On what Quora is missing
Article: http://socialtimes.com/why-quora-wont-scale_b104711
Quora, a question-and-answer website infused with social networking has been growing its user base rapidly and has been appraised for its high quality of answers. Compared to its competitors like Yahoo! Answers, Quora allows users to give accurate, credible answers backed by reputation in its user graph; the answers are sorted in order of “up votes,” the amount of agreement from other users. However, as this article points out, Quora has numerous challenges to growing its scale and improving its quality of knowledge shared.
The article suggests several reasons for Quora’s failure to connect to all of its users: natural power imbalance resulting from its classification of users into two groups (normal users, and the core, which consists of admins, reviewers, and others with special privileges), anonymous downvoting allowing mobs to downvote an answer and put it to oblivion, and “The Spiral of Silence,” where the majority option silences the minority.
Using these factors and my little knowledge of network dynamics, I present a possible explanation of why Quora fails to transcend the level of its competitors and attract a wider user and question base: the way information is presented on Quora differs drastically from how we acquire information in our everyday.
We acquire information from a huge circle of sources, from our friends, teachers, newspapers, blogs, ads, to books. While certain sources may be more influential, we ultimately make the decision of how much of each source we take in and whether to believe it. Ultimately, we have a circle of sources.
In contrast, the format of Quora is sequential and hierarchical, since only the single top answer is easily visible to the viewer. This is reinforced by “The Spiral of Silence”; it is psychologically natural for users with answers and viewpoints in the minority to be avoid participating; even if they did, it is likely to be down-voted by others in the majority. In any case, the power of the core to moderate answers often filters out other diverging answers.
While this makes easier to search for answers and is one of the reasons why Quora has been effective on some queries, it fails to offer a wide, varied source of information. It’s almost as if Quora restricts its users by isolating them and removing their edges to the rest of the network, and placing a limited set of edges to overly powerful nodes, in effect taking the complex information graph of the world and trying to impose a simple tree-like hierarchy on it. Since few users/nodes like to be more restricted (since you have access to fewer clusters of the graph), it’s unsurprising that some users seek elsewhere to find more varied and open sources of answers to questions.
We can also look at the issue from a game-theoretic standpoint. From the viewpoint of the top answerer (one who has the most up-votes), there is little incentive to make other alternate answers more available, even if they offer a wider perspective. Alexandre Enkerli, a blogger, remarked, “a voting system which encourages self-promotion, and the attitude some ‘experienced Quora users’ have of brushing off criticism as coming from people who ‘just don’t get it.’” For the top answerer, it is easier to downvote other answers regardless of their merit because by then he solidifies his answer and earns more “credits” (actual quantities awarded by Quora), further allowing himself to influence more answers on other questions. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of the viewer who’s looking for an answer, he simply wants an accurate, varied source of information from multiple sources. Certainly, the incentives may align if the viewer is quickly looking for a correct answer on a concrete knowledge-based question and the answer attempts to provide the moset accurate answer. However, the best strategies of the viewer and the top answerer are conflicting and unstable in that it singles out only the top answer in questions that do not have just one correct answer.
Alternatively, we can think of online Q&A interactions as an example of the Network exchange experiment. Instead of splitting $1, we can think of splitting “credibility” or some similar measure between users. The core users attempt to split the credits in favor of themselves, and normal users are left with only a small amount. The divisions enforced by Quora are naturally unstable since users with small measures of credibility (that sum to less than 1) can form links between themselves in other less restrictive mediums, who might be able to find better answers that way.
These may suggest why certain simpler question-and-answer websites have been more successful and collecting a larger user base, as users have easier access to more information outside Quora. As much as these deficiencies stand in the way of Quora’s growth, the overall quality of answers on certain types of questions on Quora has been very detailed and effective, and I hope to see Quora extend that to a broader and more varied audience.
– bo burger