Medium and Quora, A Content Analysis
“The world’s largest taxi firm, Uber, owns no cars. The world’s most popular media company, Facebook, creates no content.”
_Hashish Macrae, Independent.co.uk
Hashish claimed in 2015 that the money today is in owning the interface. Let the world create the content for us. It is liberating to think that anyone today with an internet connection can voice his views in the most audacious way possible till date. As a result, thousands of blogs get posted every minute. This, while great for individual writers creates an ocean of knowledge, opinions, views on every imaginable topic for the readers. Its too much information for anyone to consume. Also, most certainly, not every source of information is valid, trustworthy. As Harlan Ellison says,
“You are not entitled to your opinion, you are entitled to your informed opinion.”
Here, the facilitators of the information step in to sort the mess out and the decisions that they make can profoundly influence what we read on the web.
Quora was started in 2010 as a questions and answers community with an invite only basis. It was considered as a privilege to receive one. People posted questions, answered them, upvoted or downvoted them, followed the writers they liked and visited the website to get some value while getting to know what the people of the world were up to. Over the years, many personal articles, the feature to send personal messages, storytelling sessions emerged. As a result the destination As Semil Shah shrewdly points out, The big thing about Quora is that it was a destination. Quora depended on their army of editors to find the most relevant answers, to curb plagiarism and on the number of upvotes the content received.
Medium on the other hand, was started in 2013. It has one of the cleanest interfaces of any blogging website. Medium follows a minimalist approach providing a single font, only a few layouts and single white background. Users can search for topics, follow writers, add comments and clap for stories. Medium suggests stories that you might like in a very unobtrusive way and unlike Quora you can write about anything that you want to. No restrictions, and also no newsfeed. You can add a maximum of 5 tags to your story to make it searchable. The stories with maximum claps are shown first. This might feel cumbersome or restricting to a few people but it goes a long way to ensure that everyone has a quality reading experience. Its no wonder that Medium ranks 3rd while Quora ranks 19th in the list for best blogging websites.
Regarding the effects of biases of curators and upvotes in case of Quora or that of algorithms in the case of Medium nothing can be said for sure apart from the fact that they are undeniably there. Both are invested in keeping the users engaged on the website and to move away from the influence of the recommendations which are based on your digital footprint and which are invested in the retention rate rather than broadly educating the readers, there is no option for the reader other than to be consciously aware of them.
