Nivi · August 19th, 2010
Quora is a Q&A site. We were planning on posting a question asking startups and angels to share their AngelList experience. But someone beat us to it:
I can’t think of a better piece of marketing than this thread. There’s nothing we could say better. I want to replace the AngelList homepage with this thread.
Quora spam
Quora’s goal is “to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.”
The Quora community will kill you if you fill it with rubbish. You have to have a lot of very happy users to try Quora marketing. And you have to expect negative reviews too. Quora’s looking for the best answer — not your answer.
Hating Quora
I’ve resisted Quora since they were in closed beta. Partly because everyone was raving about it. Partly because I thought the user experience was insane.
Now I’m hooked. And I think they’ve created a new class of user experience. It’s a “go with the flow” experience. Don’t try to load a model of the site in your head — it’s too complicated and they’re constantly redesigning it. Just expect things to be there when you need them. And expect that you can do a lot with each piece of data on the site (suggest revisions, revise it, revert it, vote on it, eat it, thank the author…).
Quora’s a lot like The Wire, you’ll hate the first 5 episodes — then something will happen in your head and you won’t be able to shut up about it. Follow me and Naval on Quora and check out the AngelList thread already.
Topics AngelList
I exiled myself from Quora after a two-week addiction. Now it’s wriggling back in to my life. Today I learned on Quora that two CEOs I’ve worked with are connected to Rabois, so now I have an “in” to him. For a tech entrepreneur, the value proposition is too strong – Resistance is Futile.
The big question is, can Quora scale or will it turn into Yahoo Answers?
Ha, love the reference to the wire, so true, for Quora and the show.
I love The Wire analogy! Quora is a great resource across industry lines and topics. It is a more sophisticated way to handle questions than typing them into google searches, and there is a strong community developing that feels different than twitter and facebook. Great job on AngelList by the way, the SF start-up market is the most exciting trend in the industry now.
Yes, it’s much much better than just key in the question to google.
I don’t think it will became another Yahoo answer. Because it have strong social elements in it. But i did worry about, it will be ruled by the marketers. The marketer asked a question related to its own business, and answer it. Those kind of thing can destroy a good site.
And i noticed another try on this : http:www.longhowl.com. Sound interesting, you can set an topic, publish it, and share this topic on twitter, or facebook (it just another add this). Now you can discuss with the whole world, no registration, no login, no user name. This is will be a little anti social … You just discuss. And you also can vote the answer(they named this howl back), by biting and healing.
I just wonder who will use it, some one who would like to discuss the privacy related topics, or something sensitive. I don’t know.