Talk about “ripped from today’s headlines” … here’s an excerpt IÂ was just editing last night from g0ddesses.net, my comic novel-in-progress. The scene’s set on a discussion forum that’s modeled after Hacker News:
tech blogger: i know an unnamed startup doing Quora meets GameCrush with game mechanics like Zynga
angel investor: you’re thinking small. why not Quora plus Badgeville’s game mechanics for the enterprise?
![two question marks](https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3043/3006348550_3bb10dda55_q.jpg")
Today, I saw a link on HackerNews to a Read Write Web story Quora for the Enterprise:Â Two Contenders:
Last week we asked whether we needed a Yelp for the enterprise. Ed Borasky* suggested that Quora could fill the role of providing crowdsourced reviews of enterprise software vendors. Focus.com, a more business-centric questions and answer site, could possibly do this as well.
But what about Quora for the enterprise?
Indeed!  And reading further in the story, discovered that one of the contenders is “is applying gamification principles in an attempt to drive adoption”.
Nice to know I’m in sync with the Zeitgeist.
Life imitates art.
But art imitates life, too. Â Back at Microsoft in 2006, one of the game-changing strategies we came up with on the Ad Astra project was to leverage the web Q&AÂ platform along with other consumer products like MSN Messenger in the enterprise by combining them with Sharepoint’s strenghts — and another strategy was “game-centric user interfaces”. Â It remains a great idea, and let’s hope one somebody succeeds with it: one of startups in the article,** an established company like Jive or SocialText, or a new venture.
And while we’re on the subject of great Ad Astra ideas I hope somebody will succeed with, how about taking a diversity focus with Q&A?  The upside of Q&A is huge; Naver’s success in South Korea highlights how well it complements algorithmic search. With Google starting to be overwhelmed by content farms and spam, there’s a lot of money to be made.  So unsurprisingly, it’s a very cluttered space. And the engineering isn’t rocket science, so how can a company get a sustained competitive advantage?
Quora’s approach has been to concentrate on the Silicon Valley technology community, well-known early adopters who are very influential.  And it’s worked out great for them: an active early community, huge amounts of media attention, funding on ridiculously good terms, and usage now starting to skyrocket. So far so good. Now what?
Back in November, Kara Swisher framed Quora’s challenge as “trying to move the site well beyond its Silicon Valley-tech-dudes forum to one in which a plethora of topics and memes thrive.” They certainly have a good opportunity. So I asked what they’re doing to create a more diverse user base. At some point, I sent it to Charlie Cheever from Quora. Three months later, nobody’s responded. I guess I got an answer.
A different approach (the one we proposed for Microsoft, before they cancelled the Q&A project and killed the MSN Messenger brand) would be to start with diversity. Get a first foothold with women, Latinos, seniors, bilinguals, and other “niche” markets that almost nobody’s targeting. There are a lot more of them out there than techie white guys — and their needs aren’t being met well by today’s search engines, so there’s a lot more upside.
Oh well. If Quora won’t do it, maybe somebody else will.  In my novel, g0ddesses.net introduces a Q&A system designed by a woman and implemented by a diverse, mostly-female team. With any luck at all, life will imitate art.
jon
PS: for more on Quora, see Michael Arrington’s Quora has the Magic and Semil Shah’s Frequently Asked Questions About Quora, both on TechCrunch; Beth Kanter’s Is Quora Yet Another Social Network or Something Different?; Cara Pring’s Quora – Why you need to get involved, on The Social Skinny; and the answers to Why are people so impressed/confident in Quora?
For thoughts about how a diversity-focused Q&A sight might be different, see CV Harquail’s If Women Had Designed Facebook and Designing for Feminists vs. Designing for Women: Different vs. Revolutionary as well as my Emoware: What does Emotional Software Look Like? And for g0ddesses.net … stay tuned!
Update, January 21: CV and I were discussing this on Twitter, and she suggested I ask the quorum. Good idea! How would Quora be different if it prioritized diversity? Hmm, y’know, now that I think of it, that’d be a pretty good scene to add in g0ddesses.net …
* who, in the small world department, i linked to in Collusion is So Hot Right Now and once left a comment on Unfortuante Handling of an Error Condition 🙂
** or a competitor like StackOverflow. Aren’t they a contender? Update, January 27: Hah, I was right. See Adrian Jeffries’ Forget Quora, Stack Overflow is Killing It in the New York Observer.  For competitive positioning between Quora and Stack Overflow, see Stack Overflow founder Joel Spolsky’s view on Hacker News and VC Fred Wilson’s comments in Prisms, Kool-Aid, and an Opportunity. Joel knows how to sell to enterprises from his experience at Fog City Software and already has a huge customer list, so it’s a natural possibility for Stack Overflow.
Image credit: By Valerie Everett via Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons
jon | 18-Jan-11 at 8:12 pm | Permalink
Katherine Boehert’s A New Social Network Where Inquiring Minds Run Wild in the Wall Street Journal concludes
Could be. At least for techie insiders …
jon | 18-Jan-11 at 9:17 pm | Permalink
On Twitter, Liz Gannes of AllThingsD (who’s taken over the Quora beat from Kara Swisher) commented
I had asked a Facebook Question back in August, when they first started testing it, and 90% of the responses were from guys. It’s far from scientific, but a couple of other questions I looked at also had mostly guys answering (1, 2, 3). So … hard to know.
April 23: Facebook’s revamped their questions, making it much more poll-oriented. And at least based on my feed, Liz’ prediction is accurate: it seems to have pretty diverse participation.
jon | 21-Jan-11 at 3:18 pm | Permalink
And if (like me) you care about making Quora a more diverse place, apparently they’ll ignore you. But I digress.
They’ve got a three-point plan to deal with the scaling issues. For one thing, they’re going to make new users take a short “tutorial quiz” before adding content. Really? That’s a pretty high bar to help somebody out by answering their question. How many people want to be part of Quora that badly? So new users are a lot more likely to be “read-only”.
They’re also going to introduce an algorithm to “determine user quality”. In the comments, Liz Pullen makes a great point:
Yeah really.*
Not only that, unless Quora’s really careful, automated ranking will become another barrier to diversity. On most of these systems, longer-term users generally are “higher quality”: they have more posts, more upvotes, more followers, more experience knowing how to do well on the quality metrics, etc. So with Quora’s current techie male base starts with a huge advantage. On the other hand if they don’t give the current base an advantage, they’ll be justifiably bummed. A tricky situation. And on top of that, many of automated ranking schemes embed gender and language biases; TechMeme’s a particularly egregious example. If Quora doesn’t pay attention to diversity as they’re designing their ranking, it’s likely to further privilege guys and native English speakers and marginalize everybody else.
Speaking of which, another part of Liz’ comment is worth calling out:
Indeed.
jon
PS: Erica Friedman’s Perils and Pitfalls of Online Community Management, a response to Charlie’s post, makes some great points about the stages in any online community’s life.
* I’d vote Liz’ comment up, but alas Quora doesn’t provide that functionality. Quora also doesn’t allow formatting in comments, have a preview button, or allow you to edit a comment once you’ve posted it. See Power vectors and HTML in comments for more. Update, April 2014: to give credit where credit is due, Quora now supports all the functionality in the post that I mentioned in this footnote. However they still haven’t introduced multilingual support.
Scaling Up by Charlie Cheever - Quora | 21-Jan-11 at 4:25 pm | Permalink
[…] […]
Update from Jon: the useless and ugly bit above the line here is an automatically-generated linkback from a comment I put on Charlie Cheever’s Quora post. Compare with the much more useful automatically-generated linkback from a Quora answer later in this thread….
jon | 21-Jan-11 at 6:28 pm | Permalink
Looks like I’m not the only one who’s thinking along these lines …
Quora | 24-Jan-11 at 11:29 am | Permalink
How would Quora be different if it prioritzed diversity?…
Products that prioritize diversity as a goal make different tradeoffs: thinking about multi-lingual issues from the beginning, focusing on diverse communities rather than concentrating on techie early adopters, applying principles of gender HCI, etc. e…
Update from Jon: the bit above the line here is an automatically-generated linkback from a Quora question I asked there — very nice! Compare with the much less useful automatically-generated linkback earlier in this thread from a comment I put on somebody else’s Quora post. It’s another example of Quora having much richer functionality for questions than comments. I talked about the power differential this introduces a couple of years ago in Power vectors and HTML in comments.
jon | 24-Jan-11 at 4:02 pm | Permalink
From Quora:
Very true. Amy goes on to add
Good points. I included the screenshot here to highlight a couple of things: the avatar is very small relative to text (compare and contrast with Twitter or even Disqus), and commenters don’t get their avatars displayed (another example of the power disparities I talked about above.
And also a reminder that I should add “integrated with chat” to the requirements-doc-in-progress about a more diverse alternate-universe Quora.
jon | 24-Jan-11 at 6:19 pm | Permalink
Quora has reviewers, who look over questions and answers. Charlie Cheever, talks about how they’re selected: “We tried to pick a set of people who had shown good judgement in the past and seemed to like the site a lot.” No mention of trying to get a diverse set of reviewers. And sure enough, the current reviewers over 70% male.
Charlie describes why this matters:
Yes there are. And if most of the reviewers are guys, then they’ll generally think questions like this are okay, and they’ll become the norm — and that’ll be hard to change over time.
March 6: One of the best-known moderators is Marc Bodnick, who also does weekly posts on “New users I’ve discovered”. Here’s the one for February 17. As I remark in a comment, it’s 90% male.
jon | 28-Jan-11 at 7:55 am | Permalink
It’s a great observation about the opportunity … although for a lot of people LinkedIn’s Questions already fill that role. What (if anything) gives Quora an advantage?
And, now that I think of it, why doesn’t LinkedIn Questions come up more often in these discussions? We had great results with it a couple of times at Qworky. LinkedIn already has a big community there — industry diversity, and my impression its demographic diversity is pretty decent (a roughly 50/50 gender ratio). Quora’s got way better functionality, of course, but that’s far from the only consideration.
jon | 28-Jan-11 at 8:08 am | Permalink
Also from the comments on Cara’s post:
What on earth could be the logic of not English speakers from other countries to join the site?
Weird. Oh well, I added it to the list.
jon | 31-Jan-11 at 9:39 am | Permalink
Much drama in the Quoraverse over a series of posts by Vivek, Senil, Robert, Dan, MG, Michael, and Robert. Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here …
Meanwhile, to celebrate being named “Startup of the Year” by TechCrunch at The Crunchies, Quora threw a party for its elite users, which apparently doesn’t include me. Oh well. From Ohad Samet’s trip report, it sounds like some great discussions but also a sausagefest.
[Switching briefly to art for a second: the climax of g0ddesses.net is a competition called “The Killing Fields” at the Ejaculation conference. The after-party is a sausagefest. Fortunately the afterparty to the afterparty has a very different gender ratio 🙂 But I digress.]
It’s a great example of how a lack of diversity early is very hard to overcome. If the crowd at Quora’s parties are overwhelmingly male, a lot of women and transfolk are going to be a lot less interested in attending. If the subjects are primarily tech-oriented, a lot people who aren’t techies will be very bored. And if it’s the same old same old crowd of Valley “elites”, then people who don’t revolve around that universe will react with a collective yawn. Of course guys who prefer hanging out with guys and elites who like talking to each other will looooove it, and that’s a lot of Quora’s current user base, so they’ll get really positive feedback. The net net is that they’re very likely to reinforce existing diversity problems in the community.
jon | 01-Feb-11 at 8:39 am | Permalink
For example:
So the site can send you email you don’t care about, of course! Next, David goes into some detail about how confusing the ‘follow’ concept his, and how the help information isn’t helpful. And when it’s time to actually ask the question …
And a lot more. Definitely worth reading for anybody thinking of starting up a Quora competitor. David’s conclusion:
jon | 01-Feb-11 at 11:37 pm | Permalink
In Quora for Scientists, Bradley Voytek says
He’s got some smart points about scientists characteristics, including
Right! Actually nobody else likes to be wrong, especially in public, and a lot of Quora’s feedback mechanisms are very public. Just tonight a reviewer politely told me that my answer didn’t meet site guidelines and gave me a couple of ways to improve it. I thanked him and made the changes, so it’s certainly the right outcome. Still I would have been happier if we could have done it without a public discussion of how I had screwed up. But I digress.
Bradley’s got a bunch of suggestions that certainly seem worth exploring:
And if you think about it, they also apply (with variations) to any other “community of practice” where expertise is valued. Worth paying attention to. I wonder how StackOverflow addresses this?
Quora for Scientists by Bradley Voytek - Quora | 01-Feb-11 at 11:37 pm | Permalink
[…] […]
jon | 03-Feb-11 at 7:41 pm | Permalink
From Neville Fogerty’s Why? on Quora:
Lisa Borodkin (co-author of We the Users and the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights) replied
Here was my take:
March 7: Marius Kempe’s Does asking people to explain their answers to What’s the Best X? questions actually work? describes a well-crafted experiment with three different approaches to getting people to provide more information. None of them had even a 10% success rate, and two of the three provoked an “aggressive response” — i.e., they’re “enragers”, which lead to strong negative reactions. Making a suggestion in a comment got the best results: 3 successful edits (out of 60ish requests), no aggressive responses. Marius instead recommends collapsing them, even though this led to fewer edits and an aggressive response. Achilleas Vortselas commented:
That’s how it seemed to me as well. Which led to this discussion:
Interesting. With a limited number of moderators, it would seem a lot more efficient for “the crowd” to dismiss stuff like this if they don’t want to see it, and there are plenty of examples where it works just fine. For that matter the moderator could just downvote; that way, as soon as there are better answers these will sink to the bottom, and other users are also likely to get in the habit of downvoting. On top of that, the “collapsing” response sends a negative message that is likely to discourage (or enrage!) newcomers who are trying to help.
jon | 07-Feb-11 at 7:18 pm | Permalink
Hipster of course is best known for getting users on their mailing list without saying what they do. Actually I had a company like Hipster in an early draft of g0ddesses.net too. They were called Oooook and nobody knew what they did but wow, they sure pulled in the media attention. Part of Ooook’s shtick was that they would never take a meeting with anybody but they were fans of g0ddesses.net’s acting interim interim CEO’s blog so (gasp!) actually would meet in person. There were too many meetings in the book though so I cut it out. Maybe I should rethink things …
jon | 23-Feb-11 at 8:53 am | Permalink
Nicholas Carlson on Business Insider reports Quora tells us has rejected offers that would value the company at more than $300 million and that an investor responded to rumors of a billion-dollar acquisition offer with “I don’t know about that. But it would be too low.”
Business Insider also quotes a tech entpreneur they know as saying he wouldn’t want to be in Quora’s position:
Q: What should I read to find more about the Q&A space? A: Here’s some links. | 05-Mar-11 at 1:07 pm | Permalink
A short bibliography, including a link back to this post.
jon | 07-Mar-11 at 1:50 am | Permalink
Christie Ann Barakat’s Confessions of a Quora newbie has sparked some intense discussion on Quora. A few excerpts:
Kelly Craig kicked off the comments with
After which it got ugly, as the insiders attacked Christie. It’s almost like they didn’t want to listen.
More on the “Quora elite” here and here. The “People Rank” algorithm is likely to increase the power of the long-term users with lots of followers and upvotes and marginalize “newbies”. To me it seems like the most important members of their community are sabotaging their business by driving off newcomers. I wonder how Quora’s execs and investors see it?
jon | 15-Mar-11 at 10:05 pm | Permalink
The “recent events” he’s talking here about are the aftermath of Christie’s post I summarized in the previous comment.
A couple of people suggested Christie’s post would be good for Quora Review blog, so some of the discussion moved to the Quora Review Facebook group and QR editor Yishan Wong and a few other members Quora elite engaged in classic bullying behavior. The worst stuff was behind closed doors but a handful of follow-ups on Quora and the Quora Review give a taste of it (1, 2, 3). Christie left the group at which point the snide and condescending remarks escalated … eventually I got kicked out, although before then others had started to speak up as well.
It’s a lot like high school.
And it’s also a real tough situation for Quora. Some of their most active and well-respected users are attacking potential new community members and telling them to bugger off — a sharp contrast to the site’s stated ethos of “be nice”. If bullies like Yishan don’t change their behavior, they’re one more barrier to Quora’s getting to the more diverse audiences they need.
Venkat goes on
Hmm. Plenty of people (including, I believe, Quora’s investors and executives) don’t share Venkat’s cultural vision of it as “Darwinian” and “a far more of a loosely-governed outlaw Wild West, without much ‘rule of law,’ than the relatively polite, helpful and friendly exterior might suggest” or his philosophies the value of being annoying. It’s not whining when people challenge him and highlight the impact it has on the site. Of course it would be easier for him if others buggered off but he shouldn’t hold his breath.
That said, I totally agree with the last sentence. Indeed, I’d take it a step further. A competing culture that makes newcomers feel welcome and at home is likely to have a significant advantage over Quora — and offer a lot more diversity and choice.
Sounds like an opportunity to me.
July 4: Yishan’s How Google+ Shows That Google Still Doesn’t Understand Social objects to people he doesn’t know inserting themselves into his public conversations. Consistent with that, Yishan’s turned off comments on Quora.
jon | 16-Mar-11 at 3:33 pm | Permalink
Qato is a Q&A platform which supports different user interface “themes”, including one that’s very Quora-esque. Quora engineer Ben Newman hacked a Qato demo site and posted the exploit on Quora. Nice. The Hacker News discussion and comments on Quora have more.
jon | 17-Mar-11 at 11:02 am | Permalink
Marc Bodnick’s latest “new users” list is once again 90% male (see the previous discussion here). So that led me to ask What percentage of Quora users are women?. Quora Reviewer Achilleas Vortselas looked at a couple of different metrics implying it’s somewhere around 20%.
Alas, Quora doesn’t release demographic information, so it’s hard to know how representative these points are. Everything I see, though, makes it seem like that they’ve got a huge dilemma going forward. If long-time members of the community tend to be ranked higher by the PeopleRank algorithm, it will come out incredibly male-dominated. But if they adjust the ranking algorithm to make up for this, the people who have invested the most effort into the site in the earlier days are likely to feel that they’re being unfairly penalized. And who can blame them?
I was talking with a friend earlier today about Quora’s vulnerability to a competitor like the hypothetical women-led, diversity-oriented g0ddesses.net. Sure, there are plenty of people who don’t care, or even prefer a male-dominated environment. But a heck of a lot of women I know are tired of systems that are rigged against them — and so are likely to be interested in an alternatives. And I’m certainly not the only guy who’s tired of overwhelmingly-male environments.
Now imagine if this diversity-focused competitor starts to gain momentum and begins marketing to Quora’s current users. “Hey, check out this alternative to Quora, it may not have all the functionality yet but here are a few pages with really good information and discussions — and women aren’t second-class citizens there.” That’ll probably get at least some interest. And if it happens, it won’t be easy or cheap for Quora to pivot and fend off the threat. The heavily-skewed existing ratio will be hard to recover from, and on top of that there’s self-reinforcing norms as described in “Confessions of a Quora Newbie” and “Build, Belong or Bugger Off” and the biases baked into the all the data they’ve collected so far. . At the risk of quoting myself, diversity is like security: you really do need to think about it up front.
Image credit: “Red flags” by PierrickBlons, via Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons
April 23: John Morrow left a comment on my Quora post. Here’s the discussion:
July 9: According to Alex Chen’s answer to Which Quora users have posted the highest number of answers?, 90% of the 50 most active users are male.
jon | 26-Mar-11 at 8:51 am | Permalink
jon | 29-Mar-11 at 9:08 am | Permalink
Alas, so far I appear to be the only answerer who voted somebody else up. Mutualism, Quora-style 🙂
jon | 06-Apr-11 at 8:58 am | Permalink
Attitudes on Hacker News are general fairly cynical about Quora (seeing it as overhyped and not as good as Stack Overflow). Even so, a lot more Quora questions are starting to show up on HN — enough that it’s starting to cause some grumbling. For example:
It really is a great discussion on Quora, with perspectives from the founders of Dropbox, Pandora, VoiceTap, Buddy Beers, and many other startups — and some nicely-presented data by Josh Hannah So I feel somewhat churlish for bringing it up, but still …
With the exception of Karen Moon, who just posted this morning, the other 27 responses are all from guys.
jon | 06-Apr-11 at 10:13 am | Permalink
What are the incentives for each of these different groups?
For example, PeopleRank is set up to reward answerers. Answerers also get a lot of emotional incentives (upvotes and thanks) as well as potential disincentives (being downvoted, marked “not helpful”, or collapsed). Answers get a lot of visibility, and curators and questioners do too. But there really isn’t a lot there for editors.
Jolie O’Dell’s Quora: The Stats Behind the Buzz [INFOGRAPHIC]> on Mashable and Debbie Turner’s Quora Q & A Platform: Social Site Anatomy & Numbers, on Online Social Media have Senil’s full presentation, which also lists Quora’s top 10 categories as of November 2010: startups, entrepeneurship, food, science, venture capital, technology, Facebook, major internet companies, startup advice and strategy, Twitter … it’ll be interesting to see how that changes over time …
Liminal states :: Google ties employee bonuses to success in social | 09-Apr-11 at 11:50 am | Permalink
[…] I’m flashing! Back in 2006, the Ad Astra project proposed a strategy for Microsoft to outflank Google by leveraging its […]
jon | 13-Apr-11 at 8:41 am | Permalink
April 23: a couple days later, I did get a useful response from Adam Hoekstra. Still, compare-and-contrast my experience to Ben Schaechter’s great results in How Quora Has Helped Answer My Questions About Starting a Company. Ben’s an ex-TechCrunch writer, so is presumably pretty plugged in; one of his questions got a quick response from Quora founder Charlie Cheever. And Ben’s in the Valley, so there’s plenty of relevant information already there. By contrast, if I were interested in office space in Seattle, here’s what Quora offers me:
Meanwhile, a reference on Hacker News tipped me off to Stack Exchange founder Joel Spolsky’s answer to Forming a new software startup, how do I allocate ownership fairly? on answers.onstartups.com. [Diversity note: all the answers to this question are from guys.] So I decided to ask my question there as well. We shall see …
jon | 23-Apr-11 at 8:34 am | Permalink
It wasn’t just Quora who was down. Amazon’s problems affected like Reddit, Foursquare, Hootsuite, and many others. In IT World, Ahmar Abbas comments
Well done by Netflix! Their CEO Reed Hastings was previously founder/CEO of the great software engineering company Purify, which was a semi-competitor for my 1990s startup Intrinsa. A mutual friend invited me to one of Netflix’ IPO roadshow meetings, and I asked Reed whether he saw software quality as one of their competitive advantages. Seems like the answer is yes 🙂
More generally, it’s a good wakeup call — not just for Quora but for anybody thinking about cloud-based system architectures. Ever since Amazon booted Wikileaks in response to US government pressure I’ve been arguing that anybody hosting user-generated content needed to make sure they had contingency plans rather than relying solely on Amazon. This is one more reason.
Quora got the site back up in read-only mode in about 20 hours, and restored full functionality the next morning. Alas, their most recent backups were inaccessible, so there was some lossage …
In What changes if any is Quora making to avoid future AWS downtime?, Quora engineer Albert Sheu talks about their future plans.
jon | 24-May-11 at 12:56 pm | Permalink
This edition of Marc Bodnick’s new users to watch is a great illustration of the challenges overcoming initial biases in the community. These days many of the recommendations on the list come from other people besides Marc. Quora product manager Sandra Liu Huang and designer Rebekah Cox suggested five women and one guy. By contrast the guys that Marc talked to didn’t recommend any women at all. So despite an obvious effort, the list as a whole remains over 70% male.
Meanwhile, Robert Scoble kicked off a discussion of People Rank. Robert and others quite rightly objects to Quora’s lack of transparency, and Achilleas Vortselas has a great summary:
Update, June 6: This week’s New Users to Follow list for the week starts off with a dozen guys and winds up about 2/3 male. Once again Quora employees Sandra and Rebekah recommended women; this time, so did Charlie Cheever and Andy Barton. Overall, though, guys recommended 13 guys and only 3 women. As existing biases get more and more entrenched, they get harder and harder to change …
jon | 29-May-11 at 12:11 pm | Permalink
My first Quora spam!
jon | 01-Jun-11 at 1:32 pm | Permalink
Continuing the “big red flag” discussion on Quora …
Here’s my response:
jon | 01-Jun-11 at 9:35 pm | Permalink
Google Trends’ report on Quora traffic unsurprisngly shows that it peaked in January and then went down after the site temporarily introduced barriers to new participants. Traffic dropped again in March (StackOverflow had a similar drop around the same time, so it may well be due to changes in Google’s search algorithm or traffic measurement) …
And hasn’t increased since. Hmm …
Gary Rivlin’s Wired story Does Quora have all the answers? gives some context for the drop-off after the January spike — and once again raises the question of getting beyond the Silicon Valley focus:
Indeed. A followon thread on Quora discusses Rivlin’s comment “Stray from the startup scene, though, and Quora can look disappointingly like a ghost town.”
July 17: Compete.com’s statistics tell a somewhat different story: unique visitors have steadily climbed since April, and are now back to February’s levels. According to Compete, it’s Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange whose numbers are flat.
jon | 03-Jun-11 at 11:15 am | Permalink
A couple of days ago, I had a question about Startup Weekend. What communication and project management tools work well for Startup Weekend? really seems like the kind of thing that’s in Quora’s sweet spot. So I asked it, put the obvious tags, and sent it to a couple of Startup Weekend folks I know on Quora. And of course I tweeted it and Facebooked it. The result so far …
Crickets.
At roughly the same time, I also asked Stack Exchange (more precisely, on answers.onstartups.com, powered by Stack Exchange and hosted by On Startups) and very quickly I got three good responses. I also asked on Hacker News, and got some good responses there. (You can see the summary and links in Communications tools for Startup Weekend: Some recommendations.)
Of course, it’s just one data point. But it sure is an interesting one …
An interesting data point: Quora vs. ... by Jon Pincus - Quora | 03-Jun-11 at 11:25 am | Permalink
[…] one …(originally posted on Liminal States as a comment on Life imitates art imitates life at http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/… )Suggest edits to the author of this post:BIU @ A couple of […]
jon | 29-Jun-11 at 11:27 am | Permalink
Hmm. I wonder why nobody’s suggested that TechStars Seattle mentors Greg Gottesmann and Chris DeVore disclose their relevant affiliations? That said, they’re good people to answer the question; and other voices are being heard as well — a great example of the importance of anonymous speech. And kudos to Quora for supporting anonymous voting!
From a gender perspective, though, as I write this all 15 votes are by guys. So are both non-anonymous answers. If I recall correctly, since TechStars Seattle’s mentors are 90%+ male as well … so this could easily turn into guys voting up guys who are saying good things about guys.
jon | 04-Jul-11 at 10:36 am | Permalink
Good question! Here’s what Chris Brogan thinks:
What is “Google Experts” found in Google+ source code? has more about the hints of integrating Aardvark’s Q&A functionality with Google+.
jon | 07-Jul-11 at 1:26 pm | Permalink
On Google+, Thomas Hawk asked What happened to Quora? Alex Schleber’s Why Quora is Toast (for mainstreaming) summarizes the responses.
Meanwhile, on ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez asks “Is Google Plus already beating Quora?”
PS: Sarah’s Why Quora Thinks I’m a Scraper, from about six weeks ago, is a great description of her being blocked by Quora for reading too many posts via RSS — and their less-than-helpful response.
jon | 09-Aug-11 at 11:48 am | Permalink
Nym | 13-Aug-11 at 1:22 pm | Permalink
So, I hadn’t heard about Quora before a conversation on G+. I decided to investigate just because it was mentioned as another social service. While I’ll confess that a Q&A service centered around real names is probably not ideal for me. I did sign up using a mononym. Nym NLN.
The next day I get a message in my inbox explaining the rules of Quora to me. Quoted below in it’s entirety. The part worth noting. Is the admin’s name really ‘Quora Admin’. Do note that the policy that is linked does nothing to define real name, but says that if a moderator suspects you are not using a real name, they will ask for proof of your identity which consists of paperwork that may not reflect your real name.
Quora Admin
Hello,
One of the rules of Quora is that everyone uses his or her real full name. Do you mind changing your name to reflect that?
If this is a mistake and you are already using your real name, just reply to this message letting us know that.
You can change your name here:
Edit Profile Name
And you can find more details here:
Do I have to use my real name on Quora? Can businesses or organizations have a user account?
If you would like to ask, answer, and follow questions anonymously, Quora supports this and can also prevent your name from appearing in search engine results. See the Anonymity on Quora FAQ for more information.
Thank you
Nym | 13-Aug-11 at 1:38 pm | Permalink
This has gone further, Quora Admin states the reason they are nameless is because they’re breaking a second bit of their own policy. They use one account to represent many individuals.
Nym | 13-Aug-11 at 1:46 pm | Permalink
Annnnnd a final update. Evidently the perception that they aren’t following their own rules is cleared up by the fact that as far as participating *on* the site goes, Quora Admin is a limited account, like any other user with a nym.
jon | 20-Aug-11 at 11:07 am | Permalink
Why has there been an outcry against real names on Google+ but not on Quora? are interesting in a lot of different ways.
Bonnie L. Nadri | 23-Aug-11 at 11:05 am | Permalink
I cannot speak for any but myself, obviously, but for me, Quora is not a place where I would consider the need for a pseudonym; the place is built around the idea of developing personal/professional credibility for quality of answers and this context is generally aligned with an academic/business/career perspective that lends better to real name use than otherwise.
Given that Quora is a closed community, the consistency between stated purpose and function(ality) of the site is, to my mind, also in alignment.
This said, I can understand why some would want to use a pseudonym, but I also understand why (given the above), it is not a choice presented by the Quora team.
As for reasons why your answer isn’t getting voted up; most engaging the topic at the moment are doing so well outside a specific application or context; naturally, this means that answers that focus on a particular context (especially those that do so to the exclusion of the broader discussion) are not likely to be considered as valuable.
I am fascinated that you consider Yishan’s answer off-topic or rantish; while I do not agree with all his points, he is, I think, spot on about the reasons why real names and pseudonymous names continue to clash online. To wit, that authentication and deniability are (and should be!!) managed independently of one another and it is the attempt to lump them together (for various reasons) that creates this problem.
Succinctly, Google wouldn’t be in this position had they allowed the user to retain choice about when they are authenticated (i.e., verified, publicly known, etc) and when they are permitted to act with deniability.
In fact, had they unveiled functionality that (a) kept my real name veiled until I chose otherwise, (b) allowed one or more pseudonyms that could be manged where/as I choose, and (c) committed to never selling any of my information or my habits except in aggregate format, I likely would not have issue with them (or have left them) at all.
jon | 24-Aug-11 at 11:47 am | Permalink
Thanks for the reply, Bonnie. Good point that the people using Quora for professional and academic credibility purposes are likely to find it more useful to do so under the name they use for their career; and Quora’s got an explicit exceptions to their policy for people who are sufficiently famous under an alternate name. I upvoted your answer 🙂
As for Yishan’s answer, putting aside for a moment the question of whether he’s right or wrong, I really don’t see how it responds to the question. Those of us who think that names are more fundamentally about identity (as opposed to authentication and deniability) think that with respect to Quora as well as Google. So he’s not explaining the different reactions in the two cases. Instead he’s going on a great length, agressively bolding, attacking danah boyd, and ignoring everything that’s been written about the nymwars.
Regarding why I’m not getting more upvotes, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying about context. Do you mean that most of the voters don’t know Skud’s and the Rainydays’ role in the nymwars, and so don’t see my explanation as providing the value of some of the other answers? If so that seems plausible. But I don’t think that can account for the downvotes I’ve gotten.
In any case, the net result is that Quora as a whole thinks that the opinions of people actually involved in the topic the question’s about aren’t particularly valuable, which was the point I was trying to make. It’ll be interesting to see whether your answer fares better.
jon | 24-Aug-11 at 11:56 am | Permalink
Bonnie L. Nadri | 24-Aug-11 at 2:43 pm | Permalink
Jon, I think we may be talking past one another in relation to Yishan’s commentary; I have no interest in the person’s agenda (or lack), but it does seem that identify is not mutually exclusive to the matters of authentication and deniability (to me, anyway)… in other words, I find the three concepts work far better together than in conflict with one another and feel no need to context Yishan’s opinion about nyms as it doesn’t actually affect that the three work together (why waste energy, eh?).
Names, obviously, ARE about identity; just as any word is an identifier. It would be obtuse to an extreme to pretend otherwise. This said, it is equally true that the crux of the matter is that the reasons why names become an issue is due to incomplete, vague, or otherwise inconsistent considerations in relation to authentication and deniability.
If one asserts that:
An individual has the right to choose how they are identified (outside of legally in such venues as legal identity is required).
Then one must also accept that the concept of deniability is inalienable in all contexts outside the legal as well.
Additionally, one must accept that authentication has the capacity to destroy deniability, thus, issues of authentication must give way to deniability in all venues that are not legal in nature.
If this becomes the foundational relationship, resolving all matters is greatly simplified AND the primary assertion (as above outlined) remains unassailed.
THIS is why I find no need to care about Yishan’s words except those that clearly set forth the relevant concepts. That Yishan did not correctly interpret them, did not seem to fully understand the implications and this relationship between identity, authentication, and deniability does not in any manner detract from it (except to those who are distracted by it)…. I remain on point. 🙂
On the upvote matter, yes, the people are not known thus, not known to be credible, thus the answer may not be found legitimate (understandable in so far as we’re speaking of a closed community in which previously mentioned academic/business/career context is primary). As to downvotes, I suspect those who are aware of this and hold an opposing opinion are merely exercising their ability to detract from/work to remove it from view.
I do not think it as much a matter that “opinions of people involved do not count” as much as it is a stereotype (not uncommon) of involved persons being somewhat strongly polarized and much less likely to discuss/logically argue the core points (i.e., heavy preferential bias impeding discourse). Also, that the traditional academic/business perspective that “it’s not accurate until/unless a vetted authority says it is” is in effect.
Frankly, this should not be surprising and I would suggest that a deliberately impersonal discourse would be of far greater assistance in a venue like Quora in particular, but probably elsewhere, too. Vinegar versus honey… even as I freely admit it is hard to pour forth honey when it’s vinegar roiling about in the mind. (grin)
jon | 29-Aug-11 at 4:32 pm | Permalink
Bonnie, apologies for the belated response. I agree we’re talking past each other about Yishan’s answer. The point I was trying to make is that it doesn’t respond to the question. Yes, I agree that identity interacts with authentication and deniability; the question is about why there hasn’t been an outcry about Quora’s real names policy but there is about Google.
On the upvotes, my guess is that most of the people saw Yishan’s answer in their feed and voted it up without looking at other answers. Jay Wacker’s is excellent, very clearly written, right below Yishan’s, and he’s a Stanford professor … and it only has 10 votes! As Stormy Shippy reported in A Connected Quora: Voting Patterns, everybody loves Yisah’s content; he’s part of the core group that routinely votes each other up, so his answers get plenty of visibility.
For the downvotes, it might well be people who disagree with me — many people ignore the policy that disagreement shouldn’t lead to a downvote. If it’s a matter of my perceived authority in this area, that’s pretty funny … not to toot my own horn or anything, but I have waaaaaay better credentials in this area than Yishan or most of the other people in the thread. Then again who knows. It could be that some people just voted me down because they don’t like me. I asked why in a comment but unsurprisingly nobody responded.
Why do you think that a deliberately impersonal discourse would work better on Quora? Yishan’s discourse is extremely personal, and he thrives there; ditto Mark Bodnick and many others. And an impersonal style doesn’t work well for me much of anywhere. So, I certainly agree that I could use more honey on Quora … but I think I’ll keep the personal touch 🙂
Bonnie L. Nadri | 29-Aug-11 at 4:56 pm | Permalink
Well, it would be foolish to deny that there is a dynamic of cronyism in all human groups. That said, there is also something of a taboo in regard to asking after one’s rank (not just at Quora) and this may play into a bit.
There hasn’t been an outcry at Quora because, frankly, most of the people there are on decidedly “main street” and, I think, are far more likely to support real name use than not… The ramifications and future challenge to things like privacy and choice don’t really inhabit their regular thoughts.
jon | 02-Sep-11 at 3:23 pm | Permalink
Back in late July, Quora introduced “Credits”, an incentive system to get people to answer questions. Alexia Tsotsis has more on TechCrunch. Since I didn’t answer the fist question, looks like my price went up 🙂
keith | 09-Sep-11 at 1:01 pm | Permalink
Quora is dying. It has a core group of about 50 heavy users who spend their days generating 90% of the content half of which consists of back-slapping each other for being so smart. Even worse you have mods and reviewers censoring material they don’t agree with. It’s degenerated into one circle-jerk.
There is no business model there.
keith | 09-Sep-11 at 1:03 pm | Permalink
Sean Owczarek is a one boy wrecking crew on Quora with his idioticly juevenile questions.
jon | 10-Sep-11 at 3:07 pm | Permalink
In More About “Be Nice” And Why It’s Bad Yishan clarified
Well yeah. A rule like “be nice” necessarily involves calling bullies, trolls, and others on it when they’re not being nice. Bob Sutton’s “No Assholes Rule” is a good example of this, with a lot of evidence for why it’s a good idea. I guess I don’t fully understand Yishan’s argument.
Anyhow, Mark Hughes responded in Why Quora’s “Be Nice” Rule Isn’t Actually Harmful. So the voting on the two posts gives an idea of what the Quora community thinks. As I write this
Of course there are a lot more guys than women voting, so the overall vote is quite close — 54/47 in favor of being nice. And a lot of members of the “Quora elite” are siding with Yishan. For example here’s Venkatesh Rao in an excerpt from his comment on Mark’s post:
I wonder how Quora’s founders feel about “not quite the Lord of the Flies”?
Back in March, after some particularly egregious bullying by Yishan and friends, I said
Six months later, it’s still true.
jon | 10-Dec-11 at 6:03 pm | Permalink
Quora’s spent the last several months focused on improving engagement by, guess what, gamifying. Quora Credits and the accompanying changes limited how much people can interact with each other, introduced a rich-get-richer currency called Quora Credits, and introducing a tax. Yishan Wong quickly emerged as the richest man on Quora with 94,000 credits — and started running an investment scheme.
What could possibly go wrong?
jon | 22-Dec-11 at 7:32 pm | Permalink
jon | 02-Jan-12 at 12:02 pm | Permalink
Alexa’s comparison of Pinterest and Quora traffic, late 2011
My first reaction to Pinterest was “It’s pretty!” and so far everybody else I’ve showed it too had a similar response. As well as the visuals, Pinterest’s demographics — more women than men — are a huge contrast with Quora. And the results have been impressive so far, to say the least. In late December, Quora responded.
So what do you know, while the details are somewhat different than they were in the draft of g0ddesses.net, it sure looks to me like life is imitating art in one key way. Diversity is outperforming.
Has Quora lost its way? has Quoran’s reactions, including a discussion between me and Mark Hughes about rich-get-richer systems and the Quora 1%.
jon | 08-Jul-12 at 9:55 am | Permalink
banane’s There Are No Women On StackOverflow… Or Are There? summarizes a discussion on a women’s engineering list about why women don’t participate on SO:
jon | 23-Oct-13 at 3:38 pm | Permalink
See the original article here
Hacker News discussion here
jon | 25-Feb-14 at 5:55 pm | Permalink
A couple of quick notes …
From Quentin Hardy’s Quora and the Search for Truth, in the New York Times:
The article also estimats current usage at 1.5 million unique in December, about half of Stack Overflow.
And Quora Data Scientist Don van der drift’s writeup on The Quora Topic Network has some good information as well.
jon | 24-Mar-14 at 10:29 am | Permalink
From Quora Launches Verified Profiles, in TechCrunch:
Getting Obama is certainly a coup; and if Cory Booker starts posting again (his last posts were a couple of years ago) that could be interesting as well. Hard to how much having Mark Cuban, Craig Newmark, Ashton Kutcher et al. “verified” will help; they all have accounts there and occasionally participate. And more generally, there are 19 profiles in the list on TechCrunch — 17 guys (plus Sheryl Sandberg and actress/writer Michelle Rodriguez). So I’m kind of skeptical this will help with diversity …
jon | 29-Mar-14 at 11:38 am | Permalink
Some of the themes that come up a lot are being exposed to questions that are sexist or woman-hating. Anita Santz phrases it like this “Questions about women that are disrespectful need to be flagged and reworded from the get-go. Otherwise, just seeing questions like this, much less being A2A’d [asked to answer] on them is like walking into a party and getting a signal that it’s just not a safe place to be.”
A lot of people discuss problems with anonymous questions, answers, and comments. Quora requires your real name for your account but lets people with accounts participate “anonymously” — although Quora employees can see who’s made each anonymous post, and it’s discoverable by law enforcement and criminal cases. So it’s basically the worst case for anonymity, all the potential for abuse, no privacy benefit, no real protection for dissenting speech. But, there are some good suggestions about tools to improve the situation: the ability to disallow anonymous A2A’s for example, or filter out anonymous questions or comments.
One specific piece of functionalty that comes up several times is the ability to delete messages in your inbox. I know, I know, The Tapestries doesn’t have it yet either; but Quora’s been running for four years and has raised $71 million so it’s a little less excusable in their case!
Erica Friedman says “Most importantly, I’d really like to be able to protect other women from dealing with crap”. She suggests a “troll” button, wonders whether it would be possible to ban (or limit visibility of) questions like “what the fuck is wrong with women”.
And lots more good stuff too. Definitely worth reading — check it out!
jon | 09-Apr-14 at 8:58 am | Permalink
Quora’s raised another $80M; TechCrunch reports a valuation of $900M.
As Douglass Macmillan observes in With $80 Million in New Capital, Quora Still Has No Business Model in the Wall Street Journal:
jon | 26-Apr-14 at 8:10 am | Permalink
Meanwhile, Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late? Some good points, with some concrete suggestions, before it got closed by the moderators as “primarily opinion-based”. Good comments on Hacker News as well.
jon | 29-Apr-14 at 10:07 pm | Permalink
Oliver Emberton did several interesting posts analyzing number of followers. He didn’t explicitly look at diversity but it’s hard to miss. For example in Celebs are losing, Top Writers are winning, Gayle Laakmann McDowell (#25) is the only woman in the top 40; and Balaji Viswanathan, Yishan Wong, and Jeremiah Owyang may well be the only non-whites. Things are only a little better for the top writers, but not that much …
Speaking of Gayle, here’s a great question she asked:
Most people don’t seem to think it’s a problem. Funny how that works. My answer is languishing near the bottom. Big surprise.
jon | 11-May-14 at 1:19 pm | Permalink
On TechCrunch, Adam tells Josh Constine that YC invested an amount similar to their standard $120K (which would be about 0.013% ownership). Josh also has some interesting thoughts about the potential value to Quora and to YC.
Hard to see how this will help with the diversity challenges, though.
(Cross-posted in Tissue Turgor and Pink Elephants)
jon | 23-Jun-14 at 11:46 am | Permalink
Violet Blue's Quora's misogyny problem makes some excellent points, for example:
Indeed. And she has some specific suggestions for what Quora could do differently:
jon | 15-Nov-14 at 12:20 pm | Permalink
Ellen Pao will step in as interim CEO at Reddit, and founder Alexis Ohanian (who's been very active on the civil liberties front) is returning as Executive Chairman. What does that have to do this thread? It’s because the CEO who resigned was Yishan Wong, who was one of the biggest bullies on Quora.
Y Combinator's Sam Altman:
And on Hacker News he adds:
In the New York Times, Mike Isaacs gives some context:
blog.reddit — what's new on reddit: Coming home, on redditblog
jon | 17-Mar-16 at 12:14 am | Permalink
My email update from Quora (that I don’t remember signing up for, but that’s another story) had a link to What is some career advice that people usually learn too late in life?.
The top answer by Matt Cohler of Benchmark (play to your strengths, and be sharp rather than round), was written at 11 a.m. has 150,000 views
No other post has more than 1000.
Talk about rich-get-richer and winner-take-all …
On the gender side, there’s only one woman: Shirley Mason is fourth with Don’t bring your personal life to work.
jon | 09-Apr-18 at 9:02 am | Permalink
Some Twitter discussions of Stack Overflow …
jon | 22-Jul-18 at 2:18 pm | Permalink
A journalist contacted me about a Quora answer from back in 2011 to How common is sexism or sexual harassment in conversations between female entrepreneurs and male investors. My answer (which said that at least 1/3 of the women I talked to had experienced problems) is near the bottom of the page even it has more upvotes than anything of the others (most of them from women). What’s with that?
Meanwhile, the guy saying “I think that the type of people who accumulate capital and invest it wisely are not the type of people who would do rash things” (hahahaha) has been a “Top Writer” on Quora for the last six years.
It’s almost like the situation was common knowledge six years before so many people were shocked, shocked, by last summer’s VC harassment scandals – but the Silicon Valley (white, male) “elites” posting and voting on Quora were in denial.
jon | 28-Jun-19 at 10:48 am | Permalink
From Recode: Question-and-answer site Quora still exists, and it’s now worth $2B
I'm so old that I remember when $2B was considered a sky-high valuation for a business that has been around for decade and still hasn't figured out how to make money.