We All Adore A Qu-Ora?
I checked out Quora a few months ago and left thinking, OK, this is conceptually interesting and culturally interesting but actually READING it is pretty boring. And broadly this is what I still think. But Quora is suddenly getting hype everywhere, so I thought I’d write a “What Quora Means For Research” post as a way jotting my impressions down.
If you don’t know what Quora is, it’s a Q-and-A site: readers ask questions, answer questions, and the best answers get voted up. It’s like Yahoo! Answers, but with a social dimension and - the crucial selling point at the moment - not stupid. Most of the analysis around Quora is around whether non-stupidity can possibly scale. I’m worried about this too, but for me the main problem is already its breadth, not its user numbers.
People Like Questions
On one level, Quora is heartening for researchers as it’s yet more proof that people online really like offering opinions, and what’s more they like it in a question and answer format. I read a really terrific post this morning by Paul Ford, “The Web Is A Customer Service Medium”. You should read it too. It’s about how the web scratches an itch, a human need to feel consulted and important. If I was a researcher reading that essay I’d feel pretty validated! And I am, and I do. But I also feel worried. Because if the web is scratching that itch so well, where do we fit in? Well, our selling point is that we provide that consultation in a user-friendly Q&A format, with direct lines in to the brands and companies being talked about, and carefully designed to discourage stupidity…. oh, hold on.
Quora: Threat Or Menace?
When I started browsing Quora I kept trying to work out what it reminded me of. And it’s a mix of things. The slightly donnish tone and erratic distributon of enthusiasm is quite USENET - or at least the non-alt. bits of the USENET hierarchy (we’ll get back to this). The mix of formality, transparency and mild self-promotion is very LinkedIn. But mostly what Quora makes me think of is a giant MROC, a rather good one too - well-informed people taking questions seriously and offering real insight.
Quora’s secret sauce is that it’s been able to attract people who aren’t just well-informed on a topic, but the most well informed on a topic: real insiders and representatives from the companies being discussed. And they’re doing it for free, too - B2B research recruiters ought to look at Quora and spit feathers!
Whether this is a happy accident or down to particular decisions Quora has made will become obvious over the next few months. But certainly the atmosphere of transparency seems to help - members are encouraged to state their expertise on a topic before diving in. Of course this will hardly deter the bullshit merchants but community voting ought to filter them out.
So let’s imagine a scenario: at the moment it’s mostly small companies using Quora to answer questions candidly. Is it possible to imagine - if Quora DOES scale - larger companies using Quora to ask questions? To use Quora like a public, well-run MROC? Of course there are plenty of reasons not to do research in public like this, but it’s an interesting thought.
The problem of generalism
However, let’s rewind a bit. The good things about Quora I’ve been discussing only really apply over quite a small area of the site. Basically, Quora is great when it comes to tech, business and tech-related questions. These days that’s quite a lot of questions, I grant you! But stray away from that and the site is at worst a wasteland, at best no better than any other forum, Q-and-A site, or question posed to your mates on Facebook. And usually less fun.
On music, for instance, once you move away from questions about music sites and online music distribution there are a handful of enlightening answers but in my opinion a lot of fairly rote responses too. This is partly due to the make-up of the Quora early adopters. As one friend sarcastically put it, “I can’t imagine not wanting to hear what social media gurus think about autotune.” But it’s also partly due to Quora’s emerging house style being kind of uptight: a just-the-facts-ma’am rigidity which works as long as you’ve got people answering who KNOW the facts but is otherwise a straitjacket.
It makes a site that’s a paradise for tech journalists a bit of a wilderness for some who aren’t, and this basic use-case problem - more than any incipient idiocy that might arrive with the hoi polloi - is what makes me suspect Quora will be more niche than mainstream. As a little test, I started a few questions which had nothing to do with tech - most of them based on questions I knew had got entertaining and enlightening replies on other forums, blogs or email lists. It’s early days, and maybe my questions are crap, but so far - no replies. As a first-time user experience it’s a little disheartening.
USENET had a similar issue of self-consciousness about its own usefulness, and got around it by the creation of the alt. hierarchy - far more loosely policed, informal parts of the network which functioned as a frontier compared to the rec., comp., talk. etc areas. I could easily see something similar evolving for Quora.
Is Smartness Enough?
Even with the questions which do get replies, the user-voting system can be a double-edged sword. User-voting systems are designed to do two things: reward good content and punish bad. They do the latter quite effectively - obvious spamming and trolling is hard. But with the former - flagging good content - they’re a little more erratic.
In my experience user-voting systems reward items which reach a minimum level of non-stupidity: beyond that it’s more or less a lottery, with banal or obvious answers no less likely to succeed than great ones. This is pretty much in line with what you’d expect from experiments like Duncan Watts’ work on song popularity. And it’s not an issue with Quora in particular - it applies to most user-voted mechanisms.
Quora’s ability to attract insiders puts a positive spin on this: the star-power of those individuals, and their obvious relevance to certain topics, means they quickly top the answer rankings on questions related to them, and it makes these contributions easy to find. So the big question for Quora isn’t so much whether it can withstand an influx of newcomers, but whether it can find an equivalent for other topic areas to the people who make its tech questions valuable.
