Quora

Quora Answer : What unpopular opinions do you have about Quora?

May 15, 2017

Interesting question.

Probably my most unpopular opinion about Quora is that I disagree with "Quora is not a debate site".

I understand why lots of people say this. They're frustrated by and fed up with all the dumb insincere questions and cut'n'paste troll responses to answers. Sure, these are a pain. And I wish we didn't have to put up with them, and I don't want to "encourage" them.

But I take seriously the idea that Quora is about generating new knowledge. Not just reporting on a stock-pile of existing knowledge.

And as I'm a Popperian critical rationalist, I believe knowledge comes from a critical or even "adversarial" process where someone throws up a conjecture and other people trying to knock it down with criticism. That, for me, is the creative life-blood of our intellectual tradition.

Socrates is the well-spring of European thought. Through asking insistent rhetorical questions until he became a total PITA. Many Quorans would have this behaviour banned as Sea-Lioning. Heraclitus declares that "war is the father of all things"; all creativity comes from strife and all knowledge is "polemical". Our entire intellectual history since then, has benefited from structured disagreement : from devil's advocates, to the scientific method, to trial by jury, to representative democracy.

If Quora aspires to be part of that cannon, and to fulfil its purpose of being a (possibly great) platform to generate new knowledge, then the question is not how to avoid being a debate site, but how to become a good one.

Quora Answer : Why does Marc Bodnick think Quora will soon be one of the most important companies on the Internet?

May 27, 2017

You'll have to ask Marc Bodnick

I suspect it WON'T be one of the most important "companies" on the internet. If your idea of a company is something that makes large revenues and wields a lot of economic power. The way Google, Facebook and Uber do.

I suspect it may go down in history as one of the most important and influential communities on the internet in our time.

Right now, I'm pretty sceptical (or pessimistic) that the management will discover a business model that doesn't break Quora. And the most likely "good" future for Quora is that it's bought by a larger company or extremely rich philanthropist. Or becomes a non-profit like the Wikimedia foundation.

Quora Answer : Which company do you want to buy Quora?

Jul 18, 2017

One of Oxford / Cambridge / London / Yale / Harvard / MIT etc. A world class university.

I'd love to see this for two reasons :

I really want to see a good university starting to figure out how academia and learning are going to change in the next century. Quora is a huge collection of incredibly smart, and incredibly curious people. It is doing some of what academia / "the Republic of Letters" is meant to be doing. In some ways it's better than academia. In some ways it's worse. But it's something that academia needs to get to grips with.

Quora is a great platform and an even more impressive community. But it needs to go somewhere. It needs to "grow" in some sense. Or it will crash. I believe that to grow, it needs to invent / introduce new structures of discourse which can be more "productive" in some way. It needs to create structures for argument and debate. It could create structures for brainstorming. For other kinds of collaboration. For more formal teaching and accreditation. Some of these structures can be learned from traditional academia. Or worked out in conjunction with it.

Failing that ...

Amazon.

Why?

• Because it's big enough to fund Quora more or less indefinitely.
• It's NOT driven by advertising (sorry Google / Facebook) and relying on advertising would kill Quora.
• It's NOT stupid. Microsoft has wasted / screwed up every major acquisition it made (Hotmail, Skype, Nokia ... probably LinkedIn).
  • Whereas if JeffBezos buys Quora he will either have an interesting plan for it, or will be buying it purely out of philanthropy.
• I boycott Amazon, so it will possibly make me give up Quora. Which I'm dangerously addicted to.

Quora Answer : What do you think of Quora?

Jul 4, 2017

Quora is amazing.

It's certainly the smartest and most interesting community I've participated in on the web in the last 10 years.

When Seb Paquet introduced me to it, he said "here's your new Tribe.net".

And that makes perfect sense. I loved Tribe, for the smart people I used to meet and arguments I used to have there. And Quora is that.

Unfortunately, I worry that Quora's fate is the same as Tribe's.

Having been here for a while, I still don't see any sign that Quora has discovered a business model which can sustain the wonderful community and experience in its current form. I suspect that there isn't one, and that eventually Quora is going to either just go bust, or destroy everything that's good about it when they try to figure out how to repay investors and make some money. (That's basically what happened to Tribe. They tried to "go mainstream" by selling out all the alternative communities and ended up losing everything.)

This concerns me not just because I missed Tribe and will miss Quora. But also because I invested a lot of my time and energy writing here. I have over 4500 answers.

Until the beginning of this year, I was backing up all that writing, all my answers, via the RSS feeds so I felt that my investment was somewhat protected. I can (and do) republish some of what I write elsewhere.

But since March, the RSS feeds are down. And I've been backing up answers manually (and not entirely comprehensively). This annoys me a lot. And I think it shows that Quora don't respect their writers as much as they should. I also think it shows Quora is missing the opportunities available to it from having a lot of great writers and experts heavily invested in the site. (Not that I'm necessarily either, but there's a lot of brainpower here.)

Quora absolutely shouldn't be an "attention farm" selling its users (ie. writers) to advertisers and hoarding their questions and answers jealously to itself, to earn a pittance on page views. That is ultimately a route to a self-destructive, spiralling in on itself towards mediocrity.

Quora could, I believe, become an "intelligence farm" : exploring everything from prediction markets, to academic recruitment, to being an agency that helps writers develop and sell ideas for magazine articles and books, to running MOOCs, to reinventing what a university is. I still hope that one day they start exploring this approach. There's still time. Although time is running out.