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...
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 :(
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.