Quora Eyes A Pivot?

Quora was a brief fling for the tech crowd, who have moved on to new toys, but doctors and lawyers may have a long-term relationship in mind:

Jenna Wortham and Caire Cain Miller, Quora Makes Changes Aimed at Doctors and Lawyers

Since Quora, a question-and-answer start-up , was first introduced last June, it has become something of a Web darling among tech denizens, engineers and early adopters. But the conversations on Quora have quickly fanned out beyond new media and technology. A spin through the site reveals a wide range of topics currently under discussion, including white chocolate, the rapper Lil Wayne’s ascent to stardom and ways to alleviate car sickness in babies.

That last category — medical and health questions — is one the company has decided to zero in on. On Monday, the company announced several new features aimed at helping the service expand its discussions in those areas. In a post to its users, Quora said it would initroduce legal and medical disclaimers and policies around legal and medical questions. In addition, the company included language in its terms of service to provide protection for doctors and lawyers who chose to write answers.

And of course, doctors and lawyers have strong motivation to appear knowledgeable on medical and legal issues, perhaps more so that techies arguing about social media influence or the best way to hire at a startup.

Is this Quora eyeing a pivot into a more specialized service?

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Robert Scoble’s Severed Head, Truthiness, and the Surrender Chicken - Tristan Kromer

After using Quora for several months and seeing the myriad ways to game the system to get more upvotes, I’ve also seen a dozen ways to reduce the amount of gaming that is going on. Given the intelligence of the quora staff, I assume they probably have two dozen more on the table, but they are not being implemented. I doubt they’re even being tested.

Why?

Because more upvotes means more opportunities to stroke the ego of people answering questions. The more ego stroking, the more answers posted. The more answers posted, the more SEO, tweets, and shares. The more SEO, tweets, etc., the more users.

Here’s just a small sample of easy to implement things that could (maybe, maybe not) reduce the popularity contest:

  • Make upvotes decay so that popular older votes have a better chance to be overcome by new, better answers (the Hacker News method)
  • Make all answers anonymous until voted upon so that the identity of the answerer doesn’t influence the voter
  • Don’t allow upvotes in the stream without taking people to the page so they can see some of the other answers
  • Look for suspicious voting behavior like someone voting down every answer on a page (so theirs floats to the top)
  • Only allow a user to vote up one answer on a page
  • Require better identification by disallowing registration by solely twitter accounts (or simply weigh votes)
  • etc. etc.

I wonder if any of these recommendations get picked up? I like the decay idea, and limiting upvotes (like GetSatisfaction) makes real sense.

Which Quora users have the most followers? - Quora

Users with over 1000 followers as of 1/11/11

Mashable - The Social Media Guide has 18,787 followers (Banned account)
Evan Williams has 12,556
Robert Scoble has 11,734
Kevin Rose has 11,676
Michael Arrington has 9,270
Jason McCabe Calacanis has 8,744
Tim O’Reilly has 7,821
Leo Laporte has 6,362
John Gruber has 5,642
Loic Le Meur has 5,351
Dave McClure has 4,827
Dave Morin has 4,495
Mark Suster has 4,295
MG Siegler has 4,073
Adam D’Angelo has 3,846
Jeremiah Owyang has 3,846
Chris Messina has 3,843
Charlie Cheever has: 3,558
Steve Case has 3,514
Dave Winer has 3,378
Keith Rabois has 3,197
Craig Newmark has 3,168
Mike Butcher has 3,049
Dennis Crowley has 3,004
Adam Rifkin has 2,905
Marc Andreessen has 2,850
Tara Hunt has 2,838
Ryan Carson has 2,737
Mark Zuckerberg has 2,640
Pete Cashmore has 2,579
Dick Costolo has 2,427
Zee M Kane has 2,342
Ben Parr has 2,281
Louis Gray has 2,021
Shervin Pishevar has 1,868
Gabe Rivera has 1,805
Jesse Stay has 1,803
Tracy Chou has 1,796
Yishan Wong has 1,787
Philip Kaplan has 1,759
Dustin Moskovitz has 1,702
Tamar Weinberg has 1,611
Gina Trapani has 1,561
Robin Wauters has 1,537
Esther Dyson has 1,503
David Sifry has 1,499
Umair Haque has 1,494
Stowe Boyd has 1,395
Andy Carvin has 1,359
Reid Garrett Hoffman has 1,358
Liz Pullen has 1,307
Jennifer Van Grove has 1,233
Mike Rundle has 1,195
Susan Beebe has 1,155
Paul Buchheit has 1,146
Caterina Fake has 1,145
Marc Bodnick has 1,145
Ronald Yau has 1,100
Emily Chang has 1,096
Jolie O’Dell has 1,041
Jimmy Wales has 1,138
Michael Wolfe has 1,024
Orli Yakuel has 1,011
Fred Wilson has 1,009

quora

What will prevent Quora from experiencing the same less-than-spectacular fate as FriendFeed?

My answer:

I never warmed to Friendfeed, primarily because it seemed dominated by outsized personalities and their acolytes. As I wrote in Jan 2009 in Bottom Feeding Off Friendfeed:
It may also be that the benefits of Friendfeed only accrue to very popular people — like Gray and Scoble — who have dozens or hundreds of acolytes who respond to their every post with a barrage of commentary. I will also suggest that those who are very active followers of those two and their ilk may also get a secondary, real and significant benefit as well. But the average schmoe, wandering around in Friendfeedland, having not perfected either massive social popularity or the followership model will try the service out and quickly leave never to return because there is no ‘it’ to get for them. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland.
The difference with Quora seems to be the thematic approach. Instead of personalities dominating, in Quora issues dominate. This has the direct effect of drawing deeply knowledgeable people to jump into Quora discussions — like having the founder of a startup answer questions about the company — which reminds me of the Woody Allen bit from Annie Hall, when he’s drawn into a discussion with a bombastic idiot at a cocktail party about Marshall McLuhan, and Allen pulls McLuhan out of thin air to refute the blowhard. 
The dominant motif in Quora is the spirit of inquiry, a direct rejection of being a fan boy of highly popular media personalities. Quora is less like talk radio, where Howard Stern holds court on a dozen topics each show, and much more like reading — and participating with — the New Yorker or the Atlantic, where a diverse set of leading thinkers address the issues of the day.