Indian names are good predictors of contributors of low-value content on Quora, but not because Indians in general suck. It's that most of the users added after 2012 are Indian and most recent additions also suck. "Indian name" is highly correlated with "joined after 2012" and "suck". I think non-Indian recent joiners are actually worse than Indian recent joiners, but it's not as easy to immediately tell when someone joined.
Indian users from pre-2012 were indistinguishable from other users. (2013 isn't that much worse than 2012, yet; the decline really accelerated in late 2011). Some of the best users on Quora are "early Indian users".
The problem I have with filtering stuff on Quora is that I've successfully filtered most of the bad content, but now I have virtually no content in my feed at all. The percentage of worthwhile questions/answers has really fallen. If they didn't have essentially limitless internal funding, they'd be shutting down. They have made no meaningful product improvements in ~years.
I'm not a Quora user but I've seen this issue occur on numerous message boards and online communities over the years. I have seen one default ban anyone the moderators think is Indian.
The real problem is the output: broken English & logic that is indistinguishable from trolling.
The reason why this seems to be an "Indian" issue is because of English literacy which is good enough to be usable, but with very poor grammar, at a massive scale. Other countries, be it France, Russia, or China, appear to have either English literacy that is either high enough quality as to be indistinguishable from being non-native, or it is just a tiny blip that goes unnoticed. I would suspect that "Indian" is the term many of the outliers of these other groups are being grouped in to.
Solutions? The ones that lump everyone in to groups based on their country of origin are the simplest. The least "racist" would be to divide the community down these lines, just as Google does.
The bigger question to me is, how are so many people learning English so poorly, but in a usable form?
The Indians on Quora, even the "problem Indians", are not problems due to English -- it's not like "how is babby formed" on Yahoo Answers. For the most part their English is superior (although maybe overly formal) to anyone else's.
I think a lot of it is that the Indian users on Quora are largely drawn from the IITs, so they're either high achievers in India (and often from high SES backgrounds), or they're IIT alumni in the US. I really don't think Quora's specific Indian problem has much to do with them being Indian so much as the overall decline of the site.
(There is some India-specific content, and India-specific answers to questions which really aren't India-specific, but that can be largely filtered by topic. The really annoying content is when it's pervasive.)
I have chatted with people (primarily from India, but also from some other countries) who were intelligent, but wrote using the stereotypical broken grammar, heavy abbreviations, zero capitalization, and rampant misspellings. "plz send me obj jaba code for engg proj vey urgent."
I asked them why they type that way, and the answer I got was that it saves time, and as long as the ideas are communicated successfully, who cares? Especially on a medium as transient as the Internet! In turn, they were baffled at why I typed with so many unnecessary words and letters.
In the USA, correct English is a way of signaling respect for your content and for your reader. If I am unwilling to invest my time to spell and punctuate properly, I have no right to ask you to invest your time in reading what I wrote.
For these typists, there are other signals. For example, a common question was "sir plz cn u hlp me". Respect is conveyed via the first two words, and the style is intended to be neutral and not communicate anything. In turn, I found "sir" to be weird and overly deferential, and the style to be incredibly off-putting.
So that's one factor I identified. I'd be interested in hearing from others.
>>I asked them why they type that way, and the answer I got was that it saves time, and as long as the ideas are communicated successfully, who cares?
What??? Ironically while working at a major US based call center here in Bangalore, my American English instructor told me I need to exactly do that. In fact she always used to insist I need to let go of my 'British English' and adopt the 'US English' standards. 'Want to' had to become 'wanna', 'I would' had to become I'd - And stuff like that.
To me it felt like I had to unlearn all the good things to speak in US English.
>>In the USA, correct English is a way of signaling respect for your content and for your reader.
This really made me laugh. By British and even by standards of English spoken in Indian schools. Most Indians and can write and speak better English than most Americans can ever do.
India probably has the highest number of publications and consumption of English material and may easily account to half of the world's English speaking population- magazines, newspapers, books, novels, text books, printed form etc you name it and India will easily come out on top.
You seem to be(disturbed and) referring to a form of communication called 'SMS lingo' which is very famous among kids around the world, not just India. Its more of generation gap, while I chat with kids around- I get equally irritated as your are. Yet among them, this is what they call 'cool'.
On a side note, there was once a time when people complained about a lot of Indians in Wikipedia. This is going to happen with any English based site.
Even general questions are dominated by answers from people with "Indian-sounding" names.
Yeah, that's pretty annoying, isn't it?
But if you have a filter to blacklist 'Indian-sounding' names, then what about all the people who do what I'm doing: Use an alias that happens to mask my 'Indian-sounding' name?
"But no-one was complaining when Silicon Valley was dominating the feed? So isn't it racist to complain when Indian topics dominate?
There are two main reasons why most people find it not too irritating to have a Silicon Valley dominated social network. First is that most social networks are initially dominated by Silicon Valley, so in general, people are used to Silicon Valley content. The second, and more important reason is that many people in other countries are interested in keeping tabs on what's going on in Silicon Valley because they feel that the same thing will reach their country in an year or two. So, too much Silicon Valley content is usually not a problem for most people."
This pretty much invalidates the argument... Do they really want silicon valley content or is it just the authors bias?
I can't speak for everyone, but that's certainly the main reason why I'm not on Quora. Even before the whole "login to read" thing, I sometimes went there, skimmed through the topics and profiles of people and my impression was "So, it's a social network for Silicon Valley people. Why should I care ?"
The correct answer to that argument is "yes, it would be better to be able to filter out Silicon Valley stuff, too (but this is why there wasn't as much pressure then)." Whenever people are accused of having a double standard this, I don't know why they don't just say, "Yes, you're right too. Let's be on the same team." It seems obvious to me.
I'm sorry but it is just as racist as when people complained about Orkut being "invaded" by brazilians.
There's a product, there is a population, and a good fit. How exactly is it a problem? If you don't like indian content, just don't read it. No one is forcing you.
What if most of the content on facebook was suddently in spanish? Would you stop using it or ask for a anti-hispanic filter??
It you feel like "these people are really overtaking my place", maybe the problem is not with them, but with you.
There are many websites, and one may want to cater to a WASP-only audience. But maybe it won't be as successful.
Facebook, of course, solves this problem by simply being what it is - a social network. The whole point of Facebook is that you get to follow those people who are already in your social circle, and the content they produce is presumably somehow relevant to you. If Facebook suddenly started to force random Spanish (or English, for that matter) content into my feed, damn right I'd be angry and demand change. (By the way, I'm rather sure that most of the content in Facebook is not in English these days.)
The problem is that Quora is based on an entirely different premise and wouldn't really work too well based on existing social circles. What it does need is circles based on topics and areas of interest - of course it is a real problem if you cannot easily filter the content for topics that actually interest you. Geographical distance is one dimension in the complex function that measures how interesting a certain topic is to you.
Any time you start a sentence with "I'm sorry but", generally (a) you aren't sorry (b) the following statement is going to be wrong.
He doesn't want to see lots of Indian local politics/culture topics, because they don't interest him. This implies no dislike of or prejudice against India, merely disinterest.
He doesn't in any way shape or form say that the people posting about such topics shouldn't be on the site, and his proposed rememedy - being able to block such topics, is clearly intended to allow him to co-exist on a site containing many such people and to still interact with those people about topics that do interest him.
If 50% of the HN front page always was content about India and content people from India would be interested in, would you still be reading HN?
I know I wouldn't.
I do not believe it's about racism, are they really against people from India? Or is it just that they aren't interested in reading India-specific content?
Content of any type has it's target group, a flood of a specific type content on something like a front page will only be accepted by the target group, and the rest will feel like the site is all about that topic.
Yes, I would like to be able to filter out Facebook content in a language I can't understand. Someone who doesn't read English should have the same ability. If there's a glut of activity about underwater basket weaving, for heaven's sake, I want to be able to get away from that, too. This is not hard to understand.
Anyway, your point about "no one is forcing you" is explicitly addressed in TFA. Apparently it's genuinely hard to get away from. If you have a counter-argument, let's see it. Otherwise, don't just rehash dead points and hope people will believe you the second time.
"Just don't read content you aren't interested in" is paradoxical, because the determination of interest requires reading. The problem is that Quora presents users with content they aren't interested in, and don't give users tools to filter that content. If left unchecked, Quora may converge to a monoculture, which would make it much less important than it could be.
But you're absolutely right to point out the racism of the phrase "India problem." The problem is with Quora, not the users or their countries of origin.
> What if most of the content on facebook was suddently in spanish? Would you stop using it or ask for a anti-hispanic filter??
Absolutely, if Facebook insisted on showing me Spanish-languge content no matter what I did. The relevant metric is not "majority of content on the site" but "majority of the content presented to me."
"Just don't read content you aren't interested in" is paradoxical, because the determination of interest requires reading.
When I last used Quora, you could follow different topics and people. Presumably, if you aren't interested in Perl coding, you don't follow that topic, and you don't get exposed to Perl content.
In what way is India-centric content 'forced' on Quora users in a way that (e.g.) Perl-centric content is not?
Is Quora attracting English-speaking Indians as users in disproportionate numbers compared to users not from India?
There's a couple of replies to your post but no one of them really care that HN got a shitstorm of posts about American politics in the last 2 years or so and that it became a lot worse two months ago with posts about NSA populating the front page. I really don't see how this is different from quora.
I don't really know how this is different, I just since left reading HN on a regular basis.
I am brazillian, and I hated what brazillians did.
They did invade places.
When I joined Orkut, I found many famous game developers, befriended them, and joined their communities, and had cool hacking discussions with fellow hackers.
Then brazillians joined those communities, wrote in portuguese even when moderators politely asked them to not to, and wrote in wrong portuguese even, it pissed off even other brazillians, I remember that in about 5 months after the initial "invasions" all my foreign hacker friends had quit, and communities were dead (yes, after the foreigners quit, brazillians stopped posting too...).
Brazillians DO like to troll around, there is plenty evidence of that.
Many people have their own views on this topic (India problem) but most of them will keep it to themselves because nowadays mentioning almost anything related to some specific country/race/religion will get them called 'racists'. But it doesn't count when talking about Americans, Europeans, white people. You can tell anything you want about them.
I think Quora has a Quora problem. It's Quora. The bait and switch yahoo answers with the anti-user attitude. Why the hell are people using this service?
It had awesome content originally, but really all the great content was of the form "Specific person who did something, what did you do when x and y", or where e.g. an ER medicine student would answer ER medicine questions.
The downfall of Quora was when generalists ("polymath" being the popular self-style on Quora...) would wikipedia some shit to write an authoritative-seeming answer, and ended up being promoted above topic experts. And, when they gave up and allowed pointless survey questions. And, when people with big external audiences (Robert Scoble being the star example) arrived on Quora and brought a bunch of upvoters with them. Instead of pushing back against these trends, Quora doubled down on them -- with a "credit" system which rewarded gaming voting, etc.
The influx of Indians was more a sign that the site itself had already died.
It's not like there aren't people competing in this space either (like StackExchange). I would love to understand why people use Quora and how they got to the level of popularity that they seem to enjoy.
StackExchange does not compete in this space as they do not provide vertical instances of their site for general questions and answers like Quora, and have the overall attitude that such things are too open-ended and not handled well by their format (so when you see such questions on any of the larger StackExchanges, while there is always a flurry or really great and really valuable user contributions, the question is always quickly closed by moderators). If StackExhange wanted this space, they could probably own it very quickly.
does quora support multiple languages yet? i ask because when i was there (years ago - and i should add, given comments below, that some of the commentators i remember best were indian) a similar cultural problem was playing out, where they were clamping down on non-english posts. being vaguely bi-lingual i was happy to chat in spanish and so noticed the resentment.
anyway, in retrospect (and assuming they still don't support multiple languages) it seems like the quora reflex - to prefer "ban it" over "understand and adapt" - has come home to roost. instead of providing tools to support multiple communities / languages, they relied on exclusion through language, which was fragile to a community that uses english.
it's actually quite satisfying, if you're happy to watch quora burn.
Indians are what, half of the English speakers in the world? Any en-language site with a global audience is going to have more Indians in it than most US-ians are used to.
China Daily reports that more than 300 million Chinese already are studying English—nearly one quarter of the country’s population. And in the next five years, all schools will begin teaching English in kindergarten, and all state employees younger than 40 will be required to master at least 1,000 English phrases.
Some variation of this topic comes up over and over again.
I've seen people bitch about Brazilians on Orkut, Chinese on WoW, Blacks on MySpace/Twitter, Indians on Quora and Android users on Instagram.
For all its potential as a connector, the Internet is full of homogeneous echo chambers. There's some threshold for these places where integration suddenly becomes a "problem".
I've occasionally wondered if the future of recommendation engines are systems which feed us a steady stream of what we want to hear and filter out everything and everyone else.
> For all it's potential as a connector, the Internet is full of homogeneous echo chambers.
That's the point of the internet. To be able to seek out more people who think like you and have the exact same interests so you don't have to deal so much with all the heterogenous people in the real world.
In this regard, Quora seems to be in a unique position among similar web sites. Why doesn't StackExchange have a "race problem", for example? (And what I really mean by "race problem" is people complaining about it, somehow feeling uncomfortable or discouraged by it, rather than the "problem" itself.)
I think Quora's more fundamental problem is that the rules of the social game were not well though out. For example, I find that the user's feed can become too noisy too quickly. It is too easy for someone to add a crappy unrelated question into a topic you follow.
As a result you see people who value their time leaving the social network, no matter how "intellectualist" the network wanted to be in the beginning.
Indians just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: exactly at the time of interesting people (including interesting Indians) leaving.
Somehow I'm still hoping to see Quora's revival. Just noticed a question about Noam Chomsky and thought: so why doesn't Noam Chomsky himself answering it? This wouldn't sound like a fantasy a few years ago.
If I were Quora, I'd re-think the user's dashboard with those who value their time in mind.
There are some similarities with how, when Orkut took off in India and Brazil, its open-community/broad-affiliation features became less useful in the US.
You'll see that the first 8 pictures posted in ranked order are all of indian decent. At firs I thought maybe Varrun Ramani's upvotes were some sort of 4chan/anonymous hack but that's the first time I discovered this "Indian problem".
This is my "best" quora with the most followers. Anecdotally, it's peaked around 500 and it seems the makeup of it has skewed towards Indians.
For me, it's just another tool to research and discover things. I'm sure if I worked for quora, I'd like it to be way more than just that.
I like the comments about having country specific stuff, but then again that seems to be tough to break down current content that way. Perhaps that is a Manhattan Project that Quora needs to tackle.
That all said, if I wanted to make a "random indian name generator" I'd definitely harvest it off certain quoras.
More generally, they're having a 'plaza problem', where a universally-shared space, with too much visibility of bulk and differing-tastes content, creates scaling problems.
There's a good discussion of this concept of 'plazas' and 'warrens' in social software (originating with Xianhang Zhang) here:
Quora was always a 'club' and not a 'community', that's why it sort of can't grow... clubs are meant to be exclusive, when they grow there's always 'this place was so much cooler before', I guess an actual community won't care because it will provide ways for people to contribute that brings up the whole community, with a purpose and value enjoyed by everyone in it, that's an ecosystem that can grow. If someone contributes to Rails core, nobody will care if the dude lives in a nudist community in Camboja smoking pot and doing OSS code naked everyday. It's structural.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadIndian users from pre-2012 were indistinguishable from other users. (2013 isn't that much worse than 2012, yet; the decline really accelerated in late 2011). Some of the best users on Quora are "early Indian users".
The problem I have with filtering stuff on Quora is that I've successfully filtered most of the bad content, but now I have virtually no content in my feed at all. The percentage of worthwhile questions/answers has really fallen. If they didn't have essentially limitless internal funding, they'd be shutting down. They have made no meaningful product improvements in ~years.
The real problem is the output: broken English & logic that is indistinguishable from trolling.
The reason why this seems to be an "Indian" issue is because of English literacy which is good enough to be usable, but with very poor grammar, at a massive scale. Other countries, be it France, Russia, or China, appear to have either English literacy that is either high enough quality as to be indistinguishable from being non-native, or it is just a tiny blip that goes unnoticed. I would suspect that "Indian" is the term many of the outliers of these other groups are being grouped in to.
Solutions? The ones that lump everyone in to groups based on their country of origin are the simplest. The least "racist" would be to divide the community down these lines, just as Google does.
The bigger question to me is, how are so many people learning English so poorly, but in a usable form?
I think a lot of it is that the Indian users on Quora are largely drawn from the IITs, so they're either high achievers in India (and often from high SES backgrounds), or they're IIT alumni in the US. I really don't think Quora's specific Indian problem has much to do with them being Indian so much as the overall decline of the site.
(There is some India-specific content, and India-specific answers to questions which really aren't India-specific, but that can be largely filtered by topic. The really annoying content is when it's pervasive.)
I asked them why they type that way, and the answer I got was that it saves time, and as long as the ideas are communicated successfully, who cares? Especially on a medium as transient as the Internet! In turn, they were baffled at why I typed with so many unnecessary words and letters.
In the USA, correct English is a way of signaling respect for your content and for your reader. If I am unwilling to invest my time to spell and punctuate properly, I have no right to ask you to invest your time in reading what I wrote.
For these typists, there are other signals. For example, a common question was "sir plz cn u hlp me". Respect is conveyed via the first two words, and the style is intended to be neutral and not communicate anything. In turn, I found "sir" to be weird and overly deferential, and the style to be incredibly off-putting.
So that's one factor I identified. I'd be interested in hearing from others.
What??? Ironically while working at a major US based call center here in Bangalore, my American English instructor told me I need to exactly do that. In fact she always used to insist I need to let go of my 'British English' and adopt the 'US English' standards. 'Want to' had to become 'wanna', 'I would' had to become I'd - And stuff like that.
To me it felt like I had to unlearn all the good things to speak in US English.
>>In the USA, correct English is a way of signaling respect for your content and for your reader.
This really made me laugh. By British and even by standards of English spoken in Indian schools. Most Indians and can write and speak better English than most Americans can ever do.
India probably has the highest number of publications and consumption of English material and may easily account to half of the world's English speaking population- magazines, newspapers, books, novels, text books, printed form etc you name it and India will easily come out on top.
You seem to be(disturbed and) referring to a form of communication called 'SMS lingo' which is very famous among kids around the world, not just India. Its more of generation gap, while I chat with kids around- I get equally irritated as your are. Yet among them, this is what they call 'cool'.
On a side note, there was once a time when people complained about a lot of Indians in Wikipedia. This is going to happen with any English based site.
Yeah, that's pretty annoying, isn't it?
But if you have a filter to blacklist 'Indian-sounding' names, then what about all the people who do what I'm doing: Use an alias that happens to mask my 'Indian-sounding' name?
How do you get rid of all those people?
There are two main reasons why most people find it not too irritating to have a Silicon Valley dominated social network. First is that most social networks are initially dominated by Silicon Valley, so in general, people are used to Silicon Valley content. The second, and more important reason is that many people in other countries are interested in keeping tabs on what's going on in Silicon Valley because they feel that the same thing will reach their country in an year or two. So, too much Silicon Valley content is usually not a problem for most people."
This pretty much invalidates the argument... Do they really want silicon valley content or is it just the authors bias?
There's a product, there is a population, and a good fit. How exactly is it a problem? If you don't like indian content, just don't read it. No one is forcing you.
What if most of the content on facebook was suddently in spanish? Would you stop using it or ask for a anti-hispanic filter??
It you feel like "these people are really overtaking my place", maybe the problem is not with them, but with you.
There are many websites, and one may want to cater to a WASP-only audience. But maybe it won't be as successful.
The problem is that Quora is based on an entirely different premise and wouldn't really work too well based on existing social circles. What it does need is circles based on topics and areas of interest - of course it is a real problem if you cannot easily filter the content for topics that actually interest you. Geographical distance is one dimension in the complex function that measures how interesting a certain topic is to you.
He doesn't want to see lots of Indian local politics/culture topics, because they don't interest him. This implies no dislike of or prejudice against India, merely disinterest.
He doesn't in any way shape or form say that the people posting about such topics shouldn't be on the site, and his proposed rememedy - being able to block such topics, is clearly intended to allow him to co-exist on a site containing many such people and to still interact with those people about topics that do interest him.
Not all discrimination is born of prejudice.
EDIT: I thought you were talking about guylhem... my mistake.
https://www.quora.com/Navin-Kabra
I know I wouldn't.
I do not believe it's about racism, are they really against people from India? Or is it just that they aren't interested in reading India-specific content?
Content of any type has it's target group, a flood of a specific type content on something like a front page will only be accepted by the target group, and the rest will feel like the site is all about that topic.
Anyway, your point about "no one is forcing you" is explicitly addressed in TFA. Apparently it's genuinely hard to get away from. If you have a counter-argument, let's see it. Otherwise, don't just rehash dead points and hope people will believe you the second time.
But you're absolutely right to point out the racism of the phrase "India problem." The problem is with Quora, not the users or their countries of origin.
> What if most of the content on facebook was suddently in spanish? Would you stop using it or ask for a anti-hispanic filter??
Absolutely, if Facebook insisted on showing me Spanish-languge content no matter what I did. The relevant metric is not "majority of content on the site" but "majority of the content presented to me."
When I last used Quora, you could follow different topics and people. Presumably, if you aren't interested in Perl coding, you don't follow that topic, and you don't get exposed to Perl content.
In what way is India-centric content 'forced' on Quora users in a way that (e.g.) Perl-centric content is not?
Is Quora attracting English-speaking Indians as users in disproportionate numbers compared to users not from India?
I don't really know how this is different, I just since left reading HN on a regular basis.
They did invade places.
When I joined Orkut, I found many famous game developers, befriended them, and joined their communities, and had cool hacking discussions with fellow hackers.
Then brazillians joined those communities, wrote in portuguese even when moderators politely asked them to not to, and wrote in wrong portuguese even, it pissed off even other brazillians, I remember that in about 5 months after the initial "invasions" all my foreign hacker friends had quit, and communities were dead (yes, after the foreigners quit, brazillians stopped posting too...).
Brazillians DO like to troll around, there is plenty evidence of that.
And that's crazy.
at least white nationalists have the balls to just come out and say what they mean.
coward.
The downfall of Quora was when generalists ("polymath" being the popular self-style on Quora...) would wikipedia some shit to write an authoritative-seeming answer, and ended up being promoted above topic experts. And, when they gave up and allowed pointless survey questions. And, when people with big external audiences (Robert Scoble being the star example) arrived on Quora and brought a bunch of upvoters with them. Instead of pushing back against these trends, Quora doubled down on them -- with a "credit" system which rewarded gaming voting, etc.
The influx of Indians was more a sign that the site itself had already died.
anyway, in retrospect (and assuming they still don't support multiple languages) it seems like the quora reflex - to prefer "ban it" over "understand and adapt" - has come home to roost. instead of providing tools to support multiple communities / languages, they relied on exclusion through language, which was fragile to a community that uses english.
it's actually quite satisfying, if you're happy to watch quora burn.
"Like Facebook does..." oh man wowsers
I've seen people bitch about Brazilians on Orkut, Chinese on WoW, Blacks on MySpace/Twitter, Indians on Quora and Android users on Instagram.
For all its potential as a connector, the Internet is full of homogeneous echo chambers. There's some threshold for these places where integration suddenly becomes a "problem".
I've occasionally wondered if the future of recommendation engines are systems which feed us a steady stream of what we want to hear and filter out everything and everyone else.
That's the point of the internet. To be able to seek out more people who think like you and have the exact same interests so you don't have to deal so much with all the heterogenous people in the real world.
1. "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse": Rarely is the person actually capable of eating a horse.
2. "I'd die if he found out": Rarely would the person actually die. They'd probably be mortified (ah ha, nice pun there, eh?).
3. "Everyone's a critic": Nope, not everyone. Some people are not critics.
I think Quora's more fundamental problem is that the rules of the social game were not well though out. For example, I find that the user's feed can become too noisy too quickly. It is too easy for someone to add a crappy unrelated question into a topic you follow.
As a result you see people who value their time leaving the social network, no matter how "intellectualist" the network wanted to be in the beginning.
Indians just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: exactly at the time of interesting people (including interesting Indians) leaving.
Somehow I'm still hoping to see Quora's revival. Just noticed a question about Noam Chomsky and thought: so why doesn't Noam Chomsky himself answering it? This wouldn't sound like a fantasy a few years ago.
If I were Quora, I'd re-think the user's dashboard with those who value their time in mind.
You'll see that the first 8 pictures posted in ranked order are all of indian decent. At firs I thought maybe Varrun Ramani's upvotes were some sort of 4chan/anonymous hack but that's the first time I discovered this "Indian problem".
This is my "best" quora with the most followers. Anecdotally, it's peaked around 500 and it seems the makeup of it has skewed towards Indians.
For me, it's just another tool to research and discover things. I'm sure if I worked for quora, I'd like it to be way more than just that.
I like the comments about having country specific stuff, but then again that seems to be tough to break down current content that way. Perhaps that is a Manhattan Project that Quora needs to tackle.
That all said, if I wanted to make a "random indian name generator" I'd definitely harvest it off certain quoras.
There's a good discussion of this concept of 'plazas' and 'warrens' in social software (originating with Xianhang Zhang) here:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-...