Quora – elite? Or elitist?
I was really excited about Quora at first; now I wonder if I’ve joined a Web-based version of a whites-only country club.
(I know I’ve written twice about Quora already. I’m also aware that it’s the topic-du-jour; despite that, I can assure you this post isn’t an attempt to draw an audience to my blog.)
A recent Buzz post led to a lengthy discussion about some unpleasant experiences folks were having with Quora admins. I found their experiences surprising in light of my theory that Quora is not going to appeal to a majority. As I said on Buzz, it doesn’t make sense to me that Quora would want to offend the users who’ve already demonstrated a willingness to have actual conversations.
Yet there are some topics on Quora that have me believing the situation is even worse, that Quora is shooting itself in the foot while it’s still crawling.
The first is called “Commitment to Keeping Quora High Quality“. Sounds good, right? It does to me – I know of several services similar to Quora’s, but none of them has the depth or richness of discussion.
The topic includes a screenshot of a “tutorial quiz” the admins have implemented; it pops up the first time someone posts a question. I had to read the list of suggestions in that quiz three times before I accepted that it wasn’t a joke.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m passionate about language, grammar, punctuation, the whole shebang. I’m insanely proud of the quality of my spelling and I’m the first to notice when someone writes it’s when they mean its. But what is Quora trying to do here, recreate Encyclopedia Britannica? Am I the only one who finds the quiz patronizing?
In the end, I moved on, grateful at least that it might reduce the volume of capitalized non-proper nouns. But now I ask myself – and I ask you – is it appropriate (or even desirable) for Quora to take on the mission of educating Web users on proper style and punctuation?
And when it comes down to it, aren’t the admins doing that so that Quora doesn’t ‘descend’ into Yahoo! Answers territory?
(I’m not the only one who imagines that reasoning, by the way. Check the comment at the bottom of the topic from Nick Nguyen.)
Even if Quora’s goal is not to keep out the ‘riff-raff’, its approach to reviewing questions has opened the world’s biggest can of worms.
(Again, you don’t have to take my word for it. Quora is trying to head that posse off at the pass.)
In the end, the number of people who don’t know how to write ‘properly’ is not a small one. If Quora is determined to be an upper-crust version of Yahoo! Answers it better be prepared to alienate – or, at the very least, intimidate – a meaningfully large group of people.
