Someone else's opinion about Quora

Since I wrote about Quora pivoting to blogging platform, my good friend forwarded me a link to a long opinion piece on Quora.  It was quite long, and since most of you, I figured don't care enough to read the entire article, I thought I would share a quick outline.

Basically the writer is making three points against Quora for the following reasons:


1. Quora moderators are not doing the right job to promote greater participation from wide range of contributors because they are often more interested in being politically correct than allowing open discussion to take place.

2. Anonymous contribution is perceived as less valuable than ones with author info.

3. Q&As are not available for everyone to view without logging in to Quora.

4. Quora caters to a handful of user categories and alienates the rest of users, hence suffers from lack of diverse viewpoints.

Quora, the next blogging ecosystem

I made a mental note to myself to check out Quora's blogging platform.  Quora has launched its standalone blogging support, and now allows any user to create a blog on its site.  Earlier today I had a chance to register futureofsocialnetwork.quora.com and wrote my first quick article.

User experience of setting up a new blog was a breeze.  Writing an article was also a very pleasant experience.  With minimal UI for the blogger to write an article and easy edit feature, it was a joy to use Quora to write.  All the lessons that Quora has learned over the years perfecting Q&A site shine through its bare essential UI/UX.

But they are not what makes Quora a strong contender among other blogging platforms.  The reason why Quora is an interesting blogging platform is because it can help both readers and writers.

Tracking what people read is surveillance, not sharing

Last week Quora announced that it will start tracking who viewed your content by default.  When I checked my account today, I found that my Settings -> View option was turned on.  This meant that whatever I read would have been tracked by Quora and can be viewed by article contributors by default.

I suggest you turn off View sharing option on Quora today.
You can do that by opening Settings page and clicking 'No' on Views.

I can see how it could be interesting for writers to be able to see who's reading the posts.  But it's definitely too much information to be shared with everyone.  What I don't understand is the rationale of product designers who thought that exposing whatever articles that you read with everyone is okay thing to do.  To be fair, Quora says that they will be exposing readership information selectively and as user you can opt out at any time.  Still I don't understand how default setting of all posts that are read is acceptable.

Facebook Group: Will It Catch On?

As I discussed last week, last Wednesday Facebook announced their new Facebook Group feature along with other privacy enhancements (allowing Facebook data to be downloaded as archive file and dashboard to view history of authorized application access to personal data). While I was reading a few Facebook Group discussions on the web, there were many opinions as to whether this Facebook Group feature will catch on or not.

Quora: Experimental Public Knowledge Base For Grown Ups

Question and answer sites are crowded market. There are dozens of websites that provide question and answer functionality already: Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, Askville, LinkedIn Questions & Answers, Answerbag, AOL Answers (formerly known as Yedda), Aardvark (now part of Google lab) and Facebook Questions to name a few. This crowded market just got one more strong player about 4 months ago.  It is Quora.