Quora’s Demise (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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

>"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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 ...

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...

"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.

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.

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?

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.

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