The mistakes I made in Quora
scobleizer.com
scobleizer.com
This strikes me as one of those "lord of the flies" moments where we all need to stop and ask what we're all doing here exactly.
Good on him for being humble enough to lay his own flaws out there for everyone to see.
If he actually wasn't being helpful but yet still received a lot of votes then that is a flaw in the community's voting habits. For example, people automatically up-voting him because of who he is after seeing other people do that countless times "so he must be insightful, right?" The guy knows how that place works so it seems logical that he might make the most out his time spent on there. There are power players in every community -- even this one -- who can relate to Scoble in this regard.
His problem was that he was playing too hard IMO. This ticked a lot of people off. Now, he does mention that some of his practices were annoying to other community members. That was also his flaw.
Why is there a negative stigma around wanting karma and seeking it out even in the case where you're being helpful? It seems as though karma is something good to have but if you want it, that's bad. This seems similar to how wanting to be cool makes you so uncool.
>His posting low-quality questions quickly just so he can get upvoted while refining them, posting irrelevant pictures just so the posts look nicer, etc, all points to karma whoring, not just answering a lot.
Fair enough, my definition of karma whoring might be a bit off from the norm. I always took it as trying to gain karma from a community while basically doing nothing to further the quality of the community. I wasn't aware from his post that the pictures he was adding to the answers were entirely irrelevant. I must have missed where he said that (and I don't use Quora).
The fact that he posted low quality answers to gain karma while he refined them is a prime example of that, in my opinion. If you just care about helping you don't do that.
Karma is a reward for helpful users, it's not the goal (that's why you can't redeem it for anything). When users act in this way it stops being an indicator of helpfulness and turns into an indicator of who's the best at raking in karma.
And then in the very same blog post, he still did his annoying name-dropping thing: "I woke up in Davos, Switzerland", which has no relation to the post other than promoting how cool he is.
Not that this is very surprising, it's just a reminder to not just look at the feature list of your startup but also its.... well, soul.
Hacker News is itself an example of this.
Great points by Erik. I quoted this exchange at http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2374&cpage=1#comment-...
Is it news? I guess about as much as what you see presented as news elsewhere.
In this case, this whole thing appears void of any real "substance" which I guess is what led to the question.
I think the message here is that even a prominent tech figure can be quelled if he breaks the rules. I think an underlying message here is that the power of the people still rules supreme - what this community can take away from this exchange in Scoble v Quora is that the power of the people still win, so if you can build a compelling piece of software that appeases your customers, even if the critics don't like your product, you can basically give them the finger and tell them "xx customers couldn't disagree more!"
Remember that he may be a juggernaut, but the bigger they are the harder they fall, and to not let one man's negative comments on what you work on deter you from your course.
Perhaps this clarifying post will lead to better discussions on quora. Any new service, when explodes, some one out there misses crucial point of using the service. But in the long run those mistakes become new yardstick to rate content and hence leads to better discussions.
So Scoble - thanks again!