What can we learn from Quora?

Question

When we were doing the VC rounds, the company (rightly or not) that was on every VC's radar in the Q&A field was Quora.

Link to sign up: http://quora.com/hackernews

Quora is a question and answer site focused on getting really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.

The big idea is to try to get every question page to be the best possible resource for anyone who wants to know about the answer. One way to think about it is as a cache for the research that people compile by searching the web or asking others. The feeling you get when you see a Wikipedia article and you think "Oh, that's going to have all the information I want about that" is the feeling we want to create across a much broader space.

The best things you can do are asking and following questions you're interested in, answering other people's questions, and voting or commenting on answers.

Right now, you need to use your Facebook account to sign up. We might add other ways to join later on.

We're still in beta and are making a lot of changes and have a lot of work to do but wanted to get some feedback.

I personally don't think Quora is even on the same field as us -- we're playing baseball, they're playing football. Here's why:

• we don't care about the social graph, we care about the information graph. Even if that leads off-site or comes from Google.
• we believe that the best content comes from topic specific sites (cooking, programming, parenting), and the communities that form around those topics, not a "generic one size fits all Q&A engine"
• we're not tied to Facebook (and its social graph)
• we allow 100% anonymous viewers
• we creative commons all our content (unsure what they do there)

This is one of those things where it's the darling of every VC's eye, and presumably as a result, there's apparently a burgeoning community of VC-hangers-on and wannabe entrepreneurs who hang out on Quora, so if you're looking for Q&A on those specific topics, it's a good destination.

Anyway, I was curious what the community thought of Quora -- we're always willing to adapt useful features from other sites, but I'm not sure we're going to drop our baseball bat and put on a football helmet, either..

Answer 1

We can learn that VCs aren't worth chasing.

Answer 2

I'm adding this for everyone's amusement.

Answer 3

Ignoring all the ingratiating "social" bits, auto-followed topics (yeah, of course I want to be notified of any new questions about Paul Graham) and ugly, crowded, Facebook-ish layout...

...There are some good ideas:

(Update: all these appear to have been implemented)

1. Topic (tag) pages have editable summaries, and display recent answers. (Expanded at Atwood's request...) There are two parts to this, and they aren't terribly related.

   1. Editable summaries touches on something that has been requested before in various forms... Quora provides a user-editable "About" block at the top of each tag page: I'd like to see SO do the same, somewhere around where the tag sponsor block sits, and of course utilizing Markdown formatting. Not all tags would need or benefit from this of course, and I suspect different sub-communities would find different uses for it (see questions linked above). One way to implement this would be to have a per-tag CW question where changes could be discussed in comments and the current revision pulled automatically into the tag-page...

   2. Display recent answers is fairly self-explanatory: all of the current views list questions, even Active and Hot. Would be nice to see maybe five recent answers posted to tagged questions when viewing a tag, as (for certain tags...) answers are often more interesting than the questions. This goes back to the original, "I have 5 minutes to kill, give me something interesting to read" SO use-case.

2. Easy to use, near real-time notifications for events (answers posted, posts edited, etc.) - home button lights up and hovering over it displays a drop down listing recent events, with the ability to click through them and view details. This happens even if you don't reload the page: I'd barely finished writing my question when it notified me that someone had retagged it - nice!

3. The ability to follow individual questions seems a lot more useful than SO's "favorite" list, especially combined with the notification system.

4. The ability for new users to "suggest" edits by actually editing a post and then attaching a comment to it is great - it's a bit of work to get editing ability on SO, and while that's generally a good thing, it does leave new users unable to contribute in that area even when they have something valuable to add... Letting authors act as gatekeepers for untrusted edits is an elegant compromise.

Most of this has been suggested here at one time or another though.

Answer 4

My guess on why Quora is 'on every VC's radar in the Q&A field'...

Have a look at the Quora About page and then have a look at the SO About page and see what's missing.

Notice anything?

Can you say 'chock full o' marketing goodness'?

SO is targeted at people (uh, programmers) who know what they want and can make up their own minds.

Quora seems to be targeted at people who love to follow the crowd and be told what is good, hence the necessary marketing voodoo mumbo jumbo.

It's no surprise that the VCs (uh, not programmers) have an investment-boner for a good looking, slick, behold-my-fancy-marketing-words site like Quora. And let them.

IMHO, just keep doing what you are doing.
If you have to change what you do or who you are to get some love, then that love won't be very fulfilling.

Answer 5

First off, linking up my Facebook account? Why in the name of all holy things? I hate associating other accounts with something. I don't want to type my password into anything other than the service. I don't want you to look at my "friends" and make suggestions. I don't want you to send emails to all of my contacts. Social networking is something I'm glad to turn on and off as need be.

If you need to register just to view the stuff then I'm already turned off.

Second, I really don't like how they have the non-marked up editor. I want to see the tags in the answer box.

I haven't honestly given the site a lot of time due to the above immediate nuisances.

Answer 6

I like the idea of having one portal to follow all your topics/questions of interest.

When coupled with better following of interesting tags, you could have one site that keeps you up to date, rather than having to visit several seperate sites.

This is going to be especially more useful when/if new Stack Exchange or "Trilogy" arise that you wish to follow. Though I see no problems for simply consuming (reading questions), I have no idea how this should work with posting new questions through a portal...

And as already mentioned, the inline editing is much, much easier than having to go to an editing page!

Answer 7

The first thing that hits me is the subscriptions. While we have interesting and ignored tags, I think (and this is probably a duplicate request) that having some sort of mechanism that fed me more of a few types of questions on a home-like page would be really beneficial.

If we look at what we have now, we have JavaScript filtering for tags that we don't like and highlighting for ones we do. I realize it is like this because then it is easy to cache because the server simply sends out the home page, and the client filters it.

I like Quora's pull mechanism, where people pulled questions into their feed instead of just filtering out stuff they didn't like. This lets the user have an entire page filled of things that interest them instead of the current Stack Overflow home, which at least for me has 1/3-2/3rds of the page filtered out (adding C, C++, ASP, and Java to your ignored list will do that).

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I feel that you can't really do friends AND reputation. You can only pick one, because they are kind of conflicting if you are trying to get a system where reputation quantifies your community trust/worth, but friends just up vote you.

In this topic I think Stack Overflow is a big improvement over Quora because the type of people that use Stack Overflow, programmers, probably don't have that big of a social circle that they haven't already turned to before asking their question. Instead it is just a giant knowledge dump where anyone and everyone can try to answer it.

You can also edit everything from day 1. Seems like a lot of damage could be done really quickly in that regard. Reputation +1

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OMG OMG!

If you start to type an answer, it pops up an Ajax box saying who is currently answering this question. That is so incredibly awesome!

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Answer 8

Looks like Quora is all about the cult of personality and less about the actual content. The posts have so much author clutter that your eye and attention has to create blocks to get to the actual content.

Two good features:

• Auto-next pager - Kind of like endless scrolling but done in that Twitter style. Where if you're at the bottom, you have the option of loading only by clicking a button, instead of having it do for you. Which would be annoying in cases of where you just want to sit at the bottom of the page.

• Interest follow - They have it on questions and people, but it would be nice to click next to a tag on a question to have that auto-added to your list of interesting (or ignored) instead of having to copy the text or type it up on another page.

Answer 9

Q&A for all range of subjects & the sum of all human knowledge? Sure, why not. Let's let some guys from Facebook give us that too. Quora is as ambitious as it is useless, which is not to say that VCs won't devour it whole (this could be a fabulous question on Quora).

Stack Overflow, et al. is great because it is partial (like truth). It relegates itself to certain subjects. It sets a limit on its reach, establishes authorities on certain subjects, rewards good answers and punishes bad ones. It even goes so far as to weed out bad, misplaced or irrelevant questions altogether, while Quora embraces the warm sophic mantra of a high school guidance counselor: "There are no stupid questions." Stack Overflow leaves the lofty goal of peeing on every tree in the forest to Yahoo, Google, Quora and whoever else wants it.

If you post a dumb answer on Quora one can only hope someone on Facebook might have the sense to de-friend you. Using Quora is like letting Wikitravel plan your family holidays. Let the VCs have it, they can lead us into the next bubble carrying it aloft.

Answer 10

I love Quora, but it's entertainment, not information.

When it comes to code and programming, I find myself correcting ignorant myth-based information on Quora at least as often as I am actually posting a new answer.

That pretty much never happens on Stack Overflow.

When you bring in the masses, your signal-to-noise ratio drops off a cliff.

It's a GOOD thing that Stack Overflow doesn't have Quora's usership.

Answer 11

Wanton deletions are a big problem on Stack Overflow.

On Quora, content is preserved, and if not "useful", it gets downvoted and de-emphasized from search. Note the quotes around "useful". One man's trash is another man's treasure. On Quora, content can be retrieved later by those interested, because (with the exception of blatant spam) Quora doesn't assume that a bunch of individuals can decide for an entire site.

On Stack Overflow, moderators are assumed to have the infinite wisdom to decide between right and wrong for everyone. Spam and bogus questions are easy to decide. Off-topic questions are somewhat easy. But not everything is black and white.

This assumption of absolute objectivity on the part of moderators and users who can delete posts, results in disturbing situations where a moderator can single-handedly (without any voting!) delete a question that has been up for four years and has hundreds of upvotes, without regard to anyone who's bookmarked it, without sending a courtesy copy of the content to those who've written it; in short without giving a damn.

This wanton destruction of content makes contributing on Stack Overflow extremely frustrating for me. As soon as I write a post or like one, I take a snapshot of it using a web archiving service, because you never know when your content will be wiped out. Worse, you can't even access your own deleted content.

Answer 12

In Quora, each question can be given an answer summary which is merely an editiable post that stays up the top. In Stack Overflow, this can of course be done by Community Wiki, but if a question already has many answers, then the summary may be buried. However, this type of feature is most useful for survey type questions, which are mainly community wiki anyway, and so someone could simply add the summary to the question. Having an explicit option would encourage this to happen more often, at the cost of greater complexity, of course.

The search box autocompletes with topic names or question titles. It is nice to have an idea of what search will bring up, as you can adjust what you search for (add more keywords) or sometimes avoid completely typing something out. I think this would work very well with favorite questions for Stack Overflow.

Another feature they offer is followup questions. This seems to place the question in the related questions section on the side and also creates a link from the new question back to the old one. Currently, the method for following up questions is to post a link in a comment or to edit the original question. Featurewise, this seems to only add a slight convenience (no need to manually link the question) and a slightly increased visibility (comments can be buried).

However, socially, I believe its impact would become much greater. I only registered today, so I haven't had a chance to use it much myself, but I will attempt to speculate on the effects anyway. Firstly, having a follow up question would greatly increase how much it is used - it almost seems rude to post a link from someone else's question to a new question you have asked that hasn't been answered yet. I can imagine that a series of questions could become almost like a discussion thread on a normal forum, but in a way that is natural to the Stack Overflow paradigm. I think that this feature would be especially interesting for Stack Exchange, where people will want to use it for more discussiony things.

Sorry, no screenshots, their site isn't working for me at the moment.

Update: Quora now saves drafts of posts.

Answer 13

^{(Posted as an answer due to the length.)}

Quora is just starting up. They want to be a definitive source for everything that is asked on it. It might not be easy, but surely achievable. They plan to make it available for scraping, and their terms are slightly open. They might make it big, and we will have another resource to link to (like Wikipedia) and that is not bad, but will they share the same ethics? In the future, we may see Stack Overflow providing quick answers to the questions at hand and linking to Quora for further intensive reading on the topic at hand. The intensive nature of the content, IMHO, will define the crowd at Quora, which will be different from Stack Overflow (but will have an overlap nonetheless).

Send questions to experts on any topic

That is not what Stack Overflow does, we allow "experts" to see the questions, but we do not "send" questons to other users or experts. Such questions Quora would probably be tweeting or pasting to the walls.

Answer questions by following topics that interest you

This is what Stack Overflow does.

Build consensus around the best answer

The same as with Stack Overflow, and even the screenshot is so similar.

Quora Usage Terms vs SO License

Subject to these Terms, Quora gives you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to re-post any of the Content on Quora anywhere on the rest of the web provided that the Content was added to the Service after April 22, 2010, and provided that the user who created the content has not explicitly marked the content as not for reproduction, and provided that you: (a) do not modify the Content; (b) attribute Quora with a human and machine-followable link (an A tag) linking back to the page displaying the original source of the content on quora.com (c) upon request, either by Quora or a user, remove the user's name from Content which the user has subsequently made anonymous; (d) upon request, either by Quora or by a user who contributed to the Content, make a reasonable effort to update a particular piece of Content to the latest version on quora.com; and (e) upon request, either by Quora or by a user who contributed to the Content, make a reasonable attempt to delete Content that has been deleted on quora.com.

Terms which do not match:

1. do not modify the Content is starkly against CC-by-SA's You are free to Remix

2. upon request, either by Quora or by a user who contributed to the Content, make a reasonable effort to update a particular piece of Content to the latest version on quora.com has no match in the CC-by-SA license.

3. upon request, either by Quora or by a user who contributed to the Content, make a reasonable attempt to delete Content that has been deleted on quora.com has no match in the CC-by-SA license.

Terms which match:

1.attribute Quora with a human and machine-followable link is similar to You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor

Dubious Terms?

1. upon request, either by Quora or a user, remove the user's name from Content which the user has subsequently made anonymous vs CC-by-SA's Moral Rights Clause In addition to the right of licensors to request removal of their name from the work when used in a derivative or collective they don't like, copyright laws in most jurisdictions around the world (with the notable exception of the US except in very limited circumstances) grant creators "moral rights" which may provide some redress if a derivative work represents a "derogatory treatment" of the licensor's work. appears deceptively similar to me. It may also be compared to the Privacy part of the CC-by-SA license

Quora's license terms are not so open at the moment, especially due to the absence of remixing rights. This is surely not something that Stack Overflow would like to emulate.

Avid (and) users of quora (I don't have an invite), may be able to tell more.

If they want their question page to be THE authoritative page for that topic, they are aiming towards being an encyclopedia, rather than a question and answer site. Authoritative content which already exist in textbooks, may not always be reproducible in full without trampling on copyrights. And content produced by "experts" may not be authoritative for everyone.

Stack Overflow's philosophy of making the Internet a better place is more valuable than making a website "THE" place for something.

As far as Quora's social links are concerned, using Facebook to recruit users is something that some of Stack Overflow's sister sites try (but on a different and smaller plane). If Quora can attract Facebook's crowd to use Quora for their discussions on sundry topics, we will be looking at massive ad revenues for Quora, but with a lot of noise on their authoritative question and answer boards. Geeks (and experts of all kinds) will still flock to the place if the place becomes interesting enough (based on usability and content), and Quora will have a lot of authoritative content. If ad revenues are their primary aim, they will always have to contend with noise, and in which case the geeks will always be looking for a better place.

You need ad revenues, and you need to balance that with your ambitions of what you want to be. It's a tight rope, but I have no idea how that works.

Answer 14

I signed up for Quora today to check it out. I'm not liking the un-threaded view of the stacked questions/answers. Of course I haven't spent enough time to give the overall UI a fair verdict.

One thing I think they did right though, is that if you create an account using Twitter or Facebook ID, right away it shows you questions from your existing Twitter and Facebook friends, so you don't feel like a stranger to a new community. This is great for new users.

Answer 15

I just did a search on trying to decide between "Puppet" and "Chef" for provisioning Virtual Boxes, and I landed on a Quora page for the first time. At first I thought "Wow, is this another Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow?"

But then I noticed that for a lot of the answers one's required to login to read "more".

That put me off. Personally that requirement makes me not want to be part of that community. It's yet another closed off garden. Even if there are some good answers to be found on that system, the fact that one needs to login just to read the answers runs counter to what I've grown to expect and appreciate about more open systems.

I seriously hope that Stack Exchange doesn't adopt that requirement. If it had, I probably would have never joined in to begin with. If it does, I might just go back to doing my research on Wikipedia :)

Answer 16

Information on the Internet has become so quickly available that being forced to go through even the simplest register-wall becomes a waste of time. I took one look at their "sign up via Facebook to continue" corral and thought: "Screw this, I'll just Google it."

People will respond much better to restrictions on posting information than they will to restrictions on finding information. The former is clearly necessary. The latter is obnoxious.

Answer 17

One thing you can learn is that VCs love Facebook. Facebook now gets more hits than Google, and it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to seriously monetize that traffic. If there's one thing we know VCs will chase, it's money.

Comparing Stack Overflow to Quora, I think Stack Overflow has a big advantage in terms of the addiction factor. You guys do a much better job of giving people a technical reason to figure out how to participate. On the other hand, Quora does a much better job giving you a social reason to participate. Both are valid. Quora also does a slightly better job of reminding and helping you to participate. Quora does this in part by tapping in to Facebook.

Answer 18

As someone who is using the Stack Overflow engine for my website, I think the subject matter covered by sites like Quora are just too broad. The Stack Overflow model is simply about specialized mentors and mentorees connecting. That's why sites like Stack Overflow, Super User, MathOverflow ... and yes hopefully over time PM Verge ... are really the best angle to take. They represent a thin-sliced view where subject matter experts can interact and not a one-stop shop like Yahoo! Answers where just about anyone can answer your question about RTOS or inversion of control (IoC) principles.

I assume Quora hopes to take the social aspect of Facebook and use that as a way to funnel people together to collaborate on content, but I don't think the use case of Facebook is about work ... I think it's tethered heavily to people's personal lives and talking shop is not something people go to Facebook for.

I've got a good background in building knowledge management solutions for the intranet/Internet going back into the mid-1990s, and by far the Stack Overflow paradigm for capturing and weighing the value of information is the best model I've ever encountered. If you could close out the solution with a good way to present back the highly refined data in a meaningful way other than searching or asking a question, you'd have quite a complete knowledge management solution in your hands.

Keep up the good work.

Answer 19

I don't think we can compare Quora with SE for the following reasons:

• Answers on Quora lack credibility
• Moderation of questions & answers by "Quora bot". Seriously?
• No detailing and competition to provide correct answer in the best way.
• Quora has lots for Free-booting and no one is there to report that. [Apparently, Quora is also developed by former FB employees & you know what I mean]
• You can provide most illogical answers on Quora with absolute no meaning and will still get up-votes. [This indicates a weak user community]
• The one who is afraid to answer on SE because he/she concerned about quality of his/her own answer, can post it on Quora with no fear.
• On SE people are smart and responsible enough to delete their answer if it is not answering the question correctly, if it is a duplicate, or if it can not provide source/evidence of statement.
• Even 6 year olds can write anything on Quora (by randomly hitting keyboard), but one needs knowledge to write answer on SE.

• Questioning on Quora is like: "Asking solution to strangers walking on a road"

  Questioning on SE is like: "Hiring professional to answer your question"

Now, what we can learn from Quora:

• Search paradigm in Quora
• That's all !!!!

Then in which space Quora stands:

I my perception, Quora can only be compare with Yahoo Answers ! SE is playing a different sport, & we can not compare it with Quora.