Do You Know Jules Verne? What’s He Like?

The buzz around Q&A startup Quora has been building steadily over the past couple of months. I measure this not only by the number of Follow messages now flooding my inbox concerning people randomly sampled from my Facebook connections, but also by the heated debate that is developing about the site’s usefulness, much of which was chronicled in this TechCrunch article about the “Quora Backlash Backlash“.

Based on this post and other comments, it is fairly clear that MG Siegler is on “Team Quora”, calling Quora “a great source of information like Twitter and Facebook and blogs themselves.” Having been a Quora user for several months, I have found the quality of answers on the site to be extremely high. These have ranged from the much-celebrated cases of high-profile individuals answering questions about topics pertaining to them (e.g. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings answering the question “How much does Netflix spend on postage every year?“) to the opportunities for creative individuals to answer questions in awesome and innovative ways (see Wavii programmer Erik Frey‘s answer to the question “Which animal has been used most frequently for a band name?“). I have also personally asked a number of questions and gotten timely and high-quality answers.

However, the key question here is whether the site will continue to be as useful as more and more people join. While many might argue that including more subject matter experts can only improve the site, one must also remember that this increased signal is only useful when it can be separated from the increased noise. Right now, Quora is a bit like <nerd alert>Flynn’s cave dwelling in the Outlands, where the information contained is only safe as long as the masses can’t get to it</nerd alert>; users can trust the answers they find because they often come paired with often famous or at least recognizable names and faces. Yahoo! Answers is a great example of how a Q&A site can decrease in quality with respect to both the questions and answers as it opens up (for a quick, possibly NSFWish laugh, check out “11 Stupid Questions from Yahoo Answers That Have Changed My Life“) Even if you develop the most robust social answer-quality-checker imaginable, the presence of thousands of stupid questions tagged with topic tags that direct them to your inbox is going to turn a lot of the quality answer providers away from the site. In some ways, I felt that Aardvark fell into that trap as it grew more popular, and I now find myself answering a lot of questions that involved identifying rashes.

I had this question about the possible perils of mainstream adoption in mind, when reading a NY Times blog post this week, in which David Pogue describes his first interactions with the site as “a descent into bafflement.” Among the parts of the site that he deems confusing are the login process, the task of adding connections and following topics, and the actual task of asking a question. For chronicling his confusion, however, he earned the following response from Siegler (on his personal blog):

Is this meant to be written from the perspective of a 95-year-old senile man?

Apparently, every site should be designed in a way so that it’s just like every other site that failed before it on the Internet. Makes perfect sense.

Prediction: he’ll love Quora in 12 months.

Now, I would consider David Pogue to be a relatively tech-savvy individual. He’s been blogging about Web/technology topics for over 10 years now, and I generally find his posts to be pretty interesting and insightful. If he is having this much difficulty using the site, I think that his frustrations really do say something about Quora’s current potential to reach beyond the geek crowd into the general public . And on some level, I think that the desire to mock him for this reflects an underlying recognition that the Silicon Valley influentials who currently use the site wouldn’t actually benefit from “regular people” using it, since this could potentially spell the end of Quora’s usefulness. Perhaps a better use of time might be to consider how to make the site more user-friendly and how to maintain the quality as new users arrive.

Studying sites like Wikipedia is a great way to examine how to maintain quality while scaling out to a broader audience. While it’s difficult to ascertain what actually makes Wikipedia work (in practice, if not in theory), many of the qualities inherent in Wikipedia are those identified in a 2005 paper [1] by J.M. Leimeister and colleagues at the Technische Universität München as factors which promote community success in an environment where trusted information is key. Some of these include exposing the identity of content providers, clearly establishing goals for the community, making member profiles available to other members, and providing various levels of anonymity, all of which are things which are built into Wikipedia’s core. Another feature recognized across the literature is recognition and rewards for contributors, something embodied in Wikipedia in the form of “barnstars“. Quora does a great job of exposing identity (which will likely make it much better than Yahoo! Answers), but I don’t believe that it adequately addresses these other elements. I think that the addition of “moderators” or other custodian roles for hyper-motivated users could be the kind of thing that keeps the Quora community in check, and I would be eager to see them roll something like that out before opening the site up to the general public (I think it’s technically still in beta, no?)

Quora is a great source of information for me in some of the same ways that Facebook and Twitter are. The key difference is that in those media, I can control what I see and who it comes from. If you want to imagine the utility of those sites without such controls, just imagine trying to sift through the real-time Twitter stream – it’s mind-numbing, to be kind (unless of course you are a Justin Bieber fan, in which case you should be delighted). The goals of those who currently enjoy Quora’s usefulness should be to help maintain that usefulness as the site grows. I’m not saying that this will be an easy task, but if it isn’t accomplished, I don’t think that anyone is going to love the site in 12 months.

[1] Leimeister, J.M., Ebner, W., & Krcmar, H. 2005: Design, implementation, and evaluation of trust-supporting components in virtual communities for patients. Journal of Management Information Systems 21, 4, 101-135.