The Thick Edge of Quora

I too was an enthusiastic Quora user early on, but hardly visit the site any more. It suffers from the same problem most sites that follow the social model (of followers/following) - "celebrity" authors get substantially more upvotes for even mediocre or poor answers - undermining the mission of the site. It perpetuates the fallacy that the most "popular" answer is somehow the right answer - which it seldom is.

The author is totally unconvincing. Creating tags splits the problem of asking or answering into 2 parts. First, search the space of tags to find the one you need. Second, search the space of questions with that tag. Obviously, its an easier problem if you already know which tags to use but in an extensive taxonomy that won't be true 99% of the time.

the biggest problem with his assumption is that people will curate the best answers, in this way the site can easily be gamed. He states machines and human curation only monitor grammar but not content. Lets say a large active right wing group organize so now the site has a clear bias, and are the answers this group is voting up concerning politics really the best answers anymore ? Especially when a lot of the questions are unverifiable or matters of opinion at this point your are largely relying on the community to be an educated of the topic and unbiased enough to vote on the real answer. In the end quora is nothing different than another content farm.

The premise is intriguing but seems pretty far fetched. Quora is better organized than the current web, so eventually it could become the framework of the web.<p>Maybe, but if it's not centralized around Quora, may not do them much good. The web itself will probably become better organized and Quora will just be one of the pioneers. Google+ is also better than the current mess of blogs, RSS feeds, twitters, facebooks in a way. But will it be the new web, instead of hosting your own blog you use G+? Or post on Quora?<p>I don't see it. These services could creep in under the hood through APIs but individual websites should be able to introduce new technologies faster and have an edge of over centralized services.

tl;dr Quora will become the next google search because you will have human curation, the query can be more naturally structured, and discovery of related topics all within the same site.<p>(I do recommend reading the article though, I probably didn't get all the points across properly)

I would be more receptive to this argument if the author had resisted the temptation to use metaphors like the thin edge of the wedge.

Quora seems to me like a low quality mechanical turk. It's very cool for the SV elite who like to give out advice to fellow entrepreneurs. That's all, for most else it's neither useful nor interesting.<p>Example: I follow the neuroscience topic. Almost all of the answered questions are google/wikipedia-able. Many of the "best questions/answers" are no better than what any respectable newspaper has already written. The unanswered ones are either:<p>a) Also easily googleable<p>b) Idiotic / funny (How many hobbies does motor cortex allow?)<p>c) Popsci /media trivialities that nobody will ever answer (Can StarCraft II help with working memory in the same way that Dual-N-Back helps with it?)<p>d) Impossible to answer open questions, sometimes even rhetorical.<p>I don't see at this level how it is different from yahoo answers.<p>Answers are not constructed by review; having multiple answers is a mistake. If you're a famous entrepreneur, your answer is "more right" than others. Google is better at this: it provides an objective measure of authority that indirectly relies on the impact of your contribution (the number of links is still a signal). For most subjects, wikipedia has more up-to-date, succinct and accurate information, while quora requires that you search among a sizeable number of answers sometimes.<p>And lastly, how could quora ever solve the spam problem when it becomes big enough? At this point, from my observations, googlebots beat humans.