I have been fiddling with Quora for just under a week, thanks to a generous invite by @manuscrypts. In the week since I joined, I have started seeing a sudden and dramatic increase in the number of people talking about Quora. Suddenly there’s increased chatter about Quora on all other platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
At a first glance, Quora looks to me like the independent variant of Disqus, that provides ready-made comments modules to blogs. Imagine if there was no blogs and Disqus asks users to use its own platform to add the blog post too…that’s how I see Quora, at least now.
Here are some of my initial, newbie’ish observations.
1. One of the most startling things I noticed is how it auto-builds your followers list. To a question, ‘Does Quora make me auto follow my Facebook friends?‘, Quora’s co-founder Charlie Cheever says, “Yes. You can unfollow people if you don’t want to follow them. We’ve found that people have a much better experience if they can start off with some people and topics to follow”.
That literally means Quora leeches on existing platforms’ network connections to build its own. We have been trained to understand that ‘follow’ is something that is done voluntarily, by choice, on other networks that work hard themselves to let its users work hard on building followers. Quora assumes on its own that since there are already established connections, it need not reinvent the wheel and can simply harness those existing connections.
Naturally, this disturbs a lot of people. At least 2 people in Radian 6, to start with.
Lauren Vargas says,
Amber Naslund’s feeling is,
I concur with both these opinions, which is why you see my mugshot below each tweet.
It is an interesting tactic, to build your followers by default, without bothering to ask you, but remember…Google Buzz did that too. It assumed something along these lines and got heavily fired. I’m keen to really know how Quora’s follower/following algorithm works since it seems to only selectively follow people on their behalf.
As of now, it nothing short of an elaborately crafted ego massage – connect noobs with stars and get more follows to stars and the massage cycle is in an overdrive already. Much of those tweets on ‘I’m addicted to Quora’ seems to stem from this crafty tactic…after all, if you know that some stars in their select field are following you, while you barely signed up and answered one piddly question, why won’t you be addicted?
2. Next, the topics that one follows. No, let me rephrase that, since I haven’t followed a single topic myself, consciously, yet, but am still informed by Quora that I’m following 29 topics – so…the topics that Quora chooses to follow on my behalf.
Artifical intelligence, huh? How does that work? I’m following ‘World Economic Forum’, for some strange reason – I have no idea why. Quora has also followed ‘Britney Spears’ for my benefit – I did not know that the lady has become a topic now and I do not recollect showing any signs of liking her either!
But I’m worried about this, really. I dare not search Quora for something sidey or risque, else Quora may follow topics on that space automatically! But yes, you can follow questions anonymously, it seems.
3. The Q&A format itself is nothing new at all. Yahoo has one of the most known properties on this theme and it gets very high Google rankings too! Google’s own version is in a perennial state of limbo. however.
A Q&A site by nature depends on its users. The more the users, the more the chance of getting good/better/best responses. The more that happens, the more the chance of better quality people joining the platform and improve the standards constantly. Assuming early adopters have proven some worth at Quora, it’d be great to watch how Quora’s community behaves when the real world shows up there.
Basic features like voting for responses, thanking people and commenting on responses are all perfectly fine – most have been tried before too, but the inclination of alleged subject experts to bother responding to random strangers’ questions may happen for only one reason – when they get a benefit. In Quora’s case, that benefit seems to be the accumulation of social currency.
Consider this: You have a choice of starting your own blog on a particular topic that you want to be seen as an expert of. Mere existence of the blog does not mean it’d be viewed by all in the online world. You naturally need to promote it left, right and center to acheive that. Quora seems to be giving you a platform full of people to jumpstart that process!
4. I have a massive issue with anonymous responses. While one needs to register on Quora (by invite, I assume, at least now), the fact that it allows anonymous responses is a put-off. I, personally, would love to know who is giving me that fantastic response/opinion and would perhaps want to passively keep in touch with that person – sort of like a LinkedIn Group/ LinkedIn Answers connection. I’ve already had a troll for one of my questions and I can only sit and sulk about that situation, besides angrily cliking on that massively useful ‘Not Helpful’ option!
5. Platforms like Mahalo Answers perhaps has a more evolved and useful incentive/recognition system built within it, but to Quora’s credit, it focuses on the most critical aspects of a Q&A community – simple UI, connections on the platter from your other networks and easier ways to select the best answer through community voting. In comparison, Mahalo seems like an elaborately messy system that forces users to join that specific format.
6. The real value of Quora may be when search engines start indexing Quora responses. Or may be not! Quora could also signify a UnGoogle way to find information – Google taught us to search for everything when things were categorized into a mesh of topics, directory style. I guess that old style is making a comeback with Quora!