Quora’s Demise

by delwin • 14 years ago

129 85 14 years ago

aerosmile• 14 years ago

I still find a lot of value in Quora, but I guess directionally speaking, you're probably right that the mainstream audience is lowering the standard. Not sure if I heard you point that out, but you probably meant to say that it's possible to build a horizontal site that fits the needs of niche audiences - it's all just a question of product decisions. Twitter is a good example of how it can be done the right way: my stream is completely different from my wife's, and we both love using Twitter.

I recognize that user segmentation is easier to implement on a site that's focused on the social graph as opposed to on the interest graph, but I am not convinced that it's impossible. Ie, how about requiring social credit in a certain vertical before being able to ask a question in that same vertical? That credit could be earned with good answers to existing questions, or inherited from relevant 3rd party sites with applicable currency.

Shank• 14 years ago

The problem was that there was no barrier to entry, and therefore there was no way to prevent people from misusing it.

The intellectual value of Quora dropped as more and more people who had no reservations about posting inherently useless questions joined. If there was a system for filtering out questions from less authoritative or knowledgeable figures, they could have prevented this.

phwd• 14 years ago

Ah, now how does one find the sweet spot between this and say Stack Exchange? Many times, I have heard users complain about the barrier for Stack Exchange and overzealous moderators. There is not really a way to please everyone.

I never really understood how moderation works on Quora so I assumed there was none. Not to say that I hate Quora (I like it a lot), I just feel there is nothing preventing it from becoming Yahoo Answers in a couple years time. No barrier, no moderation.

codezero2• 14 years ago

Moderation is pretty active on the site, in fact, users who have interacted with Quora moderation consider the site to be heavily moderated... you are right -- there is a sweetspot somewhere, but even that is just a sweetspot for a small subset of users. Nobody will ever please everyone.

the_rara_avis• 14 years ago

Slightly off-topic: Forcing sign-in to read full answers strikes me as an odd path to take - reminds me of expertsexchange.

radikalus• 14 years ago

Why did I read that as expert-sex-change?

mark_story• 14 years ago

Because that's how it reads, and you can never unsee/unthink it now. :)

_delirium2• 14 years ago

There's quite a lot of self-promotion going on as well. I haven't done a real survey, so my perception might be off, but I feel like I run across more not-that-great self-cites/self-links in answers than at, for example, StackExchange. I mean, it's fine to link to something of yours (text, software, startup) that is high-quality and directly relevant to the question, but Quora has a lot of answers where the blog/company/self promotion feels pretty blatant.

(An alternate hypothesis is that StackExchange has just has much of that submitted, but that its voting/moderation works better.)

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Quora.com has slightly higher link authority than 'new to the internet' site X, so putting as many links to X in Quora boards is a form of search engine optimization (SEO).

_delirium2• 14 years ago

Aren't the links nofollowed, though?

lincolnwebs• 14 years ago

As a longtime online community manager, this piece strikes me as another entry in the time-honored tradition of "this place changed and now I don't like it" complaints. Yes, everything changes. No, it's not the same as when you joined. That's not Quora, that's life.

tptacek• 14 years ago

This comment doesn't actually say anything. Yes, things change. Yes, that's a part of life. That doesn't automatically make all change for the better.

akkartik• 14 years ago

It reflects the lack of content in the article, which boils down to, "things changed so I'm leaving." Lincoln isn't claiming that Quora is doing fine. (At least not in this comment.)

I find it useful to be reminded that as a species mankind hasn't figured out how to grow things without changing them (and so exposing them to the possibility of decline).

calydon• 14 years ago

Change for change sake isn't always good but in this case its understandable why Quora is changing (more users = more $) and it's too early to say that Quora is dying because of the lowering of the average user IQ. If Quora is in danger of becoming a less popular version of Yahoo Answers it need only make some new changes.

jwwest• 14 years ago

I was going to say the same thing. This happens in every. single. online community.

Community launches with savvy early adopters. The success starts to bring in new people. The community slowly begins to evolve. Early adopters start complaining that all the new people are ruining it.

See Reddit, HN, et al.

sthatipamala• 14 years ago

My problem with Quora is that it is very difficult to penetrate the inner sanctum and feel welcome in the community.

You used to be able to gain recognition with thorough answers to domain-specific questions. But if you take a look at a lot of the "trending" answers on Quora, they all seem to be written by the same 10 Quora power users (Mark Bodnick, Garrick Saito, Venkatesh Rao, etc..)

The problem not so much the existence of these power users but the fact that they seem to only upvote amongst themselves and contribute to each others boards, creating a very exclusive feeling.

rdl3• 14 years ago

I don't think the low-quality general answers from some of the high volume contributors really matter; I'm a lot more into the niche experts, and Quora makes it easy to find those people. (Marc Bodnick upvotes are so common as to be essentially content free, although his answers are great; there are a lot of users who contribute lots of crap with no actual knowledge, across a range of categories, and a number of users who are only contributing in very well defined areas of expertise. e.g. Gus Fuldner's PCI related answers are great, and there are a lot of domain experts and people with first-hand knowledge who post on Quora.

If you have a problem with Quora, follow better users and better topics.

The boards product is IMO pretty ill advised. Quora is doing it because they want to be a repository, easily searched, of a lot of interesting information, but they didn't take into account the second order effects of attracting a lot of boards users to Quora.

The funny thing for me is that the OP joined Quora (I think) during the big wave of idiots in December 2010. ("Scoblegate"). People said all the same things about death of Quora then, and in June 2010 when it opened up to the public. I suspect the average IQ of Quora users has been in strict decline ever since the first user was added after Charlie and Adam.

delwin5• 14 years ago

I joined Quora soon after it launched, thought it was kinda cool, forgot about it, and yes, then rejoined again sometime in the fall of 2010. There was a nice linguistics community built up for a while (I'm a linguistics undergrad) until everything kind of fell apart. Quora didn't know how to separate people very well, so people interested in memes gradually crowded everything out.

BUT I didn't actually have any problems at all with Quora (at least, nothing notable) until the launch of Boards. In fact, I really enjoyed the linguistics, philosophy, chemistry, biology, theology, travel, and cooking communities. I mostly ignored the Quora superusers and focused on niche experts, like you mentioned, but eventually it was just too much.

Perhaps I will revamp my profile when I get the time, start from scratch, and things will work out better the second time around.

Naushad• 14 years ago

They want more and more engagement, to gain more page views to become another successful website of daily use.

Thats the reason they initiated Quora Credits, based on the Variable Rewards http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/25/want-to-hook-your-users-dri...

espeed• 14 years ago

There seems to be an over-active "troll" patrol on Quora as well.

If you ask a question or present a point of view that's outside of conventional thinking, its common to see those views lambasted in the comments. Quora is definitely not a place for "things you can't say" (http://paulgraham.com/say.html).

pitchups• 14 years ago

machrider• 14 years ago

...and Ask MetaFilter quietly carries on being fantastic.

zackattack• 14 years ago

$5 + one-week filter weeds out people without sufficient prefrontal cortex size (i.e., they don't have patience and can't understand the value of a future payout).

unalone2• 14 years ago

Oh, there're plenty of idiots on MetaFilter. $5 curbs growth but is no indicator of intelligence. Trust me.

Give credit where credit is due: MeFi's moderation team is hands-down the best on the Internet. It's astonishing how much shit they have to deal with and how good they are at keeping the site civil and high-quality without pushing too many buttons.

johnpowell• 14 years ago

I think Matt has the right attitude.

"Yeah, I think once we get to 100,000 it could start to get too big. I’m OK with how big it is today. It is a lifestyle business for me—I’m just running this thing and I have a few employees and we’re all happy. What’s better than that?"

He has money. The employes are paid. No need to sell to google.

jonah• 14 years ago

Quora was mentioned in an LA Times piece[1] today as one of the new FB mafia offspring along with Asana and Path.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-facebook-friends-20120...

fufulabs2• 14 years ago

Boards had a high cost/benefit in the wrong vectors. While they acquired a very low-barrier (i mean low IQ requirement) feature that has great SEO and pageviews benefits, it had a high cost of increasing noise and diluting the Q&A DNA of the product. What i didn't understand was why didn't they go into more related and deeper dimensions of Q&A like interviews, product FAQs, debate, surveys and polls. These are branches of the same tree with lesser noise penalty than a 'board that you can cram ANY kind of content'.

There is one explanation for this move though. Pinterest-envy.

jcc80• 14 years ago

That's a really good point I hadn't considered - diving into Q&A deeper. When boards were announced I was not a fan at all and don't use them. Your suggestions would definitely fit better, imho.

fufulabs2• 14 years ago

Thanks. Theres plenty of evidence that these are popular. Reddit's Ask me Anything, poll apps (real-time) and the rest are ripe for a market leader to emerge.

delwin5• 14 years ago

It's easy to understand why — once Quora understood it was attracting the kind of online socialites who like to boost their egos and flaunt their intellect (which is by no means 100% of the community, just a loud majority), they accustomed their site to a new demographic.

codezero2• 14 years ago

Since it may not be obvious, questions like http://www.quora.com/Communication/If-you-had-a-conversation... won't show up in feeds unless you follow the Joke Questions topic. There are several other topics applied to content that doesn't have broad appeal like Quora Community. The alternative is to actively delete questions like this but the reality is that the site is too active for that to be feasible, also, regular users aren't doing the same kind of content curation that they used to. Questions used to get quickly edited or flagged, now they just sit there until they get activity and users just answer them without fixing grammar, punctuation etc... so part of the problem is that the number of people who care about curating content hasn't scaled with the over-all population.

glesica• 14 years ago

I found the comment about Quora being an encyclopedia of sorts really interesting.

This sort of site would actually fill a niche between something like StackExchange and Wikipedia: thorough, comprehensive articles (although, to be fair, these can be found on SE as well) but with more relaxed editorial standards (no notability requirements or ban on original research).

That being said, a for-profit start-up is probably the wrong medium for such a site. Imagine if Wikipedia were for-profit. There's a good chance that the pressure to monetize all those raw page views would have degraded the quality of the actual content.

For example, I've been using Wikipedia basically since it started. However, I never created an account until about a week ago (to fix a typo). I would have contributed sooner, but I never had anything important to say, and I knew that if I broke the rules or failed to uphold the editorial standards my edits would be removed anyway (admittedly, Wikipedia may have gone too far with the rules in some cases, but that's not really the point).

Contrast that with Reddit, where I've had an account for some time and comment regularly. I do so even knowing I might be down-voted because that's what the site encourages. Making a dopey comment on Reddit once in awhile (accidentally or on-purpose) is just part of Reddit. Making a dopey edit on Wikipedia destroys the value of the site.

In order for Quora to fill the role the OP wanted it to fill it probably would have had to be non-profit.

tldr; Quora could have been Wikipedia-lite. But Wikipedia works because profit isn't important, so quality can be put before monetizing traffic and creating non-essential "engagement".

carguy19833• 14 years ago

My complaints about Quora:

  * You have to use a "real" name.  
  * Their members are predominantly white upper middle class tech/finance/marketing professionals - occasionally some Asians, but mainly from California or NY.
  * There's no good way to browse the site - if there is, it's not easy to find.  
  * Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems for high-IQ communities.

olalonde3• 14 years ago

> Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind, both common problems for high-IQ communities.

That's what I like about HN. Groupthink is indeed present (especially when it comes to technical topics such as programming languages or OSes - we all have a strong incentive to promote what we use), but not nearly as much as any other online community I'm aware of. There's a recurring pattern that I like here: usually, when a submission argues X, the top comment in the comment thread criticizes/refutes X. By hearing the two sides of an argument, one can better form an opinion.

alecco2• 14 years ago

HN groupthink is getting out of control. No answers but donwvotes to any dissenting comment.

guscost• 14 years ago

I do get downvoted less for voicing angry opinions around here, which is refreshing and polite. Don't underestimate the value of politeness... especially when you want to voice angry opinions.

mtrimpe• 14 years ago

All I know is that lately for quite some percentage of HN articles I know exactly what the top comment will be before I read it.

jules2• 14 years ago

On the contrary, HN groupthink is quite severe (although it has decreased somewhat since the time that comment scores were no longer displayed). I guess it depends on perspective: if you're in the middle of a box, the box looks like the entire universe.

ma2rten• 14 years ago

I think there is groupthink in HN even on non-technical topics, but it's much more subtle. It's about that every problem should be resolved using a rational argument. I think arguments appealing to intuition, emotion or authority are likely to get down voted. I am not saying it is a bad thing, that bias is part of why I read HN and not some tabloid. However, I don't think rational thought is perse the best answer to every question, because it's inviting to make incorrect assumptions.

hyperbovine• 14 years ago

Fear of being ostracized is universal. If anything, I'd say "high-IQ" communities are less susceptible to groupthink and penalizing dissent.

zwischenzug• 14 years ago

Groupthink is human nature. You find different kinds of groupthink in high-IQ communities because their common cause is different.

Groupthink different.

uhs• 14 years ago

Why does it matter that they are predominantly white? I agree that the other things you mention like class might be important. But race, seriously? How do you even know they are white anyway?

huggyface3• 14 years ago

Their members are predominantly white

Adorable racism.

Groupthink and being penalized for speaking your mind

Is it groupthink that I pointed out your blatant racism? Message boards the world over are full of people saying wrong, obnoxious, ignorant things and then foolishly thinking that a negative response is just because everyone else is prey to groupthink, etc. It is a short-circuit of self-analysis.

whateverer2• 14 years ago

> Adorable racism.

How so? Shutting your eyes doesn't make the bias go away.

carguy19833• 14 years ago

Yeah, I guess I'm racist. I want diversity in my populations, applied to every context possible. Full stop.

"I'm sorry you're offended."

sghill• 14 years ago

The first one was the dealbreaker for me. I signed up using part of my real name instead of my full name. Within hours I was blocked from adding anything to Quora. As a result, I haven't been back since signing up.

pw• 14 years ago

"The business of startups is a sketchy subject, and I don’t intend to associate myself with it."

That's an unusual sentiment around here.

jasonkolb• 14 years ago

Same complaints here. You nailed it:

I came to Quora to find cool information.

Quora used to do a good job of surfacing that, now it's turned into mostly people trying to advertise in a sneaky way or asking inane questions.

They should put it back the way it was before it becomes a ghost town.

tatsuke95• 14 years ago

>"It was a turning point I happened to catch at its birth."

Really? Because I'm pretty sure myself and many others caught it when the T-echo Chamber was trying to sell us on this new message board system that was going to make a lot of money and change the game.

Quora was an online community that happened to be "cool", so it attracted intelligent people which made the content fantastic. But nothing they were doing, in my opinion, was especially original. And as has been pointed out, if you try to scale up an online community, you deal with more and more noise. Predictably, that happened.

I apologize for the past tense; I realize Quora still exists, and nothing I or the author says has any real bearing on where it goes from here, or whether or not it is successful in the future. But I do know that I've gone from using it occasionally to using it never.

dasil0032• 14 years ago

You pretty much nailed it. Quora was a fad for the valley's elite. It was launched with a critical mass of the right people that pretty much everyone in tech had reason to jump on board right away.

But if you grow this quickly you're also likely to implode this quickly, especially with the fundamental conflict of interest between startup vs community curation. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to make a great community is to prioritize that over profit and growth. That's why HN, MetaFilter, and countless smaller communities and boards can thrive long-term, but "community" startups like Digg, Reddit and Quora tend to go to shit. The closest I've seen to bucking the trend is Stack Overflow, but that's due to subject matter focus, phenomenal long-term utility, and abysmal competition, and even there it's hard to argue it's still as great as it was a couple years ago.

delwin5• 14 years ago

It was a fad for the Silicon elite but it COULD have been so much more. There were actual scientists, historians, etc. getting involved and those people could have made it awesome. The reason Quora faltered was because of startup/investor interests. They didn't seem to be curious intellectual types actually interested in the knowledge curation, they just seemed to have hit upon a good business idea.

somewhere1• 14 years ago

I wonder how much money has been sunk into it already.

jaredmck2• 14 years ago

Did anyone else get an email survey from the Quora Data Team asking for feedback on the site? I got this the other day, seems like maybe it was targeted at people who hadn't used Quora much in a while but had recently logged in?

stephenhandley• 14 years ago

i fucking hate posts like this.

"<power user> has gripes" => "<site> is dead".

you're either following the wrong topics, people, or just don't have a sense of humor (that bread question was funny as fuck)

there's still tons of high quality content on quora

i.e.

- http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-best-architecture-practic...

- http://www.quora.com/Jeremy-Lin-1/Whats-it-like-to-play-on-t...

- http://www.quora.com/Design/Is-there-a-science-to-picking-th...

ETC. ETC. ETC.

delwin5• 14 years ago

Just to clarify, I am not a power user. If anything, I'm less active than the average Quora user. My problem isn't really with the content of Quora, that's just a manifestation of a larger change that is happening — a shift from a Q&A site to a social network.

padobson• 14 years ago

ABC - Always Be Curating.

A successful social network is always going to have a lot of content you don't want. That's why you need to be filtering the sources of that content constantly.

Quora is an interesting case because it plays nicely with Twitter. I've found if you keep your Twitter feed curated, your Quora feed will be well curated too.

If someone is consistently tweeting junk, unfollow. If there's a Quora board that has a ton of lousy questions, unfollow.

Don't feel committed to following someone once you have, and don't worry about whether your observations about a person's or board's signal to noise ratio are accurate or not - if a content creator belongs in your content world, they'll get back in one way or another.

Start right now. If you find useful comments in this thread, follow all commenters on Twitter and Quora. Best way to curate is to add more quality to differentiate from junk.

samaraga• 14 years ago

Introduction of boards made me to move away from browsing Quora for long hours. Now, to get the best of Quora would be to read the weekly digest sent out in e-mail and the Forbes column where the best Quora answers are posted.

sitkack6• 14 years ago

Two issues ...

There shouldn't be "a community" there should be multiple communities, otherwise there will always be an 'in crowd'

Second issue: quora has a multidimensional filtering problem and this goes back to point 1. There will always be an element of digg/reddit/4chan in everything. To try and remove it is futile, just try to keep it discernable from the content you care about, maybe the 4chan stuff is your bag and you don't want the high brow shit, so be it ...

leoedin• 14 years ago

Power users, ranking users or in any way giving precedence to users with a history of popularity has been the death knell for a number of online communities. It's consistently a poor way of identifying users who make positive contributions to the site, and it's a consistently good way to alienate new and occasional users.

I suspect there's two reasons for this. The first is that popularity is not necessarily indicative of quality. Take a look at Reddit's front page today, and you'll have a hard time picking out anything worth reading from the memes and jokes. Popularity normally reflects the lowest common denominator. Rewarding users for being popular inevitably leads to users rewarded for pandering to popular opinion, rather than for making insightful or meaningful contributions.

The second is that engagement level rarely is indicative of comment quality. The internet is a vast place with a huge number of users, and as a number of studies (particularly on Wikipedia [1]) have shown, a users commitment to the project or website doesn't correlate with contribution quality. Essentially, contributions from a new or rarely commenting user are just as likely to be worthy as those from long standing members.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/10/anonymous-good-sa...

I've been actively commenting and engaging forums, social news sites and other online communities which allow commenting on topics since 2002, and time and time again I've seen sites grow in popularity and decrease in quality. My personal desire in a site is one with a fairly active membership which both introduces interesting topics and news stories and provides interesting commentary on them. I enjoy engaging in discussion about a wide range of things, and I do my best to find websites that allow and encourage that. I think perhaps the most interesting thing I've observed is that communities with a fairly high barrier for entry - perhaps a payment of some sort - and aggressive moderation policies manage to maintain a consistently good level of discussion over much longer periods of time.

Quora’s Demise

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