Hasta la Vista, Quora
raganwald.posterous.com
raganwald.posterous.com
Looking at the history, I saw that this neat and tidy question was originally a sloppy mess. Suddenly I felt cheated - here I was answering someone who had asked a sensible well written question ... except they hadn't.
I had a similar realisation that I wasn't answering to help someone, but to help future search engine results, which is less endearing.
so that you'll be easier to be hired or funded! :)
But Reg makes clear why people might do this; most often they are probably trying to be helpful at a level above mere practicality. They care about the person asking the question, not just the question itself. They are involved because there's a community.
Healthy communities offer reciprocal benefits, which draws people in. If you remove that, what is left to motivate participation?
Some people get off on public displays of cleverness, but if people are given to feel they and their free contributions are simply fodder for someone else's business they are not likely to stick around.
Sites like Quora have to decide if losing the participation of someone of Reg's caliber is worth it to maintain some strict protocol.
The moderator answer I got was "Not a serious question". End of message.
Um, okay?
I'm sure Quora will make an interesting case study, once it's dead.
Interestingly, one of the Quora moderators did an experiment about three different ways of getting people to give more information on partial answers.[1] None of them worked well. Collapsing was the worst, leading to no improvements and provoking one "aggressive response". Nonetheless the moderator decided that collapsing was the approach to use going forward. Umm ...
[1] http://www.quora.com/Does-asking-people-to-explain-their-ans...
The way I look at it, your answer was helpful. Sure, it could have been more helpful to more people if it had been different; and there may well have been other better answers. Calling "not helpful" focuses on what it isn't, not what it is.
It's more useful to think in terms of signal to noise ratio rather than a binary helpful/unhelpful. It may have been helpful when considered in isolation but was it helpful enough to be valuable?
Raganwald nails it with: This type of answer is an Internet Cliché
When the ratio of advice and/or opinions and/or theories is 10:1 relative to actual answers to the question being asked (which is common) it's not enough to say those non-answers might be helpful. They have to meet a higher standard. Because they have a built in noise-cost they need to have a signal-value that is very very high.
A individually helpful answer can have a negative value when viewed in the context of the whole system.
ADDED: My time is limited and I heed to apply it how I think it will be most useful. Since my major interest is in learning, I have been reducing my internet usage back toward books anyway.
This actually drove me away from heavily contributing on SO recently.
To some extent a "don't do it that way" answer is acceptable, but it's better if if also answers the question as written. See: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/8891/is-dont-do-it-a...
I've been trying to make sense of the Question/Follower bi-graph on Quora. Based on very different reactions to similar, but unconnected questions it appears strongly clustered by normative takes, from narrow political frameworks to attitude to entrepreneurship, food, etc. I can't seem to have access to relevant data from outside, though.
We all know that it's not how it works: there's a difference of opinions between moderators. Not all parents deny candy to their children and those that do have different quotas.
So extrapolating from a single data point, like you did, is not really valid.
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=full%20Blake%...
I think the problem is that there is an assumption that asking a question and receiving an answer is somehow a valuable experience in itself, and for basic bits of factual information it is. But much of what constitutes "interesting" questions, like the one in this article, do not fit that pattern.
I teach teams how to be agile. For many, an honest question they have is: why do we need you? Can't we just read the book and know all we need to know?
It turns out the answer to that question is very interesting, because mostly no, you probably can't. At least not in the way you think. There is factual information and then there is mastery of a complex skill. I look at it this way: I can show you a movie of a great piano player, you can meet him and get his autograph, we can even read books on how to play the piano.
Will any of that make you a piano player? No, it will not. So when you ask a seemingly straightforward and honest question like "How come I can't play this Bach piece?" I'm unable to give you a straightforward answer that you are going to find helpful. It's going to sound something like "Because you don't know what you are doing. First you must do all this other stuff". Of course, you don't want to do all that other stuff, you want to play the Bach piece. And so there we are.
This touches on another problem -- not knowing what you don't know. When I learned to fly, I found a good instructor and told him about the things I would like to do.
"We're not doing any of that," he said, and then explained what we would be doing. You see, I didn't know what questions to ask first. I simply had some goal.
The worst problem I can see is folks getting answers they are not ready to process. For example, sticking with my agile coach example, somebody might ask me why a team takes so long trying to figure out what it's doing. The "answer" might be something like "Because you've restricted their machines and tools in such a way it's taking ten times longer than it should." but good luck in giving it to somebody in that direct a fashion. They'll throw you out of their office -- especially if they were the ones all along pushing for more controls and complexity. This is a case of wanting a solution to one thing, but having a second thing that cannot be touched. And of course, the second thing is directly involved in the first thing. In situations like this you have to help people figure out for themselves where their own internal model is flaky. Sometimes that takes a while. (Interesting side note: many technologists ardently refuse to believe they could be this way, saying things like "just tell me bluntly". I have found that these folks are the worst to deal with, because instead of seeing life as a journey, they are caught up in black-and-white reasoning. So they are the last people you want to treat that way, because to do so you're basically telling them their thinking is broken -- a concept many cannot process)
I think he's trying to point out that besides "just reading the book" (as was given in his example with his customers) there are other ways people think they can learn and master complex skills - talking to famous, successful people, or watching how they work. While there's certainly value in doing so, his point is that that is probably not what you really need to improve.
"Can't we just read the book and know all we need to know? It turns out the answer to that question is very interesting, because mostly no, you probably can't. At least not in the way you think. There is factual information and then there is mastery of a complex skill. I look at it this way: I can show you a movie of a great piano player, you can meet him and get his autograph, we can even read books on how to play the piano. Will any of that make you a piano player? No, it will not."
Isn't that comparing learning from a book to watching a movie of a great piano player? This "we can even read books on how to play the piano" is just a minor addition. It should be the main point, but it is not because the other example is more ridiculous and scores more points. He puts forward an obviously stupid example of learning on your own and insists that it explains why learning on your own in general is stupid.
"Reading the book" of your text, I just can't tell, but if we were face to face I could probably feel out what you were doing. Some things, especially assisting learning, require intense feedback loops, which happen much better in person. You can learn heaps from books, but a book can't notice when you've gone off track...
If you are any good at this, please write a book. I would pay a handsome some for even just incremental improvement in this skill.
My day is filled with people going around acting as if 2 + 2 = 5. Thus far my only strategy is to say, "Are you sure it's 5? I'm pretty sure it's 4." Repeat over and over for years until people adopt the new "2 + 2 = 4" mental model and forget I'd been saying it for years...
Having said that, I disagree with your example. Oftentimes, when people ask a question, questioning their motives is a good idea. I know that when I ask a question, I often discover that I'm trying to solve the wrong problem.
A very common pattern on SO is that the accepted answer is a practical solution to the problem, and the highest-rated answer is a longer talk about whether this is something the questioner even needs to do.
Getting no feedback other than a downvote doesn't help me adapt to the community. I may not agree with why my post wasn't accepted by the community that is HN, but at least I'll have more information to work with.
Requiring explanations will merely result in meaningless deluges of "not helpful", "bad", "this is a comment of a type I don't wish to see on HN", or people C&Ping long political rants.
The second case is if your post did not deserve a downvote. This happens, particularly as our community grows. Some people downvote comments merely because they disagree with what the person said. We don't want it to happen, we (the community) try to correct for it when it does, but it does happen. And in large threads, such posts can get "stuck" at the bottom in a place where no one sees to correct it. In that case, don't worry about it. It happens to everyone.
How do you know which case it was? Keep posting and you'll be able to find out.
I do not think that in this case it is about Quora Though I find it difficult to participate effectively there. But that is not a effective or valid reason to argue that discussion can not occur there. It can, and does. But you need to follow its own style. Much like stackoverflow.
dissent is not about escaping the system. It is about participating in order to change the system.
Of course, I am already hoping you take this frustration and build something better.
Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Unhelpfulness is futile.
What's NOT great, is having some esoteric need, landing on a bunch of pages, and finding that most of them have an "are you sure you want to do this?" response with no effort made to answer the question, ahm, in question.
The author is right in this respect. You are NOT just answering the person who asked the question. Stuff on the internet STAYS. For YEARS. That means that you're answering EVERYONE who EVER asks that question, and chances are that a lot of them DO know what they are doing. All they lack are the mechanical steps to take, which you have denied them by your second guessing of intentions. And that is MASSIVELY frustrating. Sites like Quora understand this, thus the "not helpful" button.
If you must question the judgment of the person asking, do so AFTER answering the question. Otherwise your answer is, in fact, NOT useful. Oh, it may be useful if you've successfully guessed the intentions of the asker, but for a great number of other people who will land on that page in the years to come it is nothing more than condescension.
I participate because I find it a godsend whenever I get stuck on some esoteric API or poorly documented technology, or I just want to use something in a way that it's not actually meant to be used BECAUSE I HAVE A DAMN GOOD REASON TO DO IT. And I want to extend the same courtesy of answering without prejudice so that some other soul can be similarly helped by my answer.
I also remember the answer about how things didn't work like that and I thought to myself "hmm, I agree, but he's not really answering the question though" - It might also be because the answer came off very negative and degrading
So I actually flagged the answer as "not helpful".
I'm guessing more people did, so it wasn't any single person.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with how these Q&A sites work. I don't feel that it's just to serve the search engine results. I think they genuinely help people.
Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.
I guess Quora suffers fools gladly.
One service that I really liked was Aardvark which for a long time did not have public Q&A pages. Also, connecting people through IM allowed for a very personal and instant help.
I commend you for your decision. Quora should not even have a down-vote button -- the best answers will go to the top anyway through up-votes. Also, I think there is just as much (if not more) intellectual value in answers that are funny or slightly off-topic. If I wanted purely factual answers, I would ask Google.
Isn't that the idea that all the Q&A sites stem from?
I feel roughly the same as you. But I have actually asked questions both at StackExchange sites and Quora (and answered others in return for the help I received). And it certainly has it's uses to me.
Admittedly, this approach has the downside of not producing something that others encountering the same issue can find by Googling. Unless I blog it, of course.
S.O. search results have been useful in refining my understanding of a problem set, but it's rarely been useful for a direct answer. When it does provide a direct answer, it's generally about simple stuff that I'm dabbling in, such as Python syntax questions.
I've said plenty of unpopular things here on HN, yet I persevered. And if you really want to see negative responses to things that I have written, you should look at the comments on my old blog. If you want to present a theory that my character can be determined from my response to downvotes or flagged comments, I suggest your theory be amended to explain why I persevere with HN and blogging, but not with Quora.
And congratulations on being a Quora Power User.
What struck me the most was your wish to delete all your content. Taking your ball, and going home. That shows how you approach the community: with ego over sharing knowledge.
2. I only answered one question, and as that one answer was flagged, I don't actually think it was still visible on the site to other users. And even if it was, everybody (especially myself) seems to agree that it was not helpful. So what would be the harm if I had the option of deleting my account?
3. Who am I and why does my opinion matter? I can't answer that. I blog. You like it, you don't like it. You upvote or you don't. There are no rules about who is and who isn't fit to opine about anything at all. That's the beauty and the hideous reality of the Internet. I would never suggest that I have any particular qualification for writing words except that I do write. The same goes for software.
4. I have no problem whining about how Quora isn't a community in my blog. And you have no problem whining about my blog post in a public forum. We seem to have a lot in common, maybe we should be friends.
UPDATE: I should make something clear: I have nothing against Quora. I am not predicting its demise. From what I have seen of SO, such sites have a lot of potential and perform a valuable service. All I am saying about Quora is that I realize that I am looking for a social experience, and Quora is looking for answers to questions. That's not a bad thing, just not the same thing.
I quickly conclude from this that you are quick to conclusions. I've found many topics on Quora which have accreted answers which encompass a range of nuance and even questions in kind. I may have even downvoted some of those answers, but I didn't do so in hopes that anyone would stop using the service.
In re: whether you just don't want to be on Quora or you are predicting its demise, the title of your post does allude to a certain implacable finality...