Three Pivots That Can Save Quora
What is Quora?
The home page claims that Quora is your best source for knowledge, with the mission to share and grow it.
But what is knowledge? Glad you asked!
According to this Quora answer, it is justified true belief. That’s actually Plato’s definition, although the answerer credits Socrates.
The other two answers are even less satisfying (“Knowledge is a very interesting characteristic because it is the one thing that is actually persistent in experience”, “Knowledge is the aggregation of data in a certain context”).
May explain the sum total of zero upvotes here.
Perhaps we should turn to the second best source of knowledge in search of our definition?
Google has this to say:
- Information and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
- What is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information.
And its first search hit is a link to Knowledge on Wikipedia (which must be the third-best source). Here, we read:
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something, which can include facts,information, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education.
Now we’re getting somewhere. At the same time, Quora’s claim to be the best source of knowledge starts to fade rather rapidly, given these definitions. Facts, information, descriptions, and skills are much more likely to be obtained outside of Quora (especially the ones that require, as Wikipedia tells us, experience or education), and, in great many cases, outside of the Internet itself.
Even the relatively tiny crumbs of knowledge Quora has managed to extract to date from its users that are not readily available elsewhere are much easier to find via Google than via Quora’s much-maligned internal search.
Perhaps the mission statement is simply aspirational. But even then, Quora is way behind and keeps falling even more behind Wikipedia, Reddit, and, yes, Answers:
Small wonder that Wikipedia’s article for Quora doesn't include the word knowledge even once, but it has this to say:
Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users’ answers. Quora’s main competitors are social bookmarking sites like reddit, social networking sites like ChaCha, and numerous question and answer websites.
This is downright depressing. ChaCha, really? Click ChaCha’s answer to “What is knowledge?” at your own risk. I strongly advise against it. But indeed that’s where Quora is going if it doesn't do something soon.
I love Quora. I don’t want it to die. So what can help save it from the very real threat of ChaChaization?
Here are the three pivots, to be executed sequentially.
Pivot 1: Turn It Inside Out
That’s what Facebook did (in fact that’s what Charlie Cheever launched in 2007 as Facebook Platform), and that’s what, in my opinion, made Facebook what it is today, more than anything else they did, combined.
Redefine it as a topic mapping platform and create embeddable plugins for third-party websites, as well as WordPress and Tumblr, and offer toolkits for all major mobile content readers with the same super-simple functionality: topic tagging and up/downvotes. Nothing else. If Disqus can get on millions of sites, so can Quora. At the same time, unleash Quora moderators on the task of maintaining and refining Quora’s real crown jewel: its evolving topic taxonomy and its ability to cross-reference upvotes and topics, surfacing best-quality content.
If you’ve spent any time on Quora at all, you must know that one of the very best writers on topics like life advice, relationships, and social interactions is Marcus Geduld. I’m very happy that he happens to be on Quora, but how many other wonderful writers aren’t? What if Quora could help is all discover and enjoy writers like Marcus on all of WordPress and Tumbler 200 million blogs? It can, by aggregating and analyzing upvotes against its universal topic taxonomy across millions of blog posts (and, with Quora Platform 2.0, Medium-style paragraph-level comments).
Pivot 2: Out-Tumblr Tumblr
Once the critical mass on the Quora Platform is reached, reposition the company as a blogging service. Tumblr took away half of WordPress market by making it easier for kids to blog and turning blogging into a highly social experience. Here’s what happened two years ago:
Yes, Quora now offers a limited blogging ability (two years after I predicted it). But as Hugh MacLeod famously said, it’s not what the software does, it’s what the user does. And the user on Quora doesn’t blog. It’s not nearly big enough yet.
Within a year of reaching the critical mass on Quora Platform, the company will be in a position to join Tumblr in poaching WordPress users in massive numbers and start stealing them from Tumblr too as the same time.
Would make me very happy.
Pivot 3: Forget Knowlegde
Seriously, forget it. Wikipedia, Google (including Google books), schools, libraries, teachers, coaches, and drill sergeants have it covered.
The endless efforts by Quora the company to shoehorn the Quora community into compliance with its “best source of knowledge” mission remind me of the great totalitarian experiments of the last century, complete with the secret police (moderators), the Communist Manifesto (Quora policies), and sullen official humorlessness. And just like it was for Soviet dissidents, subverting the dictatorship is perversely exciting, especially while deploying plausible deniability techniques such as double meaning, obscure references, and in general writing between the lines.
And just like it always happens, people are stubbornly resisting the Utopian ideas of what’s good for them. The dissidents are winning. Here’s a random sampling of recent Trending Topics.
Life
Ice Cream
Fun
Comedy
Love
Dating and Relationships
Social Advice
Manners and Etiquette
Singers and Musicians
Christianity
So tear down that wall, Adam. Forget knowledge.
Aim higher.
Make Quora the best place for wisdom. You’ll have very little competition.
Make it a place where people discover one another and learn from each other’s mistakes and successes, offer the ability to understand and explain, listen and accept, console, encourage, laugh and cry.
But wait. At its best, that’s what Quora already is. Lean into it.
Acknowledgements
This post was inspired by Garrick Saito’s You Can Run, But You Cannot Hide, the very amusing Quora! Quora! Quora!? by Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley, and the bizarre number of upvotes for one of my recent zingers, despite it not being very funny at all: Gene Linetsky’s answer to Dating and Relationships: I’m ugly and poor. How can I get a trophy wife?
