Quora Gamifies: Credits And “Ask To Answer” Suggestions Live For Everyone

Blech. The reason I was enjoying Quora was its lack of explicit gameified geegaws -- versus StackOverflow (and to a lesser extent the whole StackExchange federation). SO has become less and less useful, if you've got a novel and/or slightly abstract or subjective query, because everyone is playing for points, including moderators. It leads to a Pavlovian house style, favoring novice questions with circumlocutious answers, with terse rebukes and heavy-handed moderation for everything else.

I appreciate SO's focus but only inasmuch as it produces something I can use. I still use it frequently as the majority of "duh, what module?" sort of questions have been answered there already.

Quora wadn't about that, though; I found the process of socially-networked collaborative question-answering to be as valuable as the answer... E.g. Answers that were 80% there would frequently contain clues to new relevant questions; if people are trying to "win" I m afraid that horizontal exploration of Quora's topics won't be as fun or accessible.

In fact I think it will be less fun in general, and the likely inference that less fun leads to less Quora use (and therefore less $)doesn't require rocket-science-grade reasoning.

I am sure enough people love this kind of game enough such that they'll stay afloat even if the Quora game is every bit as unpleasant as I might anticipate -- but in my personal expert opinion, that'd be weak.

To me, Quora has been sort of a game since it started. It has a lot of hidden/clever game mechanics underlying the design. I think this is one way that the company can start helping create an economy to pay those that create and donate the content that makes the site go in the first place.

This is sort of the old Experts Exchange model, before they went spammy/evil, isn't it?

Nope - still not interested.