Quora is already “Google Useful” | Hacker News Reader

Quora is already “Google Useful”

jasonlbaptiste.com

This is a little too close to JWZ's great truth:

So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

from: http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Wow, ive never seen that article before, but it makes sense. I mean Quora's goal isn't to get me laid, but it can certainly pass that litmus test ie- advice from women, how to find a wingwoman,etc.

What does Quora solve that other existing solutions don't?

http://www.mahalo.com/

http://www.formspring.me

http://vark.com/

http://answers.yahoo.com/

http://www.chacha.com/

...

The product just works so much better than the rest in terms of the social mechanics + natural flow of user interaction. You could have asked the same thing of what does dropbox do that box.net, xdrive, (insert 10 million others),etc. do better? Dropbox just works so much better that once you experience it, you'll certainly agree. I was an early user of Vark and I loved their product in the early days, but once the floodgates opened, I think the way it was used didn't logically scale. I was getting lots of random ims + unrelated questions.

It's invite only. It is more useful than the others because of its high SNR. It's useful for members of the Silicon Valley echo chamber because it's entirely populated by members of the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

They seem to also have good usability and cool tech that helps keep thing even more relevant, but the challenge will come when it is opened to the "How is babby formed?" Yahoo Answers public.

http://ask.metafilter.com prevents eternal september by intentionally making the sign-up process slightly difficult. Rough interface and a $5 fee for new accounts.

And extremely active moderators who are themselves respected, accessible community members, and who will actually help new users understand why their posts or comments were deleted and how to act within the social norms.

Fast, high quality answers from very intelligent people.

Quora's community is small and is primarily composed of people in tech/academia (probably because of its invite system). Real names are displayed (profiles are often linked to facebook accounts) so any response carries some weight of reputation. Every user has a timeline of new questions and recent responses that are filtered towards topics that the user follows. Presumably, the users follow topics they are knowledgeable about.

So: 1. The invite system builds a small and intelligent community.

2. The filtered timeline and low volume of questions enables fast responses from users.

3. Along with #1, the addition of reputation yields high quality answers. The topic following system gets questions in front of "experts" efficiently.

4. There is a voting system for responses much like stackoverflow.

Quora reminds me of HN + Facebook profiles + Stackoverflow.

I did an experiment. I put the same question in a sensible subreddit. I would say that the answers are pretty good.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/cg6zq/what_...

I think it will be interesting to see whether the answer quality can stay the same as the userbase expands. Right now it works well because they have a good set of smart users who contribute answers as well as asking questions. If the site gets flooded by people who only ask questions, the number of answers per question will decrease.

Quora actually reminds me a lot of Yahoo Answers back when it first came out. The community there was smart and quality of answers was high. But they used a game mechanic to ensure that people answered questions, and so the site became flooded with bad answers to the point that it is now useless. I really hope Quora can avoid going this route, as it's a really useful resource as Jason says.

So, does anyone have a spare invite for those of us who aren't a part of the Silicon Valley echo chamber?

Just sent you an invite to your gmail address.

Thank you :-)

Anyone else then? :)

Just sent you one.

Thanks!

I see that two people have already asked, but does anyone else have an invite? charles.melbye at gmail

Sure, sent.

I didn't receive it, are they backed up right now?

Check your spam folder, they say they're having delivery problems.

I have invites, reply with your e-mail address if you want one or e-mail me at info@elbertf.com.

Anyone else have a spare invite?

What's your email address?

One more invite, please.

username at gmail. thanks!

Sent! Seems like Quora may be having some email issues, check your spam folder if you haven't received the invite in a few minutes.

got it, thanks!

I've got a few invites - message me with your email for one

me please, [hn username] at gmail

I sent you one.

I'm interested too: alexandre.tp at gmail

Sent

another invite please, I really want to compare this to aardvark which I've become quite addicted to

Add your email address to your profile or something :)

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