Quora — Improve these 3 things and a bonus!
Quora is one of the largest sites for questions and answers. I like it, and I use it for learning new stuff — and I am not the only one! The site has a lot of registered users, Business insider has a Quora category and you can read answers of Ashton Kutcher, Sheryl Sandberg, Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-founder) and more.
Having said that, Quora has a lot to accomplish in order to be more appealing to their users. In this post I’ll cover the top 3 things I find important to Quora’s most users.
Stop hiding content
Quora has a lot of good content, arranged as questions and answers, and boy do they use this content to attract users. In my opinion, Quora took it one step too far.
For example, In the past I received emails from Quora that “1 more person followed you”.
Getting emails like that didn’t create an emotional connection as intended and instead led me to delete them instantly with zero interest in reading the content. Trying to attract me to the site ended up in leaving me uninterested. The name of the new follower could have drag me in, just for the sake of ‘following’ them back.
Nowadays when someone follows me on Quora their name is part of the email title and I am more likely to navigate to Quora to follow them back.
So, please keep on the good trend and stop hiding things, even though your page views might drop!
- Stop hiding the full answers to questions in emails!
- Stop hiding other user’s full bios!
- Stop hiding the full list of notifications!
Make Quora tailored better for me
I experience Quora mostly by emails. Quora’s emails include questions and answers tailored for me based on algorithms, based on people and topics I and based on upvotes (Quora likes) I do (and probably other reasons I am not aware of).
As I use Quora more, I follow additional people and topics, and therefore the content I see changes, but not always for the good. As a user, I don’t understand the hidden consequences of my direct actions.
A “Why am I seeing this?” option, as appears in Quora’s feed and in Facebook ads, should be added to the emails.
Improve your emails
Most of Quora users probably experience Quora by emails, and Quora as a user generated content site has a lot of content to share with every email… please stop!
Throwing all this content at me in an email makes the emails unpleasant to read, and as a result I would tend to postpone opening and reading them… sometimes even delete them without opening them.
I suggest you to continue working on optimizing emails, and to try one of these:
- Try to send only 1 or 2 highlighted questions, and that’s it.
- Send me the question and the full answer, don’t crop the full answer.
- Don’t include an answer at all.
Using these techniques will make me engage with the emails more frequently.
A bonus
Just for fun, here are some fun and interesting stuff you can learn on Quora:
This famous Muppets song? It was originally created for a porn movie. Read more.
Here are a lot of things you can learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for the rest of your life. Some cool examples:
- How to fold a shirt in under 2(!!) seconds — link
- Use google better — link 1, link 2
- A cheatsheet infographic for growing your own vegetables — link
- Home hacks — link
View the most upvoted answers — link
Thanks for staying until here, follow me for my next one! I would love to hear your thoughts.
