>"It was a turning point I happened to catch at its birth."
Really? Because I'm pretty sure myself and many others caught it when the T-echo Chamber was trying to sell us on this new message board system that was going to make a lot of money and change the game.
Quora was an online community that happened to be "cool", so it attracted intelligent people which made the content fantastic. But nothing they were doing, in my opinion, was especially original. And as has been pointed out, if you try to scale up an online community, you deal with more and more noise. Predictably, that happened.
I apologize for the past tense; I realize Quora still exists, and nothing I or the author says has any real bearing on where it goes from here, or whether or not it is successful in the future. But I do know that I've gone from using it occasionally to using it never.
You pretty much nailed it. Quora was a fad for the valley's elite. It was launched with a critical mass of the right people that pretty much everyone in tech had reason to jump on board right away.
But if you grow this quickly you're also likely to implode this quickly, especially with the fundamental conflict of interest between startup vs community curation. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to make a great community is to prioritize that over profit and growth. That's why HN, MetaFilter, and countless smaller communities and boards can thrive long-term, but "community" startups like Digg, Reddit and Quora tend to go to shit. The closest I've seen to bucking the trend is Stack Overflow, but that's due to subject matter focus, phenomenal long-term utility, and abysmal competition, and even there it's hard to argue it's still as great as it was a couple years ago.
It was a fad for the Silicon elite but it COULD have been so much more. There were actual scientists, historians, etc. getting involved and those people could have made it awesome. The reason Quora faltered was because of startup/investor interests. They didn't seem to be curious intellectual types actually interested in the knowledge curation, they just seemed to have hit upon a good business idea.
Really? Because I'm pretty sure myself and many others caught it when the T-echo Chamber was trying to sell us on this new message board system that was going to make a lot of money and change the game.
Quora was an online community that happened to be "cool", so it attracted intelligent people which made the content fantastic. But nothing they were doing, in my opinion, was especially original. And as has been pointed out, if you try to scale up an online community, you deal with more and more noise. Predictably, that happened.
I apologize for the past tense; I realize Quora still exists, and nothing I or the author says has any real bearing on where it goes from here, or whether or not it is successful in the future. But I do know that I've gone from using it occasionally to using it never.