Whatever happened to Quora? | Hacker News Reader

Whatever happened to Quora?

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52 pointsignifero41 comments

The spike probably had a lot to do with the release of Tron: Legacy on December 17 who had a character named Quorra which could easily be misspelled as Quora. The trend for Quorra largely follows this spike as seen at http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra&ctab=0&geo=all...

Nothing happend to Quora.com.

Really? You can plot them together, and it appears 'quorra' spiked about two weeks before 'quora'. Tron released December 17th 2010, according to wikipedia, correlating nicely with 'quorra' searches. What happened January 1st to cause a huge spike in 'quora' searches? http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra%2C+quora&ctab=0...

Hmmm. Is this an established practice for choosing product names? (regardless of whether it was intentional in this case)

Excuse me while I look up the cast list of the next James Cameron movie.

The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate.

A few people might see your product and stick around, but I think that the brand confusion (and potential law suit) might be strong enough con's to negate these few users.

>The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate.

Would that be a bad thing? Even those that left would then know that your site existed, which isn't without value.

As far as names matching a character in a movie, I think it would be very difficult to make a suit out of this. If anything, you could then change your name slightly, and get some press about it.

They'd have a negative association with it, since the site didn't give them what they wanted. You don't want to start your first impression with a negative.

Possibly the majority of people would know what it was before clicking, because the search engine description would tell them. In that case they're just fulfilling their curiosity, which can only be good.

You'd be surprised how many people don't read the description in search results.

Why would it be negative? Personally, I'd just think "oh there's a site with a similar name", and move on. I wouldn't fault the site for that.

The 'move on' part doesn't exactly speak well for capturing new customers. Certainly not well enough that you'd sacrifice a better, more appropriate name?

Well, I guess the quality of the name is another point entirely, and the scheme might unravel there. :) I just thought it was an interesting idea. If the quora spike did come from Tron, I think it's at least interesting to consider engineering such an accident. It might be good, bad, or a wash, but IMO I think the bounces would be an overall positive. The name... that is another problem.

> As far as names matching a character in a movie, I think it would be very difficult to make a suit out of this.

You would be very surprised:

'Some controversy has risen in Germany, where Albert Uderzo's own publishing company, Les Éditions Albert René, is claiming in court that certain IT companies whose name end in "ix" (not unnatural in companies who work with Unix) are damaging his brands "Asterix" and "Obelix".'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Uderzo#Lawsuits_in_Germa...

It would create more noise when trying to optimize your site to reduce the bounce rate which is a bad thing.

I wonder if it will make a comeback. Tron Legacy (DVD rip) was the #4 most downloaded movie on piratebay yesterday with 12,000 seeders and the DVD doesn't release for another 2 days.

That explains it. I actually like quora, so got worried. Now i 'm off to buy WimpyKidRodrickRules.com

Interestingly, a large chunk of the traffic comes from SF and the Bay Area. That leads me to believe that Quora is to a large extent a Bay Area echo-chamber.

That's the problem with Quora for me. When it first started to get big, I tried searching for things that weren't startup- or Silicon Valley-related, and the results were practically nonexistent. Maybe that's changed since then, but it didn't give me a good first impression. Not that there's anything wrong with a Q&A site for startups - that may well be a very good niche - but Quora clearly seems to want to be something more, and it seems that they're having a hard time breaking free.

I've found Quora to be great for non-tech topics. Human relationships, cooking, pop culture, lifestyle topics are all active on Quora and contain good content.

This is slowly changing. For instance, see: http://www.quora.com/Ashton-Kutcher

Ha. I guess you don't realise he's on there because he's an investor in early tech companies in the Bay Area? And he's been there for ages.

I do know that. My point is that of his answers: Kutcher is a movie industry insider, and he responds to questions about the movie industry.

I found his content on quora hard to read because of the spelling mistakes and general lack of formatting (stream of thought style of writing does equate to easy to consume writing). And even though people had suggested edits, he never seemed to accept them/fold them back into his post.

Quora is like TED in that it provides exhibitionists and flatterers of the powerful an opportunity to meet up with voyeurs and those who get a rush from being in the presence of quote-genius-unquote. You are what you like, and as soon as everyone knows that you are a Hans Rosling nerd, it is a certainty that you'll be significantly closer to saving the world—and getting a million Twitter followers.

What's not to like?

Patience. Most big things start from saturating a specific, comparatively-small community. They then expand with leverage.

(E.g.: Facebook, Etsy, Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, etc et all)

TC pumped and dumped them. It will be interesting to see if they can stand on their own two feet but I doubt they will. The homepage is anti-new users, and if you register in spite of that you better subscribe to popular topics or else you'll have no new content and no reason to come back.

I wonder how much of the new-user experience is to avoid an eternal september? Allowing people to easily sounds off on a few things and leave(like I'm doing right now) is not conducive to building a community.

Google Trends monitors search terms, not traffic. The Google Trends graph is relative to the total search volume for the keyword Quora.

Web traffic is a very different thing. It's how many people actually visit a site. Here's an estimate of Quora's traffic: http://www.quantcast.com/Quora.com

You can see that while they've experienced a significant peak in traffic that has resulted in a recent decrease, they're doing very well.

^^^ I came here to say this. With that said, I'm a little sick of the quora hype. I have a love/hate relationship with the UI decisions they made. I haven't had a ton of luck with the questions I've asked on the site, but I have found it useful when researching existing (answered) questions. Although those questions tend to be very valley/startup centric.

I guess the hype is wearing off? It was bound to happen when it was evangelized like the second coming of christ by TechCrunch et al. I'm guessing that the vast majority of users is realizing that it's not much more than a new Q&A-site that was fortunate/skilled enough to get a lot of Silicon Valley elite on board as users at an early stage.

It will be interesting to watch Quora in the coming times, they're facing some of the same troubles as HN is facing: it gained popularity because the quality of content was high due to the contributors often being well-connected SV-elite. Now they're facing the backlash of popularity; low-quality content on both the Q and A side of the equation.

EDIT: Not to say that SV-elite means guaranteed quality content, but "they" provided(provides?) a lot of interesting insight on Quora.

Generally, this is how most sites work. For each successive wave of popularity, they'll experience a spike followed by a decline, but the decline is to a higher level than it was pre-spike.

Trends for Websites is much better for actual site traffic estimates.

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all...

Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/quora.com) and Compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/) are better tools to measure traction. Looks like they've had a slight decline lately. With all the buzz they received early this year, I'm not surprised it's lower.

Respectfully disagree - Compete and Alexa both depend on toolbars, and no techie in his right mind wants to install such a thing. Quantcast doesn't use a toolbar, but it's heavily biased towards Quantcast-aware publishers who place the QC script on their pages. Long story short: these sites are bad for measuring traffic, but especially bad for measuring tech / power user / early adopter traffic.

Compete and Quantcast (if not "Quantified") are not good measurements of actual traffic estimates but they can usually report trends somewhat accurately. However, you make a great point about the tech/early adopter crowd which are the primary users for Quora.

They're doing ok, probably just a mini-sharkfin from a wave of press. Interesting that HN is over half as big:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com,news.ycombinat...

That's based off search volume on the term isn't it? Meaning that there was a spike of new people hearing about the service. Just because the initial media attention has come off doesn't mean those attracted in the spike aren't still around.

I find the Quora interface and usability to be kind of clunky and finicky. Their "walled garden" site rules are also a bit finicky. While it was interesting to poke around Quora a bit, I didn't perceive much value for myself.

People realized it sucks :-) And Techcrunch that it's not worth to talk about it?

Quora got a ton of press right around the end of the year - big articles in a lot of major press outlets. That likely accounts for at least some of the spike.

I feel like on Quora the same 10 people are writing the majority of the content (and it is getting boring). Maybe I'm not using it appropriately, but if so their interface isn't helping me improve my experience.

such peaks of brand interrest are quite common for new and hyped internet brands/startups. now comes the time of constant but slow(er) growth or failure.

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