Quora Vs. Yahoo Answers
How Quora won the Q&A game.
Foundation: The idea of Q&A websites dates back to 2003 with the launch of AnswerBag where the members got points for asking and answering questions as well as for rating other members’ questions and answers. Then came Yahoo Answers in May of 2006 and Amazon followed in December 2006 with Askville. A late entry by Quora in June of 2010.
Then why did Yahoo Answers fail so horribly?
Users: The initial user base of quora remained “invite only” and they were field experts who could actually write good answers. This created a loop of great answers, that actually helped. Seeing this, users started asking logically correct questions. This caused a chain of producing very rich content. At the same time Yahoo answers was open to every user from the start including a large user base of spammers who asked stupid questions (as opposed to a community driven knowledge market) and in no time it turned into a trolling playground.
Moderation: Quora has a strict moderation policy. Your questions and answers on quora could collapse if it violates the moderation policy. They can collapse for various reasons like being factually incorrect, troll/joke, etc. This again led to creation of high quality content on quora which was one of the most important aspect of providing their value as a community driven knowledge market. Yahoo answers, never cared about which content should or shouldn’t be accepted on their platform. Any user could post an answer or question about anything and everything they want. There are always some users on the platform who are disrespectful and creates hatred. Quora’s BNBR policy helped keep such users away from the platform. No such measures taken by Yahoo answers.
Social element: With so many questions and answers being created daily on quora, a new user had a very hard time to get people pay attention to her or his questions. Hence, quora created A2A (Asked to Answer), where one can request an answer to a question from a list of users (mostly those who’ve written previously on those topics) they feel will have the best/closest answer to their question. According to quora:
Request Answers is a way to connect people with questions to people who can answer them.
At the same time, Yahoo answers has no such social element. Keeping a small social element is the nitty gritty of creating a community driven platform and Yahoo answers failed right there in the basics of creating a community driven platform.
UI and UX: To be honest, Quora doesn’t have a rich or a fancy UI but it is more than enough to constantly provide(over the years) the value to the users they started out with. On the other end Yahoo Answers, their UX is horrible, let alone the UI. If the UX is bad, creating the best UI in the world will fail.
Quality and Quantity: Quora managed to get both quality AND quantity. Yahoo Answers failed in the quality stakes. In fact, when you search “quora” on google, the following results show up:
When you search yahoo answers:
User engagement: In this mobile first world, Quora has elegant android and iOS apps which exponentially increases the user engagement. The notifications and the upvote count, number of views, etc is just so engaging. Zero engagement on Yahoo answers.
Timing: This is my personal observation. For any product to be successful, timing plays a very crucial role. Yahoo answers was built before the market was ready for content. Quora was launched when there was a need for content on the internet as we’ve never seen a positive churn on number of internet users (with India being quora’s largest market) since it’s inception.
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