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Early Quora Design Notes

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43 pointsdanzuri20 comments

Do people outside the start up / technology world really use Quora? I've never seen anything there that's of value to "real people", and worse, Quora pages seldom (if ever) are returned when I search for something on Google (while other Q&A sites like StackExchange and others come up all the time). I personally find Quora confusing and the content in there more on the navelgazing side. Not sure I get it.

The question gets asked all the time quora is discussed, my 2c:

I guess it's hard to tell, but I don't know anybody who isn't a techie who is on quora.

On the other hand, I don't know anyone non-techie using *.stackexchange either.

And TBH, I don't even know anyone using yahoo answers, but judging by the number of results from YA I still get in random google searches, I'd assume way more people find it useful than we may expect.

I find that the Quora email digest is the only newsletter I'm looking forward to reading EVERY time it's in my inbox. I can't come up with anything that is as insightful, interesting, and fun on the internet. It takes the enlightenment of a TED talk and removed the bullshit. That alone makes for Quora to be a survivor.

Survivor in what sense? E-mail newsletters are not the stuff of huge cash profit.

Yeah, thing is though, YA allows people to ask absolutely retarded questions. It's basically a place where teenagers with ultra-religious parents can ask questions about their illegitimate pregnancy. Quora specifically tries to be above such rabble, and thus, misses the meat of this "market." Quora and other Q/A sites are for people who don't know how to use Google if the answer is not on the first page. Unfortunately, Quora thinks it's far above such an assessment, and is therefore nothing to no one.

I think Quora has improved loads, there's a real diverse set of users (including San Quentin Prisoners) I wrote about it last month

http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2012/12/quora-initiative-allowing...

My thoughts exactly. Not sure what the point of Quora is and don't see it being around in a year or two personally.

I vehemently disagree. You could say the same of HN, Reddit or any other site. The value is in the users and the content. Where else on the internet can you ask any sort of question and expect high quality responses?

Yahoo Answers has terrible answers. Reddit is full of trolls. HN is technology only and requires a lot of effort to get attention, most submissions die at one or two points. StackExchange's model is great for technical and highly specific questions, but its approach doesn't work well for the sort of questions Quora does.

Where else on the internet can you ask and get great responses to these questions?

- How can I explain SQL injection to my grandmother? http://www.quora.com/SQL-Injection/How-can-I-explain-SQL-inj...

- How can Delhi be made safe for women? http://www.quora.com/New-Delhi-India/How-can-Delhi-be-made-s...

- What should I do to get over my fear of public failure? http://www.quora.com/What-should-I-do-to-get-over-my-fear-of...

- Is there a physical, theoretical limit to how accurately one can measure the speed of light? http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-physical-theoretical-limit-t...

I can't read any of those questions/answers because I'm not logged in to Quora.

Which, in my opinion, further proves my point. Find me a real world person who googles a question and is able to find a Quora answer as a result.

To each their own I suppose.

I can't read any of those questions/answers because I'm not logged in to Quora.

That's an absolutely huge barrier to someone first arriving at Quora- how are you supposed to know the answers are worth it?

And as others have said, if it's not on Google, how are you going to find the site in the first place? For a Q&A site that really needs to start turning a profit, this is not a trivial issue.

how are you supposed to know the answers are worth it?

The preview.

And as others have said, if it's not on Google, how are you going to find the site in the first place? For a Q&A site that really needs to start turning a profit, this is not a trivial issue.

Quora is on Google, and ranks really well on Google for long tail keywords despite the everything but the first answer not being included in Google's index (blurred out). As a matter of fact, I've even gotten a client who came from Google after finding one of my answers.

I know HN loves Quora links, so: http://www.quora.com/How-is-Quoras-SEO-so-damn-good

The first one was also asked on security.stackexchange.com (http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/25684/how-can-i-...). The last one would probably be on-topic on Physics.SE.

Nice find. However, go ahead and actually compare the two answers. There is no way my grandma would ever be able to follow the explanation on StackExchange, especially compared to the answer on Quora.

ask.metafilter.com

Quora would make a better first impression if they didn't force users to sign up to be able to read more than the first answer.

I also find their real name policy annoying, as they disable your writing privileges if you use a name that doesn't look real enough.

After having my account locked down because I didn't want to use my full name I closed my account, shortly after they turned into a more modern looking experts exchange and I wasn't so sore about not being able to contribute to the site.

That was a recent change, and undoubtedly one driven by a Growth team that wants to keep a certain graph going upward so another graph will as well.

I was an early and very active user of quora. I deleted my account when they mucked with privacy settings among other things.

I had a number of issues with the site: I think the UI is horrid. The site admins are complete dicks and they have a heavy censorship hand with no recourse. The ability to find various topics is difficult (it got better - but in the beginning it was abhorrent).

They are arrogant. They kept patting themselves on the back exclaiming how amazing their UI/UX was and effectively told people who didn't like it that they were too stupid to understand their methods.

I recently recreated my account to specifically ask Yishan some questions about reddit, and quora censored that post as well.

Personally, I think they are too arrogant and I choose not to participate.

I'm just not impressed with Quora's design; I think her initial mockup (which was essentially a StackExchange clone) was better than where it's ended up. Every time I go there I get frustrated with something; having to click to read each threaded comment, having to manually remove new notifications because instigating the drop-down or just going to the notifications page aren't enough, clicking to expand a user's description within their own profile, no less on the answer pages.. just a lot of little annoyances combined with poor typography, consistency and use of color.

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