Quora Details Their New Answer Ranking Scheme; Their “PageRank”, Of Sorts | Hacker News Reader

Quora Details Their New Answer Ranking Scheme; Their “PageRank”, Of Sorts

techcrunch.com

10 pointsatularora8 comments

Blogspam-free link - http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/On-Quora-what-is-the-algo...

Ta-da!

That's misleading. Generally "blogspam" refers to a blog entry that has just copied something from somewhere else, so nothing is gained by reading the blog copy instead of the original.

In this case, the link you give says nothing about the possible connection between these changes and the Scoble incident. The blog link gives us a lot more information, and is by far the more useful link to those of us who have not been closely following this.

It seems like they put in a ton of work to prevent one person, Robert Scoble, from 'gaming' the system and having his sub-optimal answers go to the top. (As implied by original link and the SV drama-fest of the past couple weeks)

I think this is interesting for two reasons.

1) Based on the post by Adam D'Angelo, I don't think the changes will cause Robert Scoble's sub-optimal answers to be placed lower on the page. Scoble's past answers are interpreted to be 'high quality' by an algorithm because they get so many up votes. Every answer he posts from now on, will get a higher 'quality score' because of all the upvotes he has already included (See: "Answers written by users who have written good answers in the past will be ranked higher.")

2) This seems like a ton of work to battle the habits of one extremely unique user. It strikes me that Quora's resources could have been better used by controlling the spam caused by the social media crowd infestation (i.e astro-turfers). Or by encouraging more experts from fields other than SV start-ups to join and contribute at a high level.

Having been extremely harsh to Quora so far, I do really like that "A vote from a user who has written good answers in the past carries more weight (both upvotes and downvotes)" And this change will admittedly knock down Scoble's answers a bit.

I knew the initial greatness of Quora was dead first on Twitter. I saw a few social media and PR people I follow on Twitter starting to write "pithy" tweets about how PR and social media people were missing the boat if they weren't at Quora promoting their product. Whenever the social media and PR professionals start flocking to a thing, its usefulness is gone for me, generally speaking.

Could you elaborate why having these people on Quora makes its usefulness go to zero for you?

Because they raise the signal:noise ratio to levels that I don't want to deal with.

I see that you no longer use the internet.

Quora seems to think that scaling votes will allow it to preserve the status quo of "high quality" answers.

Is it just me or does that seem pretty naive?

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