Golden Age Info Arch

Quora is a social Q&A website in Beta.  I admire their product, their community, and their technical ingenuity.  I envy their team, investment, and to a lesser degree their location.  I think their broad, unfocused vision, and immature quality control mechanisms will pigeonhole them and prevent scalability.  Of course they might pivot successfully, but there is no indication of that occurring, yet.

What Quora is doing well:

• Questions are the center of all discussion and duplication is prevented as much as possible.
• Real time user discussions create an addictive atmosphere for sharing
• Their network tools work very well
• Community building within the tech sector

What Quora could do better:

• Filters instead of “Not Helpful” <~ I may be exaggerating this, but having my contribution removed from view indiscriminately feels like censorship to me.  I understand what quality control is and understand they are going for factual knowledge. It’s their choice to make the rules and processes, but I think they are over simplifying here.
• Endorsement, aka expert identification, which was dropped a while back.  I think this is key to seeding niche communities and thus increasing content submissions across different genres of knowledge.

What Quora is not doing:

• Providing clear vision of how Quora is different from other Q&A sites, besides fancy, real-time technology.
• They need to use more game mechanics and take more time to generate processes that determine quality in a balanced and inclusive manner.

One thing I think everyone is missing in the internet game is that quality takes time. Quora has focused too much on making their site addictive, with the real-time feel, which is good for getting users, but repeats a common problem in society: faster, faster, faster.  If I want a fast answer, I’m googling it.  Speed and quality are on opposite axises.  With that conflict left unresolved, I feel, Quora will fail to scale and spread to other “knowledge areas” successfully.

Whatever happens, I highly recommend using their product and watching as it develops further.

Here are some other opinions about Quora, which I found via Quora!

http://gigaom.com/2010/07/26/how-quora-is-trying-to-build-an-ideal-society/
summary: An accurate portrayal by @lizgannes about how Quora is conflicted between quality and scalability.

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2010/07/15/SomeThoughtsOnQuora.aspx
summary: The conclusion speaks volumes: “Then again, we might get lucky and the site never take off with the masses which may not be good for the VCs that have invested in it but would be for the community that has formed there.”

http://www.aonetwork.com/AOStory/Power-Quora-Why-Benchmark-Was-Right-Pay
summary: This one is weakest of the three, and I disagree with it at many points.  I don’t think Benchmark is going to be unhappy when Quora sells to <insert big tech company here>, but I don’t think they have the moonshot that would really make their investors happy.

A new addition (Jan 21, 2011):
http://www.cpsrenewal.ca/2011/01/how-public-sector-organizations-can.html
summary: A public sector point of view.  I’ll let Nick‘s words speak for themselves, but I agree Quora’s search/add function is really smart.

Thanks for reading!

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Tags: competition, product, questions

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 at 10:31 pm and is filed under opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.