The mistakes I made in Quora

I think it's hilarious how one person ... one registered user of a web startup can completely derail all positive discussion about the service and spawn so many blog posts and news articles.<p>This strikes me as one of those "lord of the flies" moments where we all need to stop and ask what we're all doing here exactly.

He has displayed some very poignant insight into his own behavior in that particular online community. I was able to take away some good lessons about my own activities elsewhere. It's definitely important to keep your ear to the ground, as he has apparently learned. I don't think I've read a lot of what he's written; An article or two over the last several years, maybe. That said I have an image created in my mind about the kind of person he is (very self-promotional) but this has shown me another side of the guy. Something I can relate to.<p>Good on him for being humble enough to lay his own flaws out there for everyone to see.

Wow, that was surprisingly insightful. I have to admit I didn't expect Scoble to be that self-aware.

The interesting thing here, I think, is how obvious it is that it's the community and the rules of the community that shapes a service like Quora, not the feature set or the web design or the copy used etc.<p>Not that this is very surprising, it's just a reminder to not just look at the feature list of your startup but also its.... well, soul.<p>Hacker News is itself an example of this.

Hate to sound negative (and prob will get downvoted), but why is this news at all?

These are the self-ware posts by scoble which have made his respected in tech/startup circles.<p>Perhaps this clarifying post will lead to better discussions on quora. Any new service, when explodes, some one out there misses crucial point of using the service. But in the long run those mistakes become new yardstick to rate content and hence leads to better discussions.<p>So Scoble - thanks again!

I've had his problem before -- being completely addicted to a service or forum and posting constantly just because I'm always there and am so enthusiastic about it. It's really hard to spot in yourself and deal with when you're just... so enthusiastic!

There is something wrong with him. Slight case of narcissistic personality disorder?

Damn, 400 answers on Quora... no wonder why Scoble is so passionate about it. Scoble is a content creation machine, and unlike most answer sites and other bloggers, his content is high-signal.