Wasn't there some sort of issue where they were mining user data without our consent? Many of us were having to send emails directly to Quora support requesting that our accounts be deleted.
Am I the only one that suspects Quora's future is more likely to be similar to an About.com (to be sold off for $300m in the future when a great business fails to materialize) than a Wikipedia? It seems like they latched on to the Q&A space originally when it was hot, and are now pivoting because competing with Answers.com et al. has a lot less of a runway than they previously expected.
I had a content site from January 2011 until September 2013. From the first day until June 2013 I had less than 100 sign ups. Then I forced people to enter their email before the opaque screen is removed to allow click-through. The result: 8000+ emails from June to September..... Then I accidentally deleted my database (without backup).
Depends on the economics of your business. It could be more profitable to lose some of the easily annoyed if you can get the rest to come back on a more regular basis via email contact.
But yeah, that's a big bone of contention both inside and outside Quora. The people who write a lot on Quora generally hate it, because it limits their audience. The Quora management, though, believe it is strongly to their advantage. They've never published stats or even their full reasoning, but they are quite firm in their belief that their data shows it working for them.
"Quora launched full text search of questions and answers on its website on March 20, 2013, and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013. It also announced in May 2013 that all its metrics had grown 3X relative to the same time last year." [1]
I just want to take everyone in the Valley aside and sit them down, look into the crowd and calmly say "Hey guys, if we could please stop overvaluing every company that manages to set up a simple CRUD site with no revenue model, that would be great. Let's do ourselves a favor and not re-do the DotCom bubble. Thanks all and have a good night."
Can someone explain how there a place for Quora? The only niche I can think of is generic technical advise.
Stackoverflow answers all the tech questions but they are overly pedantic to the point of ridiculous when it comes to generic tech questions.
Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we don't see questions of that nature here. May be as far as tech advise goes people from startups would rather write blog posts and get some credibility for their companies rather than contribute anonymously.
So how is Quora relevant or can be? On top of that they only show you one question. So that boggles my mind as to why it can become popular if its gated to begin with.
> The only niche I can think of is generic technical advise.
I think that's their main thrust at this point.
However, I've recently seen Q&As regarding my home town:
- What are the best restaurants?
- What is parking like?
- What are the hidden gems in the city?
- Etc.
The quality of the answers is higher than what you'd see on Yahoo Answers, and more timely.
So, I can envision a Quora that is valuable outside of technical questions.
But that assumes they can retain the quality and keep the timeliness, IMHO.
To use SO as an example: StackOverflow is running into the timeliness issue: I've been building a Rails 4 app recently, and a LOT Of SEO questions are out-of-date on. I can google around that problem due to my professional needs, but I doubt a general Q&A site would retain an audience in the long-term if the same problem emerged.
"Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we don't see questions of that nature here."
In my experience HN isn't a great place to ask questions like that, at least not any more. I tried to post an "Ask HN" question about pricing hardware and working with re-sellers the other day. First, under a newly created account so I could share more details; that submission was immediately killed I assume as a preventative measure against spam. So then I posted a much more generic version asking the same question under my typical username it floated to the bottom of the new page w/o getting any votes or responses. So I went over to Quora posted the same thing anonymously and had a reasonable answer and pointers to things to read up on in a couple hours. I like HN and have been reading it regularly for years but it isn't a replacement for Quora
Its a shame. This is exactly the group of people that could guide you in the correct direction. But I guess that is a lot to share for companies. I for one would have loved to see answers to that question myself. Did you post it on Quora and did you get any responses there? If so can you paste the link here?
The gist of the answer was your relationship with a reseller should be one of mutual respect and shared success and typical discounts to a reseller should in the 20-25% range on the low end for an established product and perhaps as high as 40% if the re-seller will invest a lot in marketing and commit to buying very large quantities upfront.
I used to answer questions on Quora. Hacker News has captured the bulk of that free time. But I still post my esoteric questions on Quora. For example, asking about the source of a Manhattan smoke plume [1], the species of a bird I spotted on a walk [2].
There's nothing particularly technically focused about Quora's content. I think of it as a sort of directed mini-blogging site, where instead of being oriented around following everything that a person said (though you can do that to an extent), it is oriented around following particular topics you are interested in. It is a good source for little entertaining essays pontificating about various topics.
There are a lot of questions that can't be asked on StackOverflow, especially ones that don't necessarily have a right or wrong answer.
HN is more focused on sharing news and less on asking questions, especially potentially silly ones.
On Quora, you can ask basically anything. It's like Yahoo! Answers, but with a much better interface.
It's a lot easier to ask a question on Quora than a place like reddit because you don't have to worry about finding the "correct" subreddit. Make a mistake with the wrong subreddit and you'll just be instantly downvoted and get nothing but joke responses.
That said, the site does have a Sillicon Valley "I want to be rich" twist to it, and I think it's necessary for that tendency to die off for the site to succeed in the long run. Far too many times have I looked at Quora only to see a lot of threads about getting rich, what's it like being rich, what would you do it you got rich overnight, what's it like to date someone richer than you, how do I be rich without being arrogant, etc.
There is a place for Quora because it has helped build a community of users that provide extremely valuable advice / answers in a nicely presented format. I'd pay atleast $10 USD per month to save Quora if there ever was need for it.
Unlike reddit or yahoo answers, answers are often provided by real members as opposed to hollow or anonymous accounts and it also serves as a collective wisdom center for past experiences of other humans that you can refer to.
I'm unsure what the correct mix is, but Quora is at the sweet spot of:
twitter + r/askreddit + yahoo answers + ask HN
-> Want to know how to transition from engineer to a job at a VC firm? Well you have folks like Leo Polovets (Current VC, early Linkedin employee /Engineer at Google, Factual) provide extremely detailed answers that are well written and more or less permanent. You know the dude is qualified and is somewhat credible [0].
-> Want to know how Stripe got its name? Well you are in luck because Stripe CTO tells you exactly how [1].
-> Where else can you ask about the evolutionary purpose of menstruationand get a response from a PhD in Zoology? You know its on Quora [2] (unless you want to get trolled on reddit).
One of their killer features is the weekly email digest. Find questions that have good answers, and then promote them to users who have said they are interested in that type of content.
The gates are an important component in how Quora has inexplicably managed to get people like Marc Andreesen and JJ Abrams to participate. I'm not sure why you feel Quora is so tech oriented. I see far more non-tech content like entertainment, politics, society, parenting, etc. Instead of belittling something that boggles your mind [in its success], maybe you should look at it for clues on how to be successful.
Quora seems to have taken a strange turn recently - their email digest is full of creepy racial questions like "do white girls find Indian men disgusting?" and "do Asian men mind if Asian girls date white men?"
I guess you can't stop such questions being asked, but they frequently appear as the top question in the digest and thus in the subject line. I deregistered off the back of that. (Come to think of it, not sure exactly when I registered in the first place!)
The digest seems to be custom created based on topics that you follow. If you decided to follow the generic "Relationships" topic, you'll end up with things like that in your digest. I'd guess questions like those attract a lot of controversy, so they will have a lot of voting and answers, which their algorithms may decide indicate that it is a topic people would be interested in.
I just scanned some updates in my inbox and none had anything like this. What's going on is that these updates are custom for each user, so either you haven't used the site and are getting the least common denominator, or for some reason you've lead Quora to believe that you're interested in such questions.
Well, that's interesting, and even more concerning if somehow a site has profiled me to think I have an interest in such things! I haven't used the site very much though, so perhaps it is the lowest common denominator.
I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost <1 million :D - 1 million, even saying that makes me laugh. Completely coded by us from the ground up. This says https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong.
My question: What in pickled f*s are these people doing with 80 million on a Q&A site? How far out of the reach of reality is this industry?
I've wondered along these lines too. There is clearly something else going on in the VC business beyond strictly evaluating company value based on ability to generate it directly. One factor I'll project (since I can't tell where you're based) is that companies with proven engineering staff in the Bay Area get a boost in inherent value just from acquihire potential. Bonus points for famous and connected founders, as Quora has.
Bay Area VC activity looks a lot like Wall Street to me, with the same disconnect between price and value happening.
I'm nowhere near the 'bay area' or any US state, nor even in Europe. I'm British, but living abroad, have never known anyone else in the IT industry. HN is my only contact :)
When I hear and see the things people in SV say and do - I honestly wonder what the hell is going on out there. It seems people who can put a bit of html + css together are getting paid 10 million these days.
-- good luck to them and everything - but it's a bit mental (imho).
That sentiment could not be further from the truth. You could prove it to yourself simply by doing what you describe and seeing how far you get. Breaking through the noise and building a large, attractive user base is incredibly difficult. Sure, just building the web site isn't that hard (actually it is).
I think you're right, but it's definitely the outside perception that something is odd about SV in this respect, and relatively trivial products can get blown out of all proportion there.
For me it was Cover, that Android launcher, that caused the confusion. The value of that is not in being able to develop it, because that aspect of it was trivial, but having the idea to do it, the vision to see it's possible, and the connections to get PR to get visibility for that in SV seems much more valuable than "just" the ability to execute. I think the surprising factor is just how valuable those intangibles can be judged to be. (Not saying they're not valuable, as they clearly are, but it's interesting just how much the VC market thinks they're worth, amplified by the effect if you happen to be in SV).
Software is made by teams, and teams that can ship quality products and code consistently are invaluable. Few companies actually know how to ship product or complete projects, let alone succeed.
Early-stage companies are purchased/funded because their teams and not the checklist of experience on the team-members resumes. Successful, or even good products often take second-seat to this. Surprisingly enough, people pay boatloads for functional teams.
Most VC'S take ~20% of the money invested at the time of the investment. They also get a cut of the returns but there better off investing in crappy company's than sitting on the money. Sure, they do have to have some justification and can't say donate it to charity but as long as the fit is reasonable and there are no good options there going to pick something.
This is also on of the reasons they do separate funds. If 9/10 funds lose 50% of the money and one get's 500% returns they take a bug cut of that return despite only breaking even on average. It also explains why they don't care about small returns if a fund does not break even they don't care if it loses 1% or 99% they already have there cut and are not making any extra cash.
Look - I don't care if Quora wants to spam my inbox with link bait in order to generate AU and page views, but they could at least not try to take the high road and pretend to be anything more than the lowest common denominator, no-business-model, spam factory that they are.
I was a Quora Top Writer in 2012 and 2013, and I've also built a lot of web stuff and spent a lot of time studying web communities. Purely from a craftsmanship perspective, they've done an incredible job. The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch.
That said, I have never understood what their economic plan is. I have a very good understanding of the economics of content businesses, and the people at Quora are either incredible geniuses or totally nuts. Since they won't say how they plan to make money, we can't say. If I had to bet, It be "totally nuts", just because so many content businesses get seduced by a creative vision that current revenue streams just can't support. But having met some of them, I know they're very smart, so I am hoping that I am wrong and that they have some clever monetization strategy that will let them justify their very large valuation.
I do like their simple form and layout, they have indeed got an elegant site. Nice piece of UX engineering without a doubt.
There can't (in my v. humble opinion) be any realistic way of recouping 80 million from a Q&A site. They would surely need to be extremely aggressive at the least.
Yeah. Having served some time in the magazine industry, there's a common pattern there:
You decide to make something way better than the existing alternatives. Your smart and literary friends tell you it's a great idea, because they want something better too. You find inexperienced investors with the same vision, and present them with early samples that make them say, "Yes! This awesome! Let me invest in your vision." Then you start shipping, and the small fraction of the population that isn't satisfied with mid-market stuff signs up and praises you. You're not profitable, but everybody is so excited that you keep going, possibly for years, getting new investor money and never selling as much as you hope.
Basically, it's like making a quirky indie film and thinking it will be a $500m blockbuster because you and your friends love it so. My fear is that Quora's on exactly the same path. That this new chunk of money comes from an outsider, Tiger Global, worries me further.
I think Stack Overflow definitely can, but mostly because it has a very high value audience that can be monetized through ad sales and and its job posting biz.
"The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch."
I SO disagree here. It's a mess. It's 10x more complex than it needs to be. And it's horribly unapproachable for new/non-geeky users. I've had non-technical relatives sit down and try to use it who were positively baffled by the user-experience.
I think Quora is an example of what happens if you listen exclusively to your most active users, when you should be tempering that with conversations with new and drive-by users. The Curse of Knowledge is deadly for product designers (http://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge/ar/1).
As a power user I really liked the early iterations of the UI. But it went downhill for me around the time they added posts. They added a lot of spammy follow crap too.
The quality of content is hard to manage. There's no granularity in rating content, but when the content persists, isn't meant to be forgotten like HN comments, that's a serious flaw. Answers and wikis should be gradually improved, voted on per edit, etc.
I agree that when you're not in editor/contributor mode there is too much going on. There should be a separate browsing and contributing UX.
Simplifying all UIs for the lowest common denominator is not the way. Bicycles vs tricycles argument of Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay.
I think one's opinions on the UI depend a lot on what the perceived audience is. If they're really after random internet users, then yes, I think it's too complex. But I think their initial play has been for that small slice of people who contribute content, vote extensively, and comment usefully. Because those are the people you need to generate a very large base of content, which is necessary to draw in the people who are going to do the ad-clicking to pay for it.
Am I the only one who sees none of this "top notch system"? Last time i used it it felt clunky* , now every time i get a search result to them on a random computer, they ask me to login to read the answer, experts-exchange-style. Thanks, but no thanks.
PS. I guess the people who find this useful live in San Francisco, and enjoy the "insider" feel.
*: Right now, while viewing any question while logged out, the "Continue with facebook" button text wraps outside the button.
If you haven't logged in, then I think yes, you're not seeing it. As a power user, I think they've done a great job. As I mention elsewhere, I think that their initial focus is the power users, because those are the people who have been creating the content they need if they are going to attract regular users.
As an aside, I am delighted that there are 4 million people learning English from somebody who uses the phrase "pickled fucks". They are, and I mean this sincerely, in very good hands.
I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. </sarcasm>
On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily.
Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora.
Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true).
It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.
That all makes sense, I would disagree on one point:
"topics on Quora are limitless"
The thing (only based on my experience) is that when you grow/diversify too much on a Q&A site, quality tends to dilute, and the audience tends to drop off. I don't know if this is true for Quora; I merely suspect it might be (as it has been for all the others who tried).
In many ways our focus on just one topic has been our saving grace. Many 'globals' try to compete (even S.E.) few manage to top 'specialisation'. Not sure why.
I started it in 2002. It's part of my full time engagement. It's paid my way since 2006.
There has never been any business model. Adsense only, yes it's profitable - we pay the 3 of us from that - but only because our costs are so low (single server, I've optimised the code to handle itself on an 8 core with 24gb - it runs at about 10% usage, @ about 10 requests a second)
How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number
We knew what Google wanted, we knew what our visitors wanted. We put our visitors first, but made sure the entire site worked in a way that would help Google do its job. (never really SEO). Our design is lacking, we didn't have a designer - we do now (very exciting for us!)
Essentially we predicted for many years what Google would be looking for, did some things ahead of other folks and tried our best to keep the quality of our content high. We also created a very friendly (most of the time) atmosphere on our site and encouraged high-quality posters to stick around - as much as we could. A lot of sites copied us, but missed the concept of keeping the community conducive to friendly interaction. We also did some interesting things to keep out trolls. Like our 'ghost' mode which makes a troll thing they've annoyed everyone, when in actual fact they're being system-level ignored. Fun stuff like that. This reduced further our overhead, and allowed us to expand while not worrying so much about spam. We spent time to build a system that self-managed, and self-grew. That seemed to work.
That's all the old system, what we've created now is far more interesting.
First off, Compete.com is a JOKE (I've regularly seen it off by 10-100x). Second, investors care about growth more than traffic-- do we have any data on Quora's growth? Third, Quora's founder/team is pretty bankable-- a failure scenario for them is an $80M acqui-hire. Assuming preferred shares or liquidation prefs by the new investors, that almost entirely de-risks this investment. That coupled with their long term ambition (supplant Wikipedia?) makes this a non-terrible bet.
Second, there is no way Quora only gets 1.5 million visitors per month. They have an Alexa ranking in the 400s. Yes, the tech audience skews this, but even a tech-heavy audience can't skew it that badly. Getting in the top 500 of Alexa is very, very difficult.
My guess is that they get at least 10 million visitors per month.
I disagree. MyFitnessPal is in the top rankings in Alexa, and they get less than that. Add to to fact that tech is more skewed, I wager they get a bit less than a million a month.
re: alexa reference: we had hit 5,000-ish on alexa a while back (then google had some fun with Q&A sites) - at that level we were getting around 180,000 uniques a day. 40k was the difference between 7000 and 5000 on alexa, it's also not as 'exponential' as one might think.
I previously would assume more than 10 mill a month, but I tend to imagine the guys above me must be 'rolling in traffic'. 10 is probably closest.
Most likely this huge investment is a way for investors to get their money from their previous investment, which might be locked up due to some contract rules.
Basically, in order to free their funds (or avoid taxation) from their first investment (let's say from some portfolio company of Benchmark/or other participated investors), they will transfer funds from the big company to the small company aka Quora (in which these investors got a better contract).
I am not going to be surprised if Quora gets acquired from the bigger company, which happens to have the same investors ;)
Great tech people often make mediocre or bad investments, or invest in things that are not really worth their time in the end. Things like, Max Levchin creating slide.
It's just that the amounts being available to invest are so staggering in SV compared to other places, that any movement of money will look huge in comparison. That makes news like this sound infuriatingly irrational. Also, i guess the facebook link is important.
if it were anywhere else in the world, we'd immediately be calling it out for exactly what it is: barefaced corruption amongst the incestuous VCs. But since the Valley has convinced many that it's the meritocratic mecca for formerly maligned nerds, we scratch our heads trying to preserve that image while the truth lies right in front of you.
I also don't understand the 80million (perhaps rich people don't know where to put their money?).
But Quora is definitely not just another Q&A site.
First, they have incredibly good technology. I would say that their livenode/webnode2 framework is one of the (or the) most technologically advanced web frameworks in existence. (Although now that React exists, it should be relatively easy to create something even better than what Quora has.) Also, I like their deployment process - they auto-deploy on every commit if tests run flawlessly. And their CEO is pretty smart (http://www.quora.com/Adam-DAngelo-1/What-are-some-good-stori...).
Second, there's lot of very valuable and high quality content. I've learned a lot from Quora.
>Founded in 2009 by former Facebook engineers, Quora is a revenue-less, question-and-answer service with 500,000 topics and an unknown number of users.
>Quora has now collected more than $140 million in funding from investors.
How could this possibly end well for the investors?
Apparently they admit they have no revenue source and as such going public doesn't make sense. Maybe they are aiming to be more like Wikipedia than Yahoo?
No, it is brilliant (in the SV way) that they have no revenue. The sky is the limit and you can get funded for pretty much any amount.
Seriously, if they had been actually monetizing, they would not be able to collect the funding.
There was that photo site a few months back which closed much discussed on HN. The problem with them was that they actually tried to make money and thus VCs could see that they would not be the big hit needed.
What would happen if we valued forums the way we value tech sites? What would SomethingAwful's valuation be in today's tech world when it had the engagement and content creation power it held in the early 2000s ?
To me, Quora is really nothing more than a glorified forum.
From personal experience, Quora started off really hot. Many influential tech people were answering very basic questions with highly impactful answers. It really was an honest look into how some great minds think. Peer voting really separated the noise and allowed smart contributors to rise up through the answers.
And then, the content got dry. It was the same questions with relatively similar answers. The newsfeed became more about showcasing content from months or even years ago to make it look more fresh. It really became a brand recognition and marketing tool to allow individuals to answer any industry-related question with their product/service/company in the context.
And then, posts came about. It made sense that authors would want to contribute their own insights without it being an answer to an already posed question. However, new sites like Medium, Svbtle, and Posthaven are much better tools for this although they each have their own content niche. Quora has become a redundant tool where people repost their blogs.
So where does that leave Quora? They have always had an issue going past the iron curtain of Silicon Valley. It's been difficult for them to engage the average, non-techie consumer. Even if they don't care about this demographic, it will be hard for them to sustain growth among techies. They must be quickly approaching a ceiling for unique users so then they must capitalize on engagement and retention. I'm curious how they decide to go about this.
It really felt like a televised red carpet even for an awards show. You get a chance to see all the celebrities and connect with them in the moment. In SV, it's more about becoming them through learnings rather than dreaming about being them through spectating.
My experience with Quora has been pretty bad, but that has mostly to do with my topic selection and network being Indian.
Quora got popular in India because of widespread adoption in IIT circles, who by virtue of being influencers spread it across India. So much so that, I saw a statistic which said that most visits on Quora are from India.
However for me what that has meant is that a rash of new registrants have appeared who have destroyed any topic related to my alma mater and India.
EDIT - Also shouldn't this 'Indian Invasion' have had an effect on the valuation?
EDIT - I am also an Indian and mean no disrespect. But the fact is that one of the side effects of Quora getting popular so fast is that it is often the first Internet forum for many students. I know it because I have talked to them. And that ends up in usual newbie mistakes.
That's basically what I'm thinking. The demographic is becoming more and more Indian, which drives away Westerners, who are the people Quora can make money on.
My Quora experience has been a sad one. I created an account just to be able to see answers to a question I was interested in. Then I tried to delete my account and their account removal policy stated that you have to send them an email for them to delete your account. Really, who still does that in 2014.
That's my point. Sorry I was actually making two distinct points that probably got intertwined. One - that Quora will not succeed like SO has. Two - Someone will buy Quora. Reason? Because, Silicon Valley.
That's the problem with gamifying something. Eventually you'll get people who are only there for karma. The other day I found an incorrect answer that was chosen, but directly below it was the correct answer. The kicker? The OP commented on the correct answer saying that his was correct but the guy other guy had less karma than him and "needed it". WTF.
These days, you really have to take Stack Overflow answers with a grain of salt.
Jesus Christ Silicon Valley[1] did a beautiful breakdown of the lunacy of Quora a year ago.
JCSV's style isn't for everyone (much sarcasm, so profanity, very rude) but he/she makes some compelling points
"Quora has raised $61 million dollars for this life-altering
question-and-answer-cum-blogging site. Let’s break that down
a bit: SpaceX, a company that sends rockets into motherfucking
space, has raised $230 million and employs more than 3000 people
(source: the world’s second-best source for knowledge). Quora,
which lets you ask other people questions on the computer, has
raised more than a quarter of that amount and employs 50
individuals."
Do your own startup, bootstrap it, answer to no one, feel the freedom to innovate as you see fit, eliminate the politics, remain true to your own calling. Fuck the VCs... fuck'm in the ass.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#Privacy_concerns
But yeah, that's a big bone of contention both inside and outside Quora. The people who write a lot on Quora generally hate it, because it limits their audience. The Quora management, though, believe it is strongly to their advantage. They've never published stats or even their full reasoning, but they are quite firm in their belief that their data shows it working for them.
I had an account with them, but removed it after they started showing others what questions I was reading. Does Quora still do this?
To make this easier for myself, I use a bookmarklet with:
[1] https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Betterhttps://www.dropbox.com/s/w68v2r2a3xq4c6c/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#History
Stackoverflow answers all the tech questions but they are overly pedantic to the point of ridiculous when it comes to generic tech questions.
Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we don't see questions of that nature here. May be as far as tech advise goes people from startups would rather write blog posts and get some credibility for their companies rather than contribute anonymously.
So how is Quora relevant or can be? On top of that they only show you one question. So that boggles my mind as to why it can become popular if its gated to begin with.
I think that's their main thrust at this point.
However, I've recently seen Q&As regarding my home town:
- What are the best restaurants?
- What is parking like?
- What are the hidden gems in the city?
- Etc.
The quality of the answers is higher than what you'd see on Yahoo Answers, and more timely.
So, I can envision a Quora that is valuable outside of technical questions.
But that assumes they can retain the quality and keep the timeliness, IMHO.
To use SO as an example: StackOverflow is running into the timeliness issue: I've been building a Rails 4 app recently, and a LOT Of SEO questions are out-of-date on. I can google around that problem due to my professional needs, but I doubt a general Q&A site would retain an audience in the long-term if the same problem emerged.
In my experience HN isn't a great place to ask questions like that, at least not any more. I tried to post an "Ask HN" question about pricing hardware and working with re-sellers the other day. First, under a newly created account so I could share more details; that submission was immediately killed I assume as a preventative measure against spam. So then I posted a much more generic version asking the same question under my typical username it floated to the bottom of the new page w/o getting any votes or responses. So I went over to Quora posted the same thing anonymously and had a reasonable answer and pointers to things to read up on in a couple hours. I like HN and have been reading it regularly for years but it isn't a replacement for Quora
The gist of the answer was your relationship with a reseller should be one of mutual respect and shared success and typical discounts to a reseller should in the 20-25% range on the low end for an established product and perhaps as high as 40% if the re-seller will invest a lot in marketing and commit to buying very large quantities upfront.
[1] https://www.quora.com/New-York-City/What-does-the-smoke-NYC-...
[2] https://www.quora.com/Birds/What-is-this-bird
HN is more focused on sharing news and less on asking questions, especially potentially silly ones.
On Quora, you can ask basically anything. It's like Yahoo! Answers, but with a much better interface.
It's a lot easier to ask a question on Quora than a place like reddit because you don't have to worry about finding the "correct" subreddit. Make a mistake with the wrong subreddit and you'll just be instantly downvoted and get nothing but joke responses.
That said, the site does have a Sillicon Valley "I want to be rich" twist to it, and I think it's necessary for that tendency to die off for the site to succeed in the long run. Far too many times have I looked at Quora only to see a lot of threads about getting rich, what's it like being rich, what would you do it you got rich overnight, what's it like to date someone richer than you, how do I be rich without being arrogant, etc.
Unlike reddit or yahoo answers, answers are often provided by real members as opposed to hollow or anonymous accounts and it also serves as a collective wisdom center for past experiences of other humans that you can refer to.
I'm unsure what the correct mix is, but Quora is at the sweet spot of:
twitter + r/askreddit + yahoo answers + ask HN
-> Want to know how to transition from engineer to a job at a VC firm? Well you have folks like Leo Polovets (Current VC, early Linkedin employee /Engineer at Google, Factual) provide extremely detailed answers that are well written and more or less permanent. You know the dude is qualified and is somewhat credible [0].
-> Want to know how Stripe got its name? Well you are in luck because Stripe CTO tells you exactly how [1].
-> Where else can you ask about the evolutionary purpose of menstruationand get a response from a PhD in Zoology? You know its on Quora [2] (unless you want to get trolled on reddit).
[0] http://www.quora.com/How-does-one-move-from-being-an-enginee...
[1] http://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/How-did-Stripe-come-up-w...
[2] http://www.quora.com/Menstruation/What-is-the-evolutionary-o...
I guess you can't stop such questions being asked, but they frequently appear as the top question in the digest and thus in the subject line. I deregistered off the back of that. (Come to think of it, not sure exactly when I registered in the first place!)
[1] https://www.quora.com/Quora/Which-country-has-the-highest-nu...
My question: What in pickled f*s are these people doing with 80 million on a Q&A site? How far out of the reach of reality is this industry?
Bay Area VC activity looks a lot like Wall Street to me, with the same disconnect between price and value happening.
When I hear and see the things people in SV say and do - I honestly wonder what the hell is going on out there. It seems people who can put a bit of html + css together are getting paid 10 million these days.
-- good luck to them and everything - but it's a bit mental (imho).
For me it was Cover, that Android launcher, that caused the confusion. The value of that is not in being able to develop it, because that aspect of it was trivial, but having the idea to do it, the vision to see it's possible, and the connections to get PR to get visibility for that in SV seems much more valuable than "just" the ability to execute. I think the surprising factor is just how valuable those intangibles can be judged to be. (Not saying they're not valuable, as they clearly are, but it's interesting just how much the VC market thinks they're worth, amplified by the effect if you happen to be in SV).
Early-stage companies are purchased/funded because their teams and not the checklist of experience on the team-members resumes. Successful, or even good products often take second-seat to this. Surprisingly enough, people pay boatloads for functional teams.
This is also on of the reasons they do separate funds. If 9/10 funds lose 50% of the money and one get's 500% returns they take a bug cut of that return despite only breaking even on average. It also explains why they don't care about small returns if a fund does not break even they don't care if it loses 1% or 99% they already have there cut and are not making any extra cash.
http://www.quora.com/Interracial-Dating-and-Relationships/Wh...
and
http://www.quora.com/Dating-and-Relationships-1/How-do-Asian...
and
http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-worst-experience-youve-had-...
That right there is a whole lotta value.
http://www.quora.com/Family/I-caught-my-younger-brother-watc...
http://www.quora.com/How-does-a-sixteen-year-old-get-a-girlf...
Look - I don't care if Quora wants to spam my inbox with link bait in order to generate AU and page views, but they could at least not try to take the high road and pretend to be anything more than the lowest common denominator, no-business-model, spam factory that they are.
I was a Quora Top Writer in 2012 and 2013, and I've also built a lot of web stuff and spent a lot of time studying web communities. Purely from a craftsmanship perspective, they've done an incredible job. The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch.
That said, I have never understood what their economic plan is. I have a very good understanding of the economics of content businesses, and the people at Quora are either incredible geniuses or totally nuts. Since they won't say how they plan to make money, we can't say. If I had to bet, It be "totally nuts", just because so many content businesses get seduced by a creative vision that current revenue streams just can't support. But having met some of them, I know they're very smart, so I am hoping that I am wrong and that they have some clever monetization strategy that will let them justify their very large valuation.
There can't (in my v. humble opinion) be any realistic way of recouping 80 million from a Q&A site. They would surely need to be extremely aggressive at the least.
You decide to make something way better than the existing alternatives. Your smart and literary friends tell you it's a great idea, because they want something better too. You find inexperienced investors with the same vision, and present them with early samples that make them say, "Yes! This awesome! Let me invest in your vision." Then you start shipping, and the small fraction of the population that isn't satisfied with mid-market stuff signs up and praises you. You're not profitable, but everybody is so excited that you keep going, possibly for years, getting new investor money and never selling as much as you hope.
Basically, it's like making a quirky indie film and thinking it will be a $500m blockbuster because you and your friends love it so. My fear is that Quora's on exactly the same path. That this new chunk of money comes from an outsider, Tiger Global, worries me further.
I SO disagree here. It's a mess. It's 10x more complex than it needs to be. And it's horribly unapproachable for new/non-geeky users. I've had non-technical relatives sit down and try to use it who were positively baffled by the user-experience.
I think Quora is an example of what happens if you listen exclusively to your most active users, when you should be tempering that with conversations with new and drive-by users. The Curse of Knowledge is deadly for product designers (http://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge/ar/1).
The quality of content is hard to manage. There's no granularity in rating content, but when the content persists, isn't meant to be forgotten like HN comments, that's a serious flaw. Answers and wikis should be gradually improved, voted on per edit, etc.
I agree that when you're not in editor/contributor mode there is too much going on. There should be a separate browsing and contributing UX.
Simplifying all UIs for the lowest common denominator is not the way. Bicycles vs tricycles argument of Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay.
PS. I guess the people who find this useful live in San Francisco, and enjoy the "insider" feel.
*: Right now, while viewing any question while logged out, the "Continue with facebook" button text wraps outside the button.
For the first 3 months of our site (before help came) 'grammar' was spelt wrong on the header.
On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily.
Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora.
Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true).
It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.
"topics on Quora are limitless"
The thing (only based on my experience) is that when you grow/diversify too much on a Q&A site, quality tends to dilute, and the audience tends to drop off. I don't know if this is true for Quora; I merely suspect it might be (as it has been for all the others who tried).
In many ways our focus on just one topic has been our saving grace. Many 'globals' try to compete (even S.E.) few manage to top 'specialisation'. Not sure why.
How long have you been operating englishforums.com ? Is this your full time engagement?
How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number ? Was it purely organic or some paid advertising ?
And is the site profitable?
Thanks.
And is the site profitable?
I started it in 2002. It's part of my full time engagement. It's paid my way since 2006.
There has never been any business model. Adsense only, yes it's profitable - we pay the 3 of us from that - but only because our costs are so low (single server, I've optimised the code to handle itself on an 8 core with 24gb - it runs at about 10% usage, @ about 10 requests a second)
How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number
We knew what Google wanted, we knew what our visitors wanted. We put our visitors first, but made sure the entire site worked in a way that would help Google do its job. (never really SEO). Our design is lacking, we didn't have a designer - we do now (very exciting for us!)
Essentially we predicted for many years what Google would be looking for, did some things ahead of other folks and tried our best to keep the quality of our content high. We also created a very friendly (most of the time) atmosphere on our site and encouraged high-quality posters to stick around - as much as we could. A lot of sites copied us, but missed the concept of keeping the community conducive to friendly interaction. We also did some interesting things to keep out trolls. Like our 'ghost' mode which makes a troll thing they've annoyed everyone, when in actual fact they're being system-level ignored. Fun stuff like that. This reduced further our overhead, and allowed us to expand while not worrying so much about spam. We spent time to build a system that self-managed, and self-grew. That seemed to work.
That's all the old system, what we've created now is far more interesting.
As harsh as this will sound, that automatically puts it into the garbage pile of advertiser profiles. They are never getting 80mil out this deal.
Seriously, any talk of Wikipedia around Quora is strictly Quora's wishful thinking. This will never happen.
So if americans use some otherwise popular qna website much less, they think it's foolish to spend 80 million fucking dollars on that.
Enjoy the fucking kickstarter.
Second, there is no way Quora only gets 1.5 million visitors per month. They have an Alexa ranking in the 400s. Yes, the tech audience skews this, but even a tech-heavy audience can't skew it that badly. Getting in the top 500 of Alexa is very, very difficult.
My guess is that they get at least 10 million visitors per month.
re: alexa reference: we had hit 5,000-ish on alexa a while back (then google had some fun with Q&A sites) - at that level we were getting around 180,000 uniques a day. 40k was the difference between 7000 and 5000 on alexa, it's also not as 'exponential' as one might think.
I previously would assume more than 10 mill a month, but I tend to imagine the guys above me must be 'rolling in traffic'. 10 is probably closest.
Most likely this huge investment is a way for investors to get their money from their previous investment, which might be locked up due to some contract rules.
Basically, in order to free their funds (or avoid taxation) from their first investment (let's say from some portfolio company of Benchmark/or other participated investors), they will transfer funds from the big company to the small company aka Quora (in which these investors got a better contract).
I am not going to be surprised if Quora gets acquired from the bigger company, which happens to have the same investors ;)
It's just that the amounts being available to invest are so staggering in SV compared to other places, that any movement of money will look huge in comparison. That makes news like this sound infuriatingly irrational. Also, i guess the facebook link is important.
But Quora is definitely not just another Q&A site.
First, they have incredibly good technology. I would say that their livenode/webnode2 framework is one of the (or the) most technologically advanced web frameworks in existence. (Although now that React exists, it should be relatively easy to create something even better than what Quora has.) Also, I like their deployment process - they auto-deploy on every commit if tests run flawlessly. And their CEO is pretty smart (http://www.quora.com/Adam-DAngelo-1/What-are-some-good-stori...).
Second, there's lot of very valuable and high quality content. I've learned a lot from Quora.
>Quora has now collected more than $140 million in funding from investors.
How could this possibly end well for the investors?
EDIT - besides a FB acquisition.
Seriously, if they had been actually monetizing, they would not be able to collect the funding.
There was that photo site a few months back which closed much discussed on HN. The problem with them was that they actually tried to make money and thus VCs could see that they would not be the big hit needed.
I am only half-kidding with this.
To me, Quora is really nothing more than a glorified forum.
And then, the content got dry. It was the same questions with relatively similar answers. The newsfeed became more about showcasing content from months or even years ago to make it look more fresh. It really became a brand recognition and marketing tool to allow individuals to answer any industry-related question with their product/service/company in the context.
And then, posts came about. It made sense that authors would want to contribute their own insights without it being an answer to an already posed question. However, new sites like Medium, Svbtle, and Posthaven are much better tools for this although they each have their own content niche. Quora has become a redundant tool where people repost their blogs.
So where does that leave Quora? They have always had an issue going past the iron curtain of Silicon Valley. It's been difficult for them to engage the average, non-techie consumer. Even if they don't care about this demographic, it will be hard for them to sustain growth among techies. They must be quickly approaching a ceiling for unique users so then they must capitalize on engagement and retention. I'm curious how they decide to go about this.
Quora got popular in India because of widespread adoption in IIT circles, who by virtue of being influencers spread it across India. So much so that, I saw a statistic which said that most visits on Quora are from India.
However for me what that has meant is that a rash of new registrants have appeared who have destroyed any topic related to my alma mater and India.
EDIT - Also shouldn't this 'Indian Invasion' have had an effect on the valuation?
EDIT - I am also an Indian and mean no disrespect. But the fact is that one of the side effects of Quora getting popular so fast is that it is often the first Internet forum for many students. I know it because I have talked to them. And that ends up in usual newbie mistakes.
Watch from 9:30 on. "The idea of Stack Overflow is to attract anyone who is an expert programmer and repel anyone who's not"
My prediction - Google/Facebook (someone in that arena) will buy Quora.
These days, you really have to take Stack Overflow answers with a grain of salt.
JCSV's style isn't for everyone (much sarcasm, so profanity, very rude) but he/she makes some compelling points
[1] http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/48962035819/...Do your own startup, bootstrap it, answer to no one, feel the freedom to innovate as you see fit, eliminate the politics, remain true to your own calling. Fuck the VCs... fuck'm in the ass.