it provides useful and useable content, and is an interesting service.
Quora has always given me a creepy feeling of a walled garden for information that has no business being in a walled garden. Facebook locks up social graphs, events between friends, relationships, birthdays? NBD imho. But trying to corner a knowledge market in a closed way is a really anti-web kind of thing to do.
"[Quora] recently reported that it has 100 million monthly visitors... with 15 percent from India."<p>Interested in knowing the ratio of questions:answers coming from Indian users.
A while back I wrote an article [1] saying that there was no advertising on Quora because that would mean that the founders would have to accept more realistic valuations for their business, and at that time it seemed they were happy to bring investors on using the "greater fool" theory. However, as Russ Hanneman [1] says: "If you show revenue people will ask how much and it will never be enough". So the question now is: will the introduction of ads harm Quora's valuation?<p>[1] <a href="http://newslines.org/blog/why-quora-joined-y-combinator/" rel="nofollow">http://newslines.org/blog/why-quora-joined-y-combinator/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo</a>
What totally pisses me off about Quora is their real name policy. I am blessed with a fairly rare name- surname combination, and I definitely don't want to give to anybody with google and a couple of hours of spare time the chance to build a complete record of my (possibly ever changing) interests, opinions and life anecdotes. Also the reason I use facebook as little as possible - never, basically. I just can't believe how others can be so fond of carving in stone and committing to eternity the result of their idle time and their fleeting thoughts about anything from food to politics to world peace, all carefully labelled and tagged for later retrieval and collection.
The answers on quora are generally well reasoned, but the questions themselves..<p>"What is it like to get 1600 on SAT?", "What it is like to make a million trading?","I am making $200k a year, should I buy a Porsche?", "What are best life changing habits of winners?". "What is it like to be born in a billionare family?"<p>Those are all real questions or very similar to real questions on Quora. For some reason Quora thinks these are the type of questions I want to read the answers to. I am a sucker for responding sometimes while cringing.<p>These are the type of questions I might have asked when I was 17 and maybe that is the answer to who is asking them.
I read the comments, some were a bit negative side about Quora introducing advertizing, others were quite positive about Quora itself and then a thought occurred. I haven't read it as explicitly as I'm about to say, but you know what the most popular startups and companies are really disrupting?<p><i>Advertizing</i><p>Google, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Stackoverflow (a lot more niche though) are all making money with advertizing.<p>It's perhaps not the only way they make money, but it is always one of the first revenue sources they have, or the first even.<p>I'm inclined to believe that a big chunk of the web app startups out there are about the same thing.<p>Nuances are welcome :)
<i>Sure there are some spam and useless answers, but there are experienced users as well who contributing with great answers.</i><p>Everyone good on Quora is going to get "Church'd" soon enough. The moderators have done everything they can to drive out quality. The ban of Michael O. Church (who was a moderate, thoughtful member of that community, regardless of his divisive presence here) convinced me of that.<p>I also find it interesting that any Indian or Chinese woman with feminist views that would be considered moderate in the U.S. gets reported as a sock puppet and banned.