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Comment by sthatipamala | Hacker News Reader

My problem with Quora is that it is very difficult to penetrate the inner sanctum and feel welcome in the community.

You used to be able to gain recognition with thorough answers to domain-specific questions. But if you take a look at a lot of the "trending" answers on Quora, they all seem to be written by the same 10 Quora power users (Mark Bodnick, Garrick Saito, Venkatesh Rao, etc..)

The problem not so much the existence of these power users but the fact that they seem to only upvote amongst themselves and contribute to each others boards, creating a very exclusive feeling.

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I don't think the low-quality general answers from some of the high volume contributors really matter; I'm a lot more into the niche experts, and Quora makes it easy to find those people. (Marc Bodnick upvotes are so common as to be essentially content free, although his answers are great; there are a lot of users who contribute lots of crap with no actual knowledge, across a range of categories, and a number of users who are only contributing in very well defined areas of expertise. e.g. Gus Fuldner's PCI related answers are great, and there are a lot of domain experts and people with first-hand knowledge who post on Quora.

If you have a problem with Quora, follow better users and better topics.

The boards product is IMO pretty ill advised. Quora is doing it because they want to be a repository, easily searched, of a lot of interesting information, but they didn't take into account the second order effects of attracting a lot of boards users to Quora.

The funny thing for me is that the OP joined Quora (I think) during the big wave of idiots in December 2010. ("Scoblegate"). People said all the same things about death of Quora then, and in June 2010 when it opened up to the public. I suspect the average IQ of Quora users has been in strict decline ever since the first user was added after Charlie and Adam.

I joined Quora soon after it launched, thought it was kinda cool, forgot about it, and yes, then rejoined again sometime in the fall of 2010. There was a nice linguistics community built up for a while (I'm a linguistics undergrad) until everything kind of fell apart. Quora didn't know how to separate people very well, so people interested in memes gradually crowded everything out.

BUT I didn't actually have any problems at all with Quora (at least, nothing notable) until the launch of Boards. In fact, I really enjoyed the linguistics, philosophy, chemistry, biology, theology, travel, and cooking communities. I mostly ignored the Quora superusers and focused on niche experts, like you mentioned, but eventually it was just too much.

Perhaps I will revamp my profile when I get the time, start from scratch, and things will work out better the second time around.

Ah, I shouldn't have assumed; although even Feb 2011 is early enough to see before and after boards.

Have you seen any positive use of Boards? I haven't -- even Marc Bodnick's boards are pretty mediocre, although I don't think they drag the site down like the others.

Survey questions are a worse thing than boards, though, I think. Getting rid of both would be great, but if I could only get rid of one...

Agreed. Survey questions are terrible. So are "joke questions", which are now legitimated by an official designation...

Joke questions by people who are already on the site, if they're a small percentage of the total, and easily filtered out, aren't that big a problem for me. Survey questions basically attract and retain the formspring crowd. Better filtering should prevent you from seeing content you don't like, but in the long run, the second order effects will take over :(

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