You can count me as one of the long-term Quora detractors. To me, it's a good example of the "bubble effect". Everyone in the Valley thinks its huge because everyone in the Valley uses it.
No one outside the Valley does (figuratively speaking).
It's a thin social layer on what's just a Q&A site not that different to Yahoo Answers, which I guess is fine but I just don't see it going mainstream.
As an aside, I've always said--and I maintain--that I don't see Stackoverflow/StackExchange going mainstream either.
Ultimately I see the end for both companies being a Google or Facebook buyout in the $X00,000,000 range, which I think says more about the overall market than it does their inherent value.
EDIT: let me add regarding SO/SE that I think the SO model works great for programmers but my point--which I didn't put very well--was that I don't see that same tagging/voting/self-organizing model necessarily translating that well to other verticals. I guess time will tell.
Although I agree that Stack[Overflow|Exchange] will never been a mainstream site, I think there's an important difference in that SO is very useful to the community that it does support.
They've really nailed the technical question 'problem' to the point that my day-to-day job would be measurably harder without it, and so as the poster says I can easily imagine paying for added-value features there.
Quora, not so much. Although I really doubt the solution is to add more eye-candy to the page design. Sheesh, web designers. ;-)
"The site is visually bland: there’s barely any color or images, and you won’t find any effect fancier than rounded corners."
Somebody please save us from the attack of web design. If I see another gradient rounded flashing Javascript-enabled button for gradient rounded flashing Javascript-enabled buttons' sake, I'm gonna hurl, Wayne's World style.
agreed. look at craigslist - about as unsexy a design as you could imagine, but it solves real problems for people, and they use it constantly. quora - not so much, and fancier buttons and UI won't really change that.
StackOverflow, because of its subject matter will never be mainstream, but I it's immensely popular among those in the programming community, and that's a pretty huge market.
StackOverflow, because of its subject matter will never be mainstream, but I it's immensely popular among those in the programming community, and that's a pretty huge market.
I don't think StackOverflow is really trying to be a general, mainstream Q&A site, largely because there is no mainstream when it comes to Q&A sites. When you go to one of these sites, you don't want your question to be answered by a generalist, you want a specialist with domain knowledge to answer your question.
Looking at it that way, the StackExchange model makes sense. Make a number of very specialized communities that experts can congregate in. Make a points system that rewards experts for their time and effort. Finally, invest in making the site friendly to search engines, so that non-experts can find the experts and ask questions of them.
Right, Stack Overflow itself can never be mainstream by definition, but cletus is talking about the (slightly) larger Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites that SO is a part of.
Regarding Stack Exchange, I understand (and agree) with your view that there are lots of verticals it won't work in. But do you think programming is the only vertical in which it can work?
My view is, the model will work well for some places, badly for others, and that's perfectly fine - for the places it works well, it works really well. For the others, other solutions will be thought up.
I have been a long time user of Quora, as well as a long time detractor.
While I think there is a very interesting critical mass of user, I agree that it is largely a valley audience. There are some really interesting answers on there, which I have found valuable; but I have maintained that its flaws are too big and too many for my tastes:
* The UX sucks. While they have made some minor improvements - it still sucks. I had posted about this prior on Quora as well. It was also made worse by their constant self-back-patting on the UX/UI where they were claiming that the users were too stupid to understand the design decisions they made, and that they were in fact design decisions not mistakes. They were constantly praising how they learned so much about good UX from facebook.
* The lack of threading is retarded, and makes discussion impossible. The fact that you can only have 1 sub level (a comment) is just wrong. The claim was they didnt want discussion and that the answers to the questions were meant to be definitive thus not needing discussion. BS.
* The colors and fonts/sizing used is horrid and makes it very difficult to navigate. The use of 'facebook blue' the light grey and then the bold black are all in the wrong order. (http://i.imgur.com/Y9EPV.png) It doesnt work for quick visual scanning.
* The entry boxes are broken; when you begin to type something, it hijacks your cursor and disabled the backspace. e.g. if you try to type @username or http - it makes it difficult to fix typos.
* it is impossible to navigate topics clearly, sort or save any meaningful data. You cannot tag or vote in a meaningful way so as to promote answers either. You can only browse a subscription/follow feed in a linear 1-dimensional manner.
Ultimately, Quora is a one dimensional service which had a lot of early hype due to its founders and early adopters having real influence in the valley.
There is good info, but the architecture of the sites containment of that data is like the work of a talented child with a lot of potential being praised for their genius too early and resulting in stagnation and reinforcement of an idea that started as a good seed, but was ultimately not thought out well enough to scale - ultimately feeling dated and as more-broken-than-not implementation.
So, I go there about once a week for a quick scan - or travel over via HN links to good posts, but I spend very little time on there any longer. The information value in exchange for my time there is too low any more.
I think Stack Exchange has a much better chance of going mainstream, but by going through the side entrance, not through the front door. Some of the SE sites will fail (a handful already have), but others will be successful in their niche. By keeping the focus small in each community, they're making much more useful sites. I think a lot of people will end up using SE sites without really knowing or caring that they're at an SE site.
Disclosure: As a Stack Overflow moderator, I'm quite biased.
I'm also a long-term Quora skeptic -- and have been documenting the reasons why in the comments at http://bit.ly/imitates#comments for the last six months. Agreed about the likely outcome; hard to know about the valuation.
And agreed with the other commenters that StackExchange/StackOverflow is in a very different situation. It's hard to know whether or not they'll get to "mainstream"; but they don't necessarily have to in order to be a very successful company. And they've got a huge advantage of several topics where they are one of the best resources on the web -- and an much larger active community than Quora.
It doesn't show up in searches because for a long time the whole site was noindexed. Think they changed this, but considering the whole site is designed much like an SEO spamfest (tags, ridiculous hierarchy), it didn't make a whole lot of sense.
"Everyone in the Valley thinks its huge because everyone in the Valley uses it."
My techie friends from Silicon Valley also don't use Quora. So don't worry, not everyone in Valley uses it. I think very few % of Valley users are using it.
"Ultimately I see the end for both companies being a Google or Facebook buyout in the $X00,000,000 range, which I think says more about the overall market than it does their inherent value."
Can you explain how a site like Quora would be worth at least $100,000,000 to Google, Facebook, or anyone else?
Aardvark's acquisition by Google for $50M about 18 months, back when the market wasn't as bubblicious as it is now, is one comparable. http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/02/12/aardvark-google/ looks at why that valuation arguably made sense. Aardvark had $6M invested, Quora's got $11M.
Like I said in my other comment, not sure what valuation makes sense, so I'm not convinced it'll be in the X00,000,000 range... but it's not impossible.
math.stackexchange.com and mathoverflow.net are working well, from what I can see, so the model works in at least one area outside of programming.
Mathoverflow has become a place where serious mathematicians go to discuss research level mathematics, and some of the world's top mathematicians ask and answer questions there (including at least a couple Field's medalists).
FYI, I'm very engaged with Quora, and I live in Chile http://www.quora.com/Carlos-Leiva-Burotto
and through Quora I made networking with a guy who works on Mauritian Island.. that's in the front of Madagascar!!!! Not even through Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, etc I engaged with someone from that place!!
So Quora is definitely a worldwide tool and the active members are not only people from SV.
You should definitely open your mind to not see only the things that you want to see.
I think the biggest problem Quora faces is that it's invite-only. A question-and-answer website needs as many users as possible to provide as many answers as possible.
the problem with that is that quality takes a nose-dive. they tried to address that by "enforcing" quality with various arbitrary rules, moderators, etc, and pretty much failed - it created an alienating, stifling, clique-like atmosphere (in a sense they violated the "social contract" - a social site is for being social, yet they were penalising certain, normal, social behaviours).
so i left; sounds like they still haven't found a solution (it doesn't help that it's predominantly populated from one social group - one not unlike hn, so i won't comment further on that ;o).
i think the biggest problem with Quora is that it was hyped up to be more than it was. It's just a Q&A site, and it was hyped up as being a Facebook killer.
Quora is extremely useful. It eliminates a lot of my visits to about.com style websites and replaces them with structured q&a. It also adds a layer of transparency (you can see who has answered a question, their 'credentials') and get a feel for who to trust.
It's quick and the answers to any questions so far have been insightful. I fail to see how structuring all q&a dispersed over the web to a centralised site is a bad thing?
In addition Quora facilitates learning over time for topics and even individual questions I am interested. I absolutely love the follow topic & question features, i've learned a lot about topics I am passionate about using them. Information I probably would never have been able to find in any other way prior to Quora.
Here's what I don't understand about Quora - at the end of the day, all of the arguments in favor of why Quora is so good, especially arguments put forward by Robert Scoble, boil down to one thing: lots of interesting people post to it.
Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily bad or easy to pull off - hell, Hacker News itself is the same, in that I only use it because of the great people here.
I just don't see how you can take it mainstream.
It's not so much that no one outside of the valley uses it, it's that, if people outside of the Valley DID use it, no one would like it anymore!
I've tried to use Quora couple of times but I really don't see the point of it. If you want to ask a programming question, you get an answer on Stackoverflow immediately and Stackoverflow is designed specifically for that purpose whereas Quora's design isn't good enough for programming questions. It doesn't even do syntax highlighting. For me, Quora is one step away from a forum.
While i agree with the thrust of the post, the argument is severely undercut at the point where the author writes that Quora's problem is that it doesn't solve a problem, and then immediately turns to observation that twitter doesn't solve a problem either, and is wildly successful.
True, that was not very well written. I meant to say that not solving a well-defined problem is not always a death sentence (see: Twitter, Reddit, etc.), but that it's still not a very encouraging sign.
I automatically discounted your entire argument based on those six words. If you're still unable to see the problem that Twitter solved, then you shouldn't be writing about tech, media or related.
To date, it's the most reliable, worldwide accesible, short-messaging, real-time propagation system that we've developed. Hands down, it has no competition. Not radio, not TV, not satellite communication and certainly not through any corporate-owned mouthpiece. It discounts trends, rumors, celebrity-induced Mass Sociogenic Illness or cheap propaganda.
It solved the problem of truthful dissemination through independent social verification.
If you did no not know that there was a problem with the truth as it was delivered to us prior to 2009 (which is when Twitter got its wheels) then you are one ignorant summbitch. Downvote for stupidity.
My point is that some sites are fun to use because of their visual design, some because of their interactions, some because of game mechanisms… but Quora has none of these.
I can imagine that sites appear to be fun to use, initially, because of a great design, but I really have a hard time believing that they really become fun to use.
Like a game with awesome graphics and sucky gameplay, people play them for a day and then get rid of it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Quora seems to be useful only to those who have been invited to join it. It's not really a public-facing site in the way every other Q&A site on the internet is.
So I'd say it's even less useful than Yahoo Answers. I can't remember even once, googling for a question and getting a Quora page in the search results.
This is my experience too. All the people who are members have no idea how useless the site is to the rest of us. The only time I ever visit Quora is by direct link from HN. It never comes up in search engine responses, and they have no native search feature. To me, it's just a box with a login form (which I don't have) and a signup page (which tells me to sod off). How will the world live without it!?
I find myself asking, who is this guy? Honestly who ever thought that Quora was a facebook killer - or anything more than another Yahoo answers with different userbase? Also, who makes a thesis, then gives examples to show that their thesis is wrong (the twitter example etc)? The whole thing seems incredible and contrived.
Interesting. I always felt Quora was overdesigned, as if I couldn't move my mouse anywhere on the page without triggering some sort of hover effect. Drove me absolutely crazy.
I've had serious problems with the flow for things like signing in and password recovery. I signed in with Twitter - I think - now when I go back, they're asking for an email? No idea which I used and I can't find any emails from Quora, so my account is lost. I've never had such a problem with any other site.
It is not necessary for one tool to lose in order for another tool to win.
Plenty of people outside Silicon Valley use Quora. If you aren't seeing them, that's a sign that you aren't paying sufficient attention, or that you don't follow many people outside Silicon Valley.
I see a lot of comments about how Quora is only providing value or attracting users in the valley and while I hate anecdotal premises that are used as support for arguments, I live in the midwest and over three quarters of my friends use Quora on a daily basis.
I don't see it as a direct competitor to Facebook or Stackoverflow, but instead as filling a niche unto itself. I can't speak to the value it adds for all subject matter categories, but for the ones that I am most interested in (startup entrepreneurship, technology, mathematics) it has some incredibly thought-provoking questions and answers.
The biggest value that I get from Quora is not when I am looking for a specific answer, but the serendipity of scrolling through my favorite topics to find questions that I wouldn't have thought to ask.
If Quora died, it would be a sad day for the world's intellectual curious.
I was once a heavy quora user. Here's what drove me away (I do still use it but I no longer 'hang out' there): the overwhelming pretentiousness and self-righteousness of many within the very early core userbase who, because I was in that early group, dominate my feed (don't know if they dominate for others...). You can only read so many "what does it feel like to be dumb" or "if i went to Harvard how should I respond to 'where did you go to school?' without offending the asker?" without rolling your eyes and writing the entire thing off as a circle-jerk for the self-appointed hipster elite. These people suck and unfortunately quora has rewarded them with upvotes and therefore influence. Otherwise I think the site is great and useful for very niche/obscure questions that google cannot answer well.
Nobody in the circles I talk in has ever mentioned Quora. Ever. Google+ has come up about 50 times a day since last week, so I don't think it's quite that it's replaced Quora.
The author wrote, 'Facebook solves the problem of how to stay in contact with your 250 "friends". Twitter solves... well, ok, Twitter didn’t solve any real problem, but has still grown to become extremely useful.'
How can something be useful and not solve a problem? Twitter is such a great soapbox for complaints that many companies have felt the need to create twitter accounts and respond directly to their customers. Personally, I can find last minute tickets to a baseball game easier on Twitter than on Craigslist.
I stopped reading there. staying informed is a real problem. It is just one twitter solves. Entertainment is not a problem but a desire, and another one that twitter satisfies. Quora works for both as well. I trust what I read on quora
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[ 1839 ms ] story [ 2074 ms ] threadNo one outside the Valley does (figuratively speaking).
It's a thin social layer on what's just a Q&A site not that different to Yahoo Answers, which I guess is fine but I just don't see it going mainstream.
As an aside, I've always said--and I maintain--that I don't see Stackoverflow/StackExchange going mainstream either.
Ultimately I see the end for both companies being a Google or Facebook buyout in the $X00,000,000 range, which I think says more about the overall market than it does their inherent value.
EDIT: let me add regarding SO/SE that I think the SO model works great for programmers but my point--which I didn't put very well--was that I don't see that same tagging/voting/self-organizing model necessarily translating that well to other verticals. I guess time will tell.
They've really nailed the technical question 'problem' to the point that my day-to-day job would be measurably harder without it, and so as the poster says I can easily imagine paying for added-value features there.
Quora, not so much. Although I really doubt the solution is to add more eye-candy to the page design. Sheesh, web designers. ;-)
"The site is visually bland: there’s barely any color or images, and you won’t find any effect fancier than rounded corners."
Somebody please save us from the attack of web design. If I see another gradient rounded flashing Javascript-enabled button for gradient rounded flashing Javascript-enabled buttons' sake, I'm gonna hurl, Wayne's World style.
1) Pivot 2) Redesign 3) Existing members come for the redesign and stay for the new Quora, thus giving the new strategy a chance.
Although you could say that when all you have is Photoshop, every site looks like it needs to be redesigned… ;)
Looking at it that way, the StackExchange model makes sense. Make a number of very specialized communities that experts can congregate in. Make a points system that rewards experts for their time and effort. Finally, invest in making the site friendly to search engines, so that non-experts can find the experts and ask questions of them.
My view is, the model will work well for some places, badly for others, and that's perfectly fine - for the places it works well, it works really well. For the others, other solutions will be thought up.
While I think there is a very interesting critical mass of user, I agree that it is largely a valley audience. There are some really interesting answers on there, which I have found valuable; but I have maintained that its flaws are too big and too many for my tastes:
* The UX sucks. While they have made some minor improvements - it still sucks. I had posted about this prior on Quora as well. It was also made worse by their constant self-back-patting on the UX/UI where they were claiming that the users were too stupid to understand the design decisions they made, and that they were in fact design decisions not mistakes. They were constantly praising how they learned so much about good UX from facebook.
* The lack of threading is retarded, and makes discussion impossible. The fact that you can only have 1 sub level (a comment) is just wrong. The claim was they didnt want discussion and that the answers to the questions were meant to be definitive thus not needing discussion. BS.
* The colors and fonts/sizing used is horrid and makes it very difficult to navigate. The use of 'facebook blue' the light grey and then the bold black are all in the wrong order. (http://i.imgur.com/Y9EPV.png) It doesnt work for quick visual scanning.
* The entry boxes are broken; when you begin to type something, it hijacks your cursor and disabled the backspace. e.g. if you try to type @username or http - it makes it difficult to fix typos.
* it is impossible to navigate topics clearly, sort or save any meaningful data. You cannot tag or vote in a meaningful way so as to promote answers either. You can only browse a subscription/follow feed in a linear 1-dimensional manner.
Ultimately, Quora is a one dimensional service which had a lot of early hype due to its founders and early adopters having real influence in the valley.
There is good info, but the architecture of the sites containment of that data is like the work of a talented child with a lot of potential being praised for their genius too early and resulting in stagnation and reinforcement of an idea that started as a good seed, but was ultimately not thought out well enough to scale - ultimately feeling dated and as more-broken-than-not implementation.
So, I go there about once a week for a quick scan - or travel over via HN links to good posts, but I spend very little time on there any longer. The information value in exchange for my time there is too low any more.
Disclosure: As a Stack Overflow moderator, I'm quite biased.
And agreed with the other commenters that StackExchange/StackOverflow is in a very different situation. It's hard to know whether or not they'll get to "mainstream"; but they don't necessarily have to in order to be a very successful company. And they've got a huge advantage of several topics where they are one of the best resources on the web -- and an much larger active community than Quora.
I'll validate that: I've barely heard of it. I've never visited, and it never seems to turn up in Google or DDG searches.
My techie friends from Silicon Valley also don't use Quora. So don't worry, not everyone in Valley uses it. I think very few % of Valley users are using it.
Can you explain how a site like Quora would be worth at least $100,000,000 to Google, Facebook, or anyone else?
Like I said in my other comment, not sure what valuation makes sense, so I'm not convinced it'll be in the X00,000,000 range... but it's not impossible.
Google trends gives a better view. Here is is related to other sites that (according to Alexa) have similar traffic: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=stackoverflow.com%2C+dou...
Mathoverflow has become a place where serious mathematicians go to discuss research level mathematics, and some of the world's top mathematicians ask and answer questions there (including at least a couple Field's medalists).
So Quora is definitely a worldwide tool and the active members are not only people from SV.
You should definitely open your mind to not see only the things that you want to see.
so i left; sounds like they still haven't found a solution (it doesn't help that it's predominantly populated from one social group - one not unlike hn, so i won't comment further on that ;o).
what i argued at the time was that they should encourage quality by giving more support to people to cultivate their answers - to get feedback, edit, and improve. http://www.quora.com/Andrew-Cooke/Why-did-you-delete-all-you...
It's useful as a Q&A, but I don't see it as a social network. Quora does seem better than Yahoo Answers though.
It's quick and the answers to any questions so far have been insightful. I fail to see how structuring all q&a dispersed over the web to a centralised site is a bad thing?
In addition Quora facilitates learning over time for topics and even individual questions I am interested. I absolutely love the follow topic & question features, i've learned a lot about topics I am passionate about using them. Information I probably would never have been able to find in any other way prior to Quora.
Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily bad or easy to pull off - hell, Hacker News itself is the same, in that I only use it because of the great people here.
I just don't see how you can take it mainstream.
It's not so much that no one outside of the valley uses it, it's that, if people outside of the Valley DID use it, no one would like it anymore!
That's not a good position to be in.
This is not cogent writing :P
I automatically discounted your entire argument based on those six words. If you're still unable to see the problem that Twitter solved, then you shouldn't be writing about tech, media or related.
It solved the problem of truthful dissemination through independent social verification.
If you did no not know that there was a problem with the truth as it was delivered to us prior to 2009 (which is when Twitter got its wheels) then you are one ignorant summbitch. Downvote for stupidity.
You couldn't have answered the question without that bit?
Like a game with awesome graphics and sucky gameplay, people play them for a day and then get rid of it.
So I'd say it's even less useful than Yahoo Answers. I can't remember even once, googling for a question and getting a Quora page in the search results.
Someone with influence and vision needs to step in and set s course.
Plenty of people outside Silicon Valley use Quora. If you aren't seeing them, that's a sign that you aren't paying sufficient attention, or that you don't follow many people outside Silicon Valley.
I don't see it as a direct competitor to Facebook or Stackoverflow, but instead as filling a niche unto itself. I can't speak to the value it adds for all subject matter categories, but for the ones that I am most interested in (startup entrepreneurship, technology, mathematics) it has some incredibly thought-provoking questions and answers.
The biggest value that I get from Quora is not when I am looking for a specific answer, but the serendipity of scrolling through my favorite topics to find questions that I wouldn't have thought to ask.
If Quora died, it would be a sad day for the world's intellectual curious.
How can something be useful and not solve a problem? Twitter is such a great soapbox for complaints that many companies have felt the need to create twitter accounts and respond directly to their customers. Personally, I can find last minute tickets to a baseball game easier on Twitter than on Craigslist.
I stopped reading there. staying informed is a real problem. It is just one twitter solves. Entertainment is not a problem but a desire, and another one that twitter satisfies. Quora works for both as well. I trust what I read on quora