Something no one else has mentioned yet (perhaps for fear of plunging down the meta discussion rabbit hole) is the degree to which HN competes with Quora.<p>As a small experiment, I'd previously posed roughly the same question to both HN and Quora.<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-optimum-pricing-strategy-for-a-new-iPhone-application" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-optimum-pricing-strategy-fo...</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097527" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097527</a><p>The response from HN absolutely destroyed the response from Quora. Those links don't even tell the whole story as I had multiple people email me directly from the HN community to offer advice and in one case give me access to a private iPhone application price research tool that he'd built for his own use.
My problem with the Quora hype is that its only in the TechCrunch echo chamber. Even relatively tech saavy people I know don't know Quora unless they read TechCrunch (and a LOT of very techincal people don't read TechCrunch). And I don't mean they know about it, just haven't used it. I mean they literally haven't heard of it before.<p>I've never been to Quora and this is somewhat surprising given the number of Google/Bing searches I do that take me a Yahoo Answers page or StackOverflow. I'm surprised I've never once even seen a Quora page on page 1 of a Bing/Google search I've done.<p>It's a weird very bimodal hype. I tend to agree with the author. Unless something drastically changes in the next 6-12 months, it will be a niche site with much less hype.
Every investor I've chatted to about Quora since it's been created has been all a-twitter because of who the team is. Because they're valley royalty the earliest users of Quora have been Valley nobility which has raised it's profile even further.<p>I used it once or twice but found no reason to go back and haven't been directed to go back by Google either because the site doesn't answer questions I have.<p>It's helpful in daily life to day that Quora is awesome because you're agreeing with Valley nobility. At least it was until Vivek's blog entry.
I went on Quora a while ago and answered a few people's questions, mostly about the Stanford CS department and maybe a couple about Django or AI or something. I haven't been back on the site since - I haven't gotten any emails from Quora saying "you should answer this question" or "these people liked your answer" or "this discussion might interest you". I'm probably the kind of person they want on the site, since I actively like answering questions and helping people, but they're not doing much to keep me on there.
He is both right and wrong on this.<p>Right, for the present: Quora is special because of <i>who</i> is there, not <i>what</i>, and there is an upper limit to the success of a fan-club.<p>But he is wrong in the long term, or <i>could</i> be wrong, if Quora adapts and allows the rest of the world to create their own fan-club universes. If it goes on to inspire communities from different backgrounds, fields, industries and specialties, then yes, Quora can become "Stack Exchange" + resident celebrity monks + Wikipedia.
I am surprised by the fact that arrington allowed an article that criticizes tehcrunch for being hype machine (which it is).<p>Regarding quora, yes it gets too much techcrunch attention but it is not as flawed as the writer thinks, quora generates quality content thanks to its quality users, while quality may start to decline as number of users grows(something that happens to almost all startups) it is possible to prevent that to some extent with introduction of advanced peoplerank/answerrank algorithms.<p>Going back to techcrunch, yes it is a crappy place that religious fanboys (MG) write about twitter, iphone and foursquare (and now quora) 5 times a day and ex-alcoholics (Carr) makes fun of its readers.
In the short term, Quora is an interesting site. Long term, I see nothing being done by Quora to anticipate spammers, marketers, trolls, plain stupid people, etc. Add to that the front- and back-end performs atrociously.<p>The first time I saw Quora, I didn't really see the point of it, but it turned out to have some very interesting users. I don't think they have any roadmap for the service, and I sincerely doubt that Quora is going to be relevant in six months.<p>Quora may have done some interesting things as a start-up (or not), but the founders seem to have foregone any basic wisdom that concerns creating and maintaining a community.
This is the same criticism that has been leveled at Quora since it first launched, and yet the site has been growing tremendously. It's too early to say that Quora will eventually become truly mainstream, but it seems even more premature to say that it won't when it is still growing.<p>Pre-launch, it's definitely true that Quora was given a big boost by the names of its founders and (to a lesser extent) tech blogosphere coverage, but after using the site for a while it's become one of the most important ways I access information, in particular one of the most important ways I discover new interesting information. That is potentially a powerful position to be in. It's telling that the links in the original article to Quora questions were are interesting enough that I clicked on all of them and thought they were all much more valuable and entertaining than the original column.
Maybe I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, but am I the only one who was put off by this comment:<p>"Quora’s membership is growing largely because of the attention that TechCrunch has given it."?
TL;DR summary: "Silicon Valley is again drinking its own Kool-Aid; it is looking at the world through its own prism."<p>Well worth reading. There's an interesting comment from Fred Wilson too.
I find quora to be useless. I finally signed up the other day to ask a question that I was having a hard time getting answered elsewhere. After 2 days, it had exactly 1 view, mine.<p>I consider the StackOverflow model to be much more useful.
<i>You can talk about your own products and services, and disparage others’; in other words, it is a spammers’ paradise.</i><p>Same argument was used against Wikipedia back in the day.
One thing that I'm getting out of this article and which I tend to agree with, if a site isn't focused on a specific community the way HN or StackOverflow are, there is a tipping point at which its quality becomes inverse-proportional to the size of the audience. Quora might still be good because it hasn't yet reached it.<p>eBay used to be good as well, then one day they got so big that buyers and sellers were practically left to settle their disputes on their own. eBay used to be my #1 stop for anything that I wanted to buy online. After getting burnt 2 or 3 times, I haven't opened a page on the site in over a year and haven't bought anything from it in the last 3.<p>I'm also going to make the bold claim that if Facebook was in its current state 3 or 4 years ago, in terms of quality and community, it would probably not have gotten the success it currently enjoys. Most of us would just consider it another MySpace or HI5 clone.<p>As far as Quora goes, if it is indeed successful, it might also very well be a victim of its own success, but maybe by then it will be financially viable, which is the one thing that matters most to its backers.
Quora will be successful if they can devise an algorithm which does personalized ranking of users and answers. Rank users globally, yes, but also incorporate <i>your</i> upvotes, searches, and page views as features in a correction term to locally rerank for logged in users. This way you see the answers at the top which are valuable to you specifically, ranked in order of your probability of upvote.<p>The basic math here has been around since Kaltix in 2003. It will need to be tuned for this specific app, but an off the shelf version will be a qualitative leap over Yahoo or Goog answers.<p>Because unlike Yahoo or Google Answers, Quora has the social graph as a critical piece of ranking infrastructure. That is a huge difference, comparable to search before and after the web, because the credibility of many nontechnical answers depends fundamentally on the identity of the respondents. And unlike Facebook Questions, they have the benefit of complete focus on one area (Q&A).
I used Quora a bit, mostly in movie section. The main problem is the quality of the questions are not so good. Something like "What is the best films of director XXXX?" seems so pointless and subjective. And it is not in only movies; in travel, web design etc... You see all around the "What is the best....".<p>There is no best and the answers will(have) change in time.
I don't know much about Quora, and have never used it, so I can't comment on its chances of success.<p>But I really don't like the name, and I think it may hold them back, as far as mainstream adoption goes. It's not an attractive name to begin with, and I don't quite know how to pronounce it: koo aura or kwaura (rhymes with Laura)?<p>If we're comparing Quora to Facebook and Twitter, it loses the name game by a mile. Facebook and Twitter are both easy to say and there's no confusion on spelling or pronunciation. Also, Quora can't be easily or obviously verb-ized; "Facebook me" or "Tweet it". I don't see "Quoraize it" or "Quoing" becoming a commonly used phrase.<p>All of this may be irrelevant if Quora is just <i>that good</i>, but it's certainly something to think about.
Vivek is absolutely right about Quora's scaling chances. I made the same assessment back in October when I first started using it and their recent unveiling of their future plans just confirmed it. Quora is niche, it picked a good niche to go after, but it's still niche.<p>For a Q&A site to take over the market, it needs to be designed with scaling in mind from day 1, it's just that type of market. Thinking that social was the only missing ingredient was pretty naive, though it did advance the state of the art a bit.<p>The last thing I will say is this, the real deal Q&A site won't have people questioning it's scaling potential, but rather why nobody figured it out before.
Is this just me? I visited Quora for the first time a few days ago. I logged in, couldn't figure out what I was looking at, and logged out.<p>It prompted me a few times, ...I think, but I couldn't see questions and answers right away.
The site-wide quality of answers matters less for Quora to be useful to an individual when you're following people rather than topics. You see answers upvoted by people you follow or answered by people you follow.<p>Quora will continue to work for the same reasons that Twitter does...I get tweets from people I follow, millions of bieber fans don't affect my twitter homepage.
Quora's value comes from the quality of the people on it. There is very little that's exciting about them except the people they've been able to attract initially.<p>As the site grows, the density of interesting people will drop and the noise will increase, getting worse the more mainstream it gets. Eventually it will be a slow Yahoo answers.
They have a lot of good data to identify positive users. Also they have considerably more latitude than your average geek q&a site, since there is no firehose, and no visible karma score. Don't count them out yet.
Just as with HN, it's not the technology that makes it so great, it's the people. If the people stick with Quora, it will continue to be immensely informative.
I use Quora daily, and I find the info valuable - but the UI and the clunky-ness of the interface are debilitating.<p>I think that in the longer term, if they dont make topics easier to navigate and sort info from - they will lose the value they provide. For example - you cant easily browse the topics, top answers top questions etc.<p>The search box tries to be too cool and provide a list of what you may be searching for - but at the expense of letting you type fluidly.<p>The choice of fonts, sizes, colors in the UI is counter-intuitive and suggestions made to the quora team fall on arrogant ears "We designed it to be like that" rather than, you know what - you may be right - useability is affected by the slowness of the site"<p>Any thread with a substantial number of comments regularly crashes my browser (the thread about which startups are hiring in SF Bay will crash FF on linux) - and viewing the site on a phone is clunky, jerky and slow.<p>All of that aside - if they can allow people to post as quickly and efficiently as Reddit - and allow for topics to be better navigated, I think they will survive.