Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype | Hacker News Reader

Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype

techcrunch.com

132 pointsbretpiatt79 comments

Something no one else has mentioned yet (perhaps for fear of plunging down the meta discussion rabbit hole) is the degree to which HN competes with Quora.

As a small experiment, I'd previously posed roughly the same question to both HN and Quora.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-optimum-pricing-strategy-fo...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097527

The response from HN absolutely destroyed the response from Quora. Those links don't even tell the whole story as I had multiple people email me directly from the HN community to offer advice and in one case give me access to a private iPhone application price research tool that he'd built for his own use.

To be fair; the audience for your particular question is better on HN than Quora. If you had asked "what is the optimal pricing strategy for funding an iphone startup" quora may have been a better bet.

I'm not disagreeing with you so much as I'm still honestly sort of stumped as to what exactly is the "sweet spot" in Quora's audience.

The sweet spot comes from users who have been to the companies during the phases about which the questions are asked. Where else can you find how much serving the Like button costs to Fb. Sure you can do a guess-estimate but how close would that be to the figure quoted by Tweetmeme CEO about their RT buttons. There are countless such incidents. I think if the user base has some sort of expertise in an area and they "choose" to answer questions about thos domains only, that would be make it a great place for knowledge. I honestly think Quora is the lovechild of Twitter and Wikipedia. You can call it the real time Wikipedia with Questions than topics having info that I do not give a damn about.

In my so-called expert opinion, only communities focused around particular topics get enough traction to be useful. The "let's talk about everything!" solution is just varying paths to the wide world of Yahoo Answers.

That said, Quora could end up being a slightly better Yahoo Answers which is actually a net plus for the world, considering the sad and depressing state of Yahoo Answers.

Your "evidence" is anecdotal. Compare this to an answer like this on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/How-can-I-prevent-share....

There are things I'd rather ask about on HN, and the same applies to Quora.

I think we're agreeing more than we're disagreeing. My point was mainly that there is a large degree of overlap between the areas of discussion on the two sites.

I'd be very interested in knowing your criteria for which site to ask what kinds of questions.

You just seem(ed) very dismissive of Quora in your example. I also think that your verbiage of "destroyed" is greatly exaggerated.

I think that, on average, you'll get a much more useful response on HN, because there is a general feeling of how to reply and what can be done. When you write a question on Quora, it doesn't feel like you create a discussion; you submit a ticket you hope people will be kind enough to answer (seeing that there is no incentive, i.e. reward, model in Quora whatsoever). The comments for each answer are just yays, nays, and cutesy remarks.

There's a reason I don't feel comfortable calling Quora a community, because the interaction is mainly from answerer to asker.

I don't understand that, how do investors gain control of a company? How do you ensure board control? If you have 51%+ of the company, can't you just veto everything else?

My problem with the Quora hype is that its only in the TechCrunch echo chamber. Even relatively tech saavy people I know don't know Quora unless they read TechCrunch (and a LOT of very techincal people don't read TechCrunch). And I don't mean they know about it, just haven't used it. I mean they literally haven't heard of it before.

I've never been to Quora and this is somewhat surprising given the number of Google/Bing searches I do that take me a Yahoo Answers page or StackOverflow. I'm surprised I've never once even seen a Quora page on page 1 of a Bing/Google search I've done.

It's a weird very bimodal hype. I tend to agree with the author. Unless something drastically changes in the next 6-12 months, it will be a niche site with much less hype.

Quora's gotten recent press in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NBC, etc. etc. ... just try Googling them. So the hype's gone beyond the echo chamber.

The publications you mentioned missed the wave with Facebook and Twitter so they are now over-compensating with stories about Foursquare, Quora, et al

I heard directly from a journalist at one of these publications that they have been directed to pursuit the latest hot startups so that they don't miss out again.

It would make sense that at least one article per day by TechCrunch would make the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NBC, etc. write about them.

In six months the site's traffic will absolutely improve as people link to answers. A newer site with as many pages as quora is not passing enough link juice around.

Is this not because Quora isn't public / accessible to search engines? I was under the impression it was facebook login only.

Quora is being indexed by search engines. From googling around the date was around August 6th it happened.

I am continually surprised by the number of tech/web people I come across who haven't even heard of TechCrunch let alone read it. It always makes me feel better about not having a glowing TechCrunch article about whatever my latest project is. Though it wouldn't hurt.

Every investor I've chatted to about Quora since it's been created has been all a-twitter because of who the team is. Because they're valley royalty the earliest users of Quora have been Valley nobility which has raised it's profile even further.

I used it once or twice but found no reason to go back and haven't been directed to go back by Google either because the site doesn't answer questions I have.

It's helpful in daily life to day that Quora is awesome because you're agreeing with Valley nobility. At least it was until Vivek's blog entry.

I went on Quora a while ago and answered a few people's questions, mostly about the Stanford CS department and maybe a couple about Django or AI or something. I haven't been back on the site since - I haven't gotten any emails from Quora saying "you should answer this question" or "these people liked your answer" or "this discussion might interest you". I'm probably the kind of person they want on the site, since I actively like answering questions and helping people, but they're not doing much to keep me on there.

A lot of that stuff shows up on the home page, if you're looking at it; you get notified for upvotes or "thank you"s for answers, and the questions that show up there are the ones that it marks as being of interest (though that seems to be based solely on the topics you're watching).

The email notifications are a lot more sparse, presumably by design (to avoid drowning people in the stuff). A weekly summary (upvotes, thanks, and particularly active topics of interest) might be nice...

He is both right and wrong on this.

Right, for the present: Quora is special because of who is there, not what, and there is an upper limit to the success of a fan-club.

But he is wrong in the long term, or could be wrong, if Quora adapts and allows the rest of the world to create their own fan-club universes. If it goes on to inspire communities from different backgrounds, fields, industries and specialties, then yes, Quora can become "Stack Exchange" + resident celebrity monks + Wikipedia.

So then what's to say the Stack Exchange platform doesn't just expand to all other areas of life. I'd bet more on SE being more predominant on the web then Quora, since their platform already is modelled this way. It's owner actually said this is the success of such QA websites - create them in "verticals". (don't have the quote, but remember reading it somewhere)

Fred Wilson said that, on avc.com. He's an investor in SE.

I am surprised by the fact that arrington allowed an article that criticizes tehcrunch for being hype machine (which it is).

Regarding quora, yes it gets too much techcrunch attention but it is not as flawed as the writer thinks, quora generates quality content thanks to its quality users, while quality may start to decline as number of users grows(something that happens to almost all startups) it is possible to prevent that to some extent with introduction of advanced peoplerank/answerrank algorithms.

Going back to techcrunch, yes it is a crappy place that religious fanboys (MG) write about twitter, iphone and foursquare (and now quora) 5 times a day and ex-alcoholics (Carr) makes fun of its readers.

"while quality may start to decline as number of users grows... it is possible to prevent that to some extent with introduction of advanced peoplerank/answerrank algorithms."

You say that as if it's some sort of established industry best practice and they just have to go yank the relevant open-source project off of Sourceforge, rather than something where only a handful of people at great and continuing effort have gotten up to "reasonably adequate", and the usual path for a site like this trying to pull this trick is simply to fail.

flagged for ad hominon attacks.

I am surprised by the fact that arrington allowed an article that criticizes tehcrunch for being hype machine (which it is).

I doubt arrington views that as a bad thing.

I tend to think that this piece was posted so that TC could masterfully play both sides of the Quora debate, thus keeping it alive and us talking about both.

Agreed with you on the crappiness of Techcrunch.

However it's a bit low calling someone out as an ex-alcoholic. Call him out on the quality and integrity of his articles by all means. But his alleged alcoholism - true or otherwise - is nobody's business but his and his family's.

And this gets a downvote why ?

From the guidelines:

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I disliked the comment as well.

But I honestly think it's not as bad as you make it out to be. Remember, Paul Carr basically makes a living talking about himself, including talking (at length) about his antics, especially while drinking. He also publicly announced his decision to stop drinking, and brings it up quite a lot.

I wouldn't go around referring to him as an ex-alcoholic, especially not in such a way, but Paul Carr has definitely made discussions of the subject relevant to more people than his immediate family.

We should resist to the temptation to let "crapiness" be a regular part of our vocabulary.

you made a genuine point, I stay corrected, thanks.

Once a writer has credentials on Techcrunch, they can go in and write whatever they want. Posts are not reviewed.

MA stresses that each writer has editorial independence, and there isn't a "techcrunch view" per se on any subject.

Why is that surprising? I see lots of articles by them criticizing each other. Carr against Twitter, Vivek against Quora, Arrington against himself on Facebook privacy, etc, etc. It seems to me that all the bloggers there have a pretty long editorial leash, which admittedly would also include the fanboy stuff.

In the short term, Quora is an interesting site. Long term, I see nothing being done by Quora to anticipate spammers, marketers, trolls, plain stupid people, etc. Add to that the front- and back-end performs atrociously.

The first time I saw Quora, I didn't really see the point of it, but it turned out to have some very interesting users. I don't think they have any roadmap for the service, and I sincerely doubt that Quora is going to be relevant in six months.

Quora may have done some interesting things as a start-up (or not), but the founders seem to have foregone any basic wisdom that concerns creating and maintaining a community.

This is the same criticism that has been leveled at Quora since it first launched, and yet the site has been growing tremendously. It's too early to say that Quora will eventually become truly mainstream, but it seems even more premature to say that it won't when it is still growing.

Pre-launch, it's definitely true that Quora was given a big boost by the names of its founders and (to a lesser extent) tech blogosphere coverage, but after using the site for a while it's become one of the most important ways I access information, in particular one of the most important ways I discover new interesting information. That is potentially a powerful position to be in. It's telling that the links in the original article to Quora questions were are interesting enough that I clicked on all of them and thought they were all much more valuable and entertaining than the original column.

Let's not kid ourselves. Any morning we will wake up to the headline "Quora acquired by Facebook."

what for ?

This. Zuck speaks about Adam and Quora highly; no reason it wouldn't translate into an acquisition. With a $50B evaluation Zuck can very well afford back his old friends into the fold.

It makes sense, until you realize that Facebook does "Talent acquisitions" basically, i.e. with drop.io, friendster, etc.

He thinks highly of Adam for sure, but Adam also left Facebook to found Quora. I don't think Adam would want to be bought back by Facebook and actually stay there for any significant period of time.

Plus, there's Facebook Questions... (Of course, the quality of the questions/answers is certainly debatable)

I don't think Adam would want to be bought back by Facebook and actually stay there for any significant period of time.

For the right amount of money, he could stay for 3 years, the avg post-acquisition lock-in period. It'd be a win-win for all: the next three years are super critical for fb and if they can lock-in a guy like Adam, it'll be well worth the acquisition.

I don't think this will happen. Adam left because he was marginalized by Zuck and replaced by Bret Taylor as CTO.

Since then, Facebook has come out with Facebook Questions.

Adam will return because it will be financially rewarding. Notice even when he left, he only did so after he had fully vested.

He'll get a new vesting clock with the acquisition and all will be good.

If Zuck thought Adam was valuable, he would have given him an incentive to stay instead of replacing his position with a newcomer and putting him in a position where he would likely leave the company.

he would have given him an incentive to stay

Clearly we don't know if he did. But what we do know is that guys like Adam, Paul Buchteit etc. just want to go do their own thing after a while. And we also know the tendency of founders to sell their co back to their original employer or a close competitor.

Clearly we don't know if he did.

It obviously wasn't enough if there were any. And don't you think it is convenient that Zuckerberg "got rid of" the CTO position when Adam left (when he complains about his position not fitting his stature)...and then a couple months later they have another CTO again?

Facebook Questions is permanently in beta though -- http://facebook.com/questions has said "rolling out in the next few weeks" for the last 4 months.

Maybe I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, but am I the only one who was put off by this comment:

"Quora’s membership is growing largely because of the attention that TechCrunch has given it."?

No you are not. I think he mistook cause and effect.

Though it's hard for many of us to disagree with it when:

1) we heard of quora due to TechCrunch

2) we keep hearing of quora due to TechCrunch

#1 assumes that "we" all read TechCrunch regularly

personally if it's not linked from a story I've read here, I don't tend to read TechCrunch. Nothing against the site, but I find that if it's something that would interest me, it'll find it's way to HN.

Eh, people have been attributing a lot of Twitter's success to the same phenomenon for a few years now.

TL;DR summary: "Silicon Valley is again drinking its own Kool-Aid; it is looking at the world through its own prism."

Well worth reading. There's an interesting comment from Fred Wilson too.

Am I the only one reminded of the Usenet Oracle when hearing about Quora?

No.

You owe the Oracle a successful social network running on NNTP.

I find quora to be useless. I finally signed up the other day to ask a question that I was having a hard time getting answered elsewhere. After 2 days, it had exactly 1 view, mine.

I consider the StackOverflow model to be much more useful.

you'll probably get a lot more value if you post the link to your question on your own social networks (Twitter/FB) to start

Then perhaps I wouldn't need Quora after all, if all the answers are going to come from within my existing social network.

You can talk about your own products and services, and disparage others’; in other words, it is a spammers’ paradise.

Same argument was used against Wikipedia back in the day.

One thing that I'm getting out of this article and which I tend to agree with, if a site isn't focused on a specific community the way HN or StackOverflow are, there is a tipping point at which its quality becomes inverse-proportional to the size of the audience. Quora might still be good because it hasn't yet reached it.

eBay used to be good as well, then one day they got so big that buyers and sellers were practically left to settle their disputes on their own. eBay used to be my #1 stop for anything that I wanted to buy online. After getting burnt 2 or 3 times, I haven't opened a page on the site in over a year and haven't bought anything from it in the last 3.

I'm also going to make the bold claim that if Facebook was in its current state 3 or 4 years ago, in terms of quality and community, it would probably not have gotten the success it currently enjoys. Most of us would just consider it another MySpace or HI5 clone.

As far as Quora goes, if it is indeed successful, it might also very well be a victim of its own success, but maybe by then it will be financially viable, which is the one thing that matters most to its backers.

Quora will be successful if they can devise an algorithm which does personalized ranking of users and answers. Rank users globally, yes, but also incorporate your upvotes, searches, and page views as features in a correction term to locally rerank for logged in users. This way you see the answers at the top which are valuable to you specifically, ranked in order of your probability of upvote.

The basic math here has been around since Kaltix in 2003. It will need to be tuned for this specific app, but an off the shelf version will be a qualitative leap over Yahoo or Goog answers.

Because unlike Yahoo or Google Answers, Quora has the social graph as a critical piece of ranking infrastructure. That is a huge difference, comparable to search before and after the web, because the credibility of many nontechnical answers depends fundamentally on the identity of the respondents. And unlike Facebook Questions, they have the benefit of complete focus on one area (Q&A).

I used Quora a bit, mostly in movie section. The main problem is the quality of the questions are not so good. Something like "What is the best films of director XXXX?" seems so pointless and subjective. And it is not in only movies; in travel, web design etc... You see all around the "What is the best....".

There is no best and the answers will(have) change in time.

I don't know much about Quora, and have never used it, so I can't comment on its chances of success.

But I really don't like the name, and I think it may hold them back, as far as mainstream adoption goes. It's not an attractive name to begin with, and I don't quite know how to pronounce it: koo aura or kwaura (rhymes with Laura)?

If we're comparing Quora to Facebook and Twitter, it loses the name game by a mile. Facebook and Twitter are both easy to say and there's no confusion on spelling or pronunciation. Also, Quora can't be easily or obviously verb-ized; "Facebook me" or "Tweet it". I don't see "Quoraize it" or "Quoing" becoming a commonly used phrase.

All of this may be irrelevant if Quora is just that good, but it's certainly something to think about.

I think your massively overstating the importance of a name to the success of a company. Unless a name is straight up awful and suggests something unpleasant - it won't have an impact on the success/failure of a company.

People thought google was pretty stupid. The word Microsoft doesn't really mean anything. IBM is relatively meaningless, ditto for HP. All of those companies are massively successful because of the products they built. That's really the only thing that matters.

IBM and HP both mean something...

Meaning =/= easy to say and pronounce.

Apple Dell Yahoo Microsoft Google Facebook Myspace

None of these really mean anything, but they're all easy to say and spell. Quora, not so much. Considering that word of mouth is the single most important "marketing method", I think it's relevant at some level.

Wikipedia doesn't verb-ize well either

Maybe it's just me, but I don't find Quora to be hard to pronounce or spell. Compared to something like Posterous it seems pretty straight forward.

Can't agree more! Wait till 'Quora' version of Social Media experts start spamming the site.

Pretty sure there's already plenty of self-serving questions - there's lots of questions asking what [startup] does, or what platform [startup] uses for their trivially small traffic.

Eg what is quora built on... with 3000 visitors a day their technical decisions are untested, unscaled, and uninteresting.

http://www.quora.com/What-languages-and-frameworks-were-used...

Vivek is absolutely right about Quora's scaling chances. I made the same assessment back in October when I first started using it and their recent unveiling of their future plans just confirmed it. Quora is niche, it picked a good niche to go after, but it's still niche.

For a Q&A site to take over the market, it needs to be designed with scaling in mind from day 1, it's just that type of market. Thinking that social was the only missing ingredient was pretty naive, though it did advance the state of the art a bit.

The last thing I will say is this, the real deal Q&A site won't have people questioning it's scaling potential, but rather why nobody figured it out before.

Is this just me? I visited Quora for the first time a few days ago. I logged in, couldn't figure out what I was looking at, and logged out.

It prompted me a few times, ...I think, but I couldn't see questions and answers right away.

The site-wide quality of answers matters less for Quora to be useful to an individual when you're following people rather than topics. You see answers upvoted by people you follow or answered by people you follow.

Quora will continue to work for the same reasons that Twitter does...I get tweets from people I follow, millions of bieber fans don't affect my twitter homepage.

Quora's value comes from the quality of the people on it. There is very little that's exciting about them except the people they've been able to attract initially.

As the site grows, the density of interesting people will drop and the noise will increase, getting worse the more mainstream it gets. Eventually it will be a slow Yahoo answers.

They have a lot of good data to identify positive users. Also they have considerably more latitude than your average geek q&a site, since there is no firehose, and no visible karma score. Don't count them out yet.

Just as with HN, it's not the technology that makes it so great, it's the people. If the people stick with Quora, it will continue to be immensely informative.

I use Quora daily, and I find the info valuable - but the UI and the clunky-ness of the interface are debilitating.

I think that in the longer term, if they dont make topics easier to navigate and sort info from - they will lose the value they provide. For example - you cant easily browse the topics, top answers top questions etc.

The search box tries to be too cool and provide a list of what you may be searching for - but at the expense of letting you type fluidly.

The choice of fonts, sizes, colors in the UI is counter-intuitive and suggestions made to the quora team fall on arrogant ears "We designed it to be like that" rather than, you know what - you may be right - useability is affected by the slowness of the site"

Any thread with a substantial number of comments regularly crashes my browser (the thread about which startups are hiring in SF Bay will crash FF on linux) - and viewing the site on a phone is clunky, jerky and slow.

All of that aside - if they can allow people to post as quickly and efficiently as Reddit - and allow for topics to be better navigated, I think they will survive.

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