The Thick Edge of Quora | Hacker News Reader

The Thick Edge of Quora

semilshah.wordpress.com

34 pointskahseng13 comments

I too was an enthusiastic Quora user early on, but hardly visit the site any more. It suffers from the same problem most sites that follow the social model (of followers/following) - "celebrity" authors get substantially more upvotes for even mediocre or poor answers - undermining the mission of the site. It perpetuates the fallacy that the most "popular" answer is somehow the right answer - which it seldom is.

I browsed Quora briefly before, but I never got addicted to it.

A Q&A site like stack overflow is nice, because I end up there by searching Google for programming questions. I'd probably only end up on Quora if it was the result of a Google search.

I never made it as far as browsing on Quora. After hearing about it a few times here, I went to the site and saw that you have to sign up before it lets you see anything and so I just closed the tab.

Perhaps there's some value there that lifts it above stack-exchange sites, but I can't be bothered to sign up for yet another website prior to even knowing if I care about it.

I, too, visit less now that the novelty is gone, and that I've seen some of the celebrity/inner-circle machinations.

But, when I ask a question, I get good answers. When I occasionally find myself there from other links, it's good content.

So maybe it doesn't have to be an everyday social experience... just a constantly-improving, generally well-tended collection of reliable information.

The author is totally unconvincing. Creating tags splits the problem of asking or answering into 2 parts. First, search the space of tags to find the one you need. Second, search the space of questions with that tag. Obviously, its an easier problem if you already know which tags to use but in an extensive taxonomy that won't be true 99% of the time.

the biggest problem with his assumption is that people will curate the best answers, in this way the site can easily be gamed. He states machines and human curation only monitor grammar but not content. Lets say a large active right wing group organize so now the site has a clear bias, and are the answers this group is voting up concerning politics really the best answers anymore ? Especially when a lot of the questions are unverifiable or matters of opinion at this point your are largely relying on the community to be an educated of the topic and unbiased enough to vote on the real answer. In the end quora is nothing different than another content farm.

The premise is intriguing but seems pretty far fetched. Quora is better organized than the current web, so eventually it could become the framework of the web.

Maybe, but if it's not centralized around Quora, may not do them much good. The web itself will probably become better organized and Quora will just be one of the pioneers. Google+ is also better than the current mess of blogs, RSS feeds, twitters, facebooks in a way. But will it be the new web, instead of hosting your own blog you use G+? Or post on Quora?

I don't see it. These services could creep in under the hood through APIs but individual websites should be able to introduce new technologies faster and have an edge of over centralized services.

tl;dr Quora will become the next google search because you will have human curation, the query can be more naturally structured, and discovery of related topics all within the same site.

(I do recommend reading the article though, I probably didn't get all the points across properly)

I would be more receptive to this argument if the author had resisted the temptation to use metaphors like the thin edge of the wedge.

He is saying that Quora might be the next search and you are quibbering over metaphor use. Did you read the article at least?

It is a lot harder to evaluate accurately an argument that uses certain rhetorical techniques, so I stopped reading before the end.

If Quora is the next Google, there will be more posts on it.

Quora seems to me like a low quality mechanical turk. It's very cool for the SV elite who like to give out advice to fellow entrepreneurs. That's all, for most else it's neither useful nor interesting.

Example: I follow the neuroscience topic. Almost all of the answered questions are google/wikipedia-able. Many of the "best questions/answers" are no better than what any respectable newspaper has already written. The unanswered ones are either:

a) Also easily googleable

b) Idiotic / funny (How many hobbies does motor cortex allow?)

c) Popsci /media trivialities that nobody will ever answer (Can StarCraft II help with working memory in the same way that Dual-N-Back helps with it?)

d) Impossible to answer open questions, sometimes even rhetorical.

I don't see at this level how it is different from yahoo answers.

Answers are not constructed by review; having multiple answers is a mistake. If you're a famous entrepreneur, your answer is "more right" than others. Google is better at this: it provides an objective measure of authority that indirectly relies on the impact of your contribution (the number of links is still a signal). For most subjects, wikipedia has more up-to-date, succinct and accurate information, while quora requires that you search among a sizeable number of answers sometimes.

And lastly, how could quora ever solve the spam problem when it becomes big enough? At this point, from my observations, googlebots beat humans.

I would add an additional area of fail: interpersonal questions.

There is a question up there to the effect of What does it feel like to be ugly? (or unloved, I think) One of the highest voted answers is from Yishan Wong, and his advice includes waiting until the Singularity arrives so that the asker can transplant into a more attractive body. And this answer was highly lauded!

(IMO, the preponderance of his responses on the site has gone a long way in creating a sterile culture of mechanical answers.)

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