Last week, I wrote about my Quora addiction and the reasons that I like the site. Today, I want to talk about a few of the problems I still see with it. A couple of my complaints are minor - quibbles really. One though, goes to the heart of the site and asks a couple of tough questions about its future.
So what don't I like about Quora?
Slapping the Wrist that Feeds You
Quora depends on a dedicated group of volunteer reviewers and admins to keep the discussions on track and to fend off the horde of internet asshats looking to troll the site. This is a fairly common way of policing discussion sites, assuming you don't want them to turn into Youtube comments.
Basically, if you've written an answer that a Quora volunteer doesn't think is useful or relevant, they can "collapse" the answer. I have a problem with the subjective nature of these decisions. When an answer is collapsed, a note indicates why, but its usually a completely meaningless phrase like "Not Helpful". The reviewer or admin can add a comment, but these aren't particularly helpful either, being cut and paste phrases that tell you nothing, like "This would be better as a comment than an answer". I've given up trying to guess why something gets collapsed. At least half the time, I can't see any reason for it, and I'm sure the person who wrote it doesn't know either.
Says Who?
Quora offers up some good options for identifying people you might want to follow. One thing that is absent, and that I think would be useful, is some sort of system to tell you about a person's past performance in terms of asking and answering questions. I have no doubt that they collect this data - how often are your answers voted up, do your questions attract a lot of interesting debate - but it isn't quantified for users in any simple way.
Just as some sites use a "Karma" score or something similar, it would be helpful to be able to see if a person is generally seen by the community as being a positive influence or not. I suspect the absence of this kind of system is a deliberate choice on their part, but I for one, would welcome our robotic-karma-noting overlords.
What's the Point?
This is probably the biggest question I have. As I said, I enjoy Quora and spend a fair bit of time there answering and asking questions. It's good, honest fun if you're the kind of person who likes to debate or discuss issues. But at the end of the day, so what? Is Quora contributing anything meaningful to the internet or to users?
Quora has big pretensions - that it should serve as some sort of repository of information for use by people searching for answers to questions. I don't really see it being used that way though. If you need to find out the mathematical formula for the change in velocity of poop flung against a wall, you're unlikely to swing over to Quora to see if anyone has asked that. A simple Google search will turn up what you want 99 times out of 100.
To me, Quora is kind of like Farmville for smart people. Instead of tending virtual crops, we're sitting around arguing about metaphysics or economics, but at the end of the discussion, it's very rare that any kind of definitive answer has been reached that will be of use to anyone. I also can't imagine anyone quoting an answer from Quora in an academic paper - no matter how compelling the answers, they're still just a random collection of opinions from people with nothing better to do that sit on Quora. It's hardly an authoritative source.
I think this last point will be what determines Quora's longterm success. Do they embrace the "entertainment" aspect of the site and make that their focus, or do they continue to hope to turn it into a serious research tool? I think that if they try to do the second, they will fail.
In the meantime, I'm off to Quora to argue about how many T-Rexs Noah packed on his Ark.