Why Quora Won't Scale

I work at a startup in Austin, I read HN daily, I enjoy news about SV startups, etc. Still, I haven't found a compelling reason to spend any substantial time on Quora. I'm happy to read a particularly insightful answer when I see the occasional link pop up on another site, but that doesn't make me want to search Quora for other information.

I wonder if my disinterest in Quora is common among developers outside of SV?

If I, a tech savvy developer at a startup, don't find the idea of Quora particularly interesting, why would Average Joe be interested in joining the community?

I wanted to like Quora. I really did. Theoretically, Quora should be a wet dream for me: insightful discussions, check. Answers from bright people, check. A place to learn, to read, to spend hours on soaking in information, check. I never could have guessed that spending time on Quora would turn out to be more of a nightmare.

As the article points out, Quora is a dictatorship, which doesn't really care about what the community wants. Which would be fine, except that the dictators don't know what they're doing. Their policies, and the general vibe of the community, just aren't welcoming. I don't contribute to Quora because I self-moderate myself out of posting. Why shouldn't I post? I have insights to contribute, as much as any other person. The problem is that Quora allows so little room for free expression in a world that is crying out for originality. Don't use your real name? Your account is locked and you can't post. Didn't directly address the question? Your answer downvoted into oblivion. Spelled something wrong? Here let me edit your post. The community they've attracted doesn't help either. There are a lot of nice people they've somehow convinced to stay on Quora, but I can't help but get the vibe that a lot of users think they're the sh, and how dare you disagree with them.

The founder of reddit once said that the philosophy he had towards running reddit was like hosting a party - he couldn't just allow users free reign to do whatever they pleased, but he had to make it an inviting and fun place for users. Otherwise the party would suck. Well, if reddit is a fun party with alcohol, humor, entertainment, and cat pictures, along with the occasional smart person to learn from, then Quora is like hanging out with a group of bitter, pretentious intellectuals who wield their answers like weapons, at a party with no alcohol allowed.

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First, a community is founded with a small handful of users. Those small handful of users all know the topic well, so good discussion arises. Those small number of users all know each other, and form a bond. Once word gets out that the community is a place where high quality discussion occurs, people start joining in droves. The small handful of people who were there since the beginning start feeling like that community "belongs" to them, and start acting hostile towards the "noobs". You also have this phenomenon where the new users desperately want to be "accepted" by the establishment, so they'll suck up to the core users, which results in cliquish behavior and it really kills the site for anyone who just wants to discuss and learn about he topic/hobby the community was founded on.

It's happened to Something Awful, JetCareers, the entirety of usenet, and yes even Hacker News.

I like the theory described by the spiral of silence and it somehow seems relevant to the continuing discussion about HNs apparent demise (in the eyes of some). it seems like quora successfully implemented a system, that leaves a community largely true to it's original state, by giving dominant admins/moderators the tools to block unwanted content and to promote their own views. left aside whether this fosters better or worse answers, it apparently doesn't help growing a noticeable community and I'm glad that HN didn't go that same way.

Many of the arguments should have been tested against Facebook: elitism didn't slow the spread of Facebook. In fact, it was likely a main driver of growth in the world's most popular website. It's not surprising Quora has been modeled after Facebook since Quora is made up of early Facebook alumni.

Many of the rest of the arguments apply to discussion websites in general. If you consider Wikipedia, for instance, scaling doesn't seem to be a problem. Taking Wikipedia is a good idea, since, despite what's been said, Quora is or should be a direct competitor to Wikipedia.

At a descriptive level, Quora isn't represented accurately.

Judging from the slant of the article, it seems the author is reacting to a bad experience on the site.

I'm sure there's a core group of people who love and swear by it, it just seems most of the comments in the posts are usually one way traffic. You either agree or just get downvoted into oblivion.

For someone looking for a welcoming community, this is not the sort of impression you want to give new users.

or is exponential growth one more thing that isn't the same as it was back in the day?

But as to the elitist / insider's club / groupthink accusations, my inclination is to ask what the alternative is? I mean if you don't impose some form of social norms that someone (I'm not personally passing a judgement) will interpret as elitism then inevitably you will face the Eternal September which spirals out of control and leads to evaporative cooling as you grow. I suppose they could be nicer about it, but it's better to please the people who provide value than to try to make everyone happy and eventually degrade into Yahoo! Answers.

PG spoke of this (an essay perhaps?).

Why should we be surprised? Culture is the most important thing in a business, morals to a person. Why would we be able to get it right online at scale without a few hiccups (and a lot of dissent).

It's almost a law of social gravity.

Anonymous comments have to stand on their own. They can't rely on name association. The reader has to evaluate them for their content, not their author. This is a good thing.

Another thing I have learned over many years of using the web is that intelligent people do not always make intelligent comments. We are all inconsistent; we're human. It's foolish to assume everything Joe the Self-Proclaimed Expert says is going to be worth reading. Sometimes he will say stupid things. By the same token people who in the real world might not be deemed intelligent can sometimes have some brilliant insights. It would be foolish to assume that every comment they make is worthless simply because of the name it's attached to. Anonymous commenting allows each comment to be evaluated individually. It addresses the inherent inconsistency of human comments and protects readers from making unwarranted assumptions. Unless of course they assume every anonymous post automatically falls into some category with respect to its content. IMO, that sort of thinking is the mark of web inexperience.

The notion of "experts" is vastly overrated. This is an idea used to sell advice and services. Socrates figured this out hundreds of years ago. Read what Socrates learned and you too will learn something abut "experts" and earned reputations as "authorities" on given subjects. Learn how to form questions. In learning, it is my opinion that questions, knowing how to formulate them, are far more important than answers.

The web is blissfully free from the hard sell of the "expert" while still being a great place to discover many types of "expertise". No one is demanding to see how many degrees or certifications anyone else has. No one cares about your "reputation". People are just interested in knowledge, no matter who it might come from. They can then evaluate it on their own. Without anyone telling them what to do or think.

This is not stopping some from trying to force their own system, with "experts" and "reputation" and so forth. In my opinion, none of them will scale. The main attraction of the web is that it is free from those sort of restraints. There are plenty of experts on the web, but they do not have to self-promote. They might not be trying to sell anything; maybe they just share their thoughts for the joy of sharing.

Anonymous posting is as close to pure thought, free from real world biases like identities, credentials and reputations, as we're going to get. Every thought can be evaluated on its own merits, irrespective of the submitter.

My experience on Quora has been extremely positive. Right now, it's one of the best online communities for quality of content.

People who call Quora a nasty community because of downvoting have no idea what they're talking about. Wikipedia in 2004-5 was nasty. Personal attacks all over the place, edit wars and tag teaming (troll raids by influential people, justified by the "3 revert rule"). There was one guy who created a bunch of sock puppet accounts and attempted to attribute them to me on a still-infamous hate page, in which he claimed about 50 accounts, most nonexistent, were my sock puppets when many of them were later established to be his. (Half the accounts weren't used for anything but have obscene names.) That is what I call nasty. Downvotes on Quora aren't anywhere close to that.

I haven't seen Quora get even on the same planet as what Wikipedia was when I last edited (which was more than 5 years ago).

I don't agree with the decision to collapse answers based on 1 downvote, but if I'm really interested in a question, I'll usually read all the answers anyway, so I don't find it to be a major hindrance. Besides, being downvoted isn't a big deal: fewer people read your answer; so what?

Quora's great, at least from my experience. It might be that I stay away from extremely charged topics (e.g. politics) but I've never encountered any of this stuff-- and I've seen it a lot on other internet communities.

http://startupjunkies.org/blog/2012/09/14/unlucky-little-quo...

I'm a hard core Quora addict and have never encountered most of the things in this post. He's way off about the "elite". Yes there are people who get tons of upvotes and have huge followings but in every case I've seen it's because they are well known off of Quora or they give consistently amazing answers, often both.

It's not like Digg was where some random anonymous person has all this power. Quora power users don't even really have any power beyond knowing lots of people will read their answers, even then those answers still must be good to get upvotes.