By Jeanie Straub, Douglas County Libraries
I discovered Quora when a member of the Colorado Council of Medical Librarians list asked if anyone had used Quora and what they thought of the service. The questioner compared it to the cooperative virtual reference service AskColorado, so I thought it sounded useful for libraries.
Seven months later, I’m a daily user and see the question-and-answer site as having unlimited potential. Quora is extremely valuable for all libraries and all industries, especially specific communities of practice.
Quora bills itself as “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.” New York Times technology columnist David Pogue called Quora and other Q&A sites “informational crowdsourcing” in an article he wrote for Scientific American.
“The most important thing is to have each (Quora) question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question,” according to the company.
Some people think of it as Wikipedia for semantic search, although that’s a very limited view of its potential.
Says the company: “One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people. Eventually, when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: ‘Oh, great! That’s going to have all the information I want about that.’ It’s also a place where new stuff – that no one has written about yet – can get pulled onto the web.”
Quora’s goal is not objectivity, one of the founders told a tech journalist, but undisputed consensus.
Says PCMag: “While it won’t replace the reference desk, Quora is a great place to socialize, share knowledge, and, for the time being, at least, enjoy some civil exchange.”
Quora, founded in June 2009, first launched in private beta in December 2009 and was made available to the public in June 2010. Tech journalists say Quora received an $11 million round of funding that valued the company at $86 million.
The clean design of Quora is part of its appeal. It is very simple and crisp, although from what I’ve read online from people such as Pogue, that’s not universally agreed upon.
Quora has been criticized for being “unintuitive” for a Q&A site, but after a few minutes on the site, it is easy to figure out.
- At the top of the page is the search box. The search box can be used to find questions or topics or people, but it also can be used to post a new question.
- When you have a specific question page open, related questions are displayed down the right-hand side.
- When you are “home,” you have notifications on questions you are following at the top, and a feed below it. The feed is populated by questions, answers, and posts from people you are following, or activity on questions and topics you are following. So there are three ways to populate your feed: by following people, questions, or topics. (You can easily unfollow a question or a topic at any time.)
If you are wondering whom to start following, there are lots of questions and answers to help. For example, there is a question that asks who the librarians on Quora are. I also followed all the employees of Quora right away as they always seem to be posting about new developments on the site.
Questions are supposed to be asked only once, so if you ask a question that is too similar to another question, your question will be redirected to that question. You can remove a redirect, however, if you feel the question is too different from the one to which it has been redirected.
Topics are broad categories that are assigned to questions. For example, the topics “technology” or “ipads” or “Internet” would be assigned to questions having to do with technology, ipads or the Internet. You can assign topics to your own questions, but administrators will add them as well. And if they don’t agree with a topic you have assigned, they will delete it.
One mistake people make early on is assuming that the more topics they assign, the better, because more people will see the question. Also: Some topics are very busy and have a lot of great questions and answers, and some topics are non-existent; some areas are stronger than others. For example, startups are big on Quora, as is anything to do with entrepreneurs, since the first beta users were Silicon Valley friends and friends of friends of the co-founders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, two former Facebook employees.
People ostensibly use their own names on Quora – via their Twitter or Facebook accounts – so the site is classified by the tech press as “social search” rather than just Q&A. Even though you are using your own name, you may ask a question anonymously, or vote up or down an answer anonymously – you just can’t comment on an answer anonymously. (Discussions that take place via comments are very big on Quora.)
The best answers are those people have voted up, although a good answer may not receive any votes. About 20 percent of the questions I have asked have gone unanswered, and I was satisfied with the answers on almost all of the questions that were answered.
One thing about Quora is that cultural norms of on the site are very specific, and right now the crowd – 200,000 members return to the service each month, according to a June 27 Fortune article – can be a little condescending. For example, after a storm of negative comments on Pogue’s not-so-positive column about Quora, a Quora enthusiast had this retort:
Reading this article and these comments is pretty comical. This probably isn’t a “first adopter” crowd and there may not be the information a “normal” internet user is seeking on Quora. Right now, it’s a pretty amazing product for some people (technical, very web savvy, interested in startups, etc.). Give it a few years and the normal folk will find it very useful and may even learn how to use a computer better by then, too. I’m guessing most of you weren’t on Facebook in 2003, either.
One of the best things about the site is that it is dominated by educated users who demand well thought-out, accurate answers. The early users who are still on Quora consider the site sacred and think it is very important that it doesn’t turn into Yahoo Answers. That said, the site is not above having people guess at answers or provide answers that don’t really address the question. With enough down-votes, however, an answer can be collapsed and won’t show up on the page at all, although you can also read those, if you click on the “Down-voted” link at the bottom of the page.
One complaint I heard from a colleague is that the site is more focused on subjective question and answers than objective question and answers. For example, my colleague wanted to know how much cooked pasta one cup of uncooked pasta makes, and that question isn’t typical of Quora.
Quora users also rely heavily on Wikipedia as a source for information, and we all know how reliable librarians think Wikipedia is. However, part of the appeal of Quora is that an expert is answering the question, so the person answering is the source. The citation is Quora.
Says Inc.: “What … quickly becomes evident while clicking around Quora, is that serious heavy-hitters are answering questions there. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz offers his opinion of the movie ‘The Social Network.’ Google Images product manager Nate Smith explains how color image search works. Foursquare’s head of business development talks about what it’s like to work for founder Dennis Crowley. Twitter’s Pierre Legrain explains the cost-per-follow principle for Promoted Accounts. And AOL co-founder Steve Case answers how much it cost to mail everyone those CDs back in the 1990s.”
There are lots of spoken and unspoken rules on Quora, and it takes a month or so to figure them all out based on questions and answers that you read, or by making a mistake that someone corrects. For example, it is considered bad form to post a link as an answer without any explanation. It is also considered bad form to repeat an answer someone has already mentioned. (Instead, you are supposed to vote up someone else’s answer that has already used the example you wanted to use.) Survey or poll questions are also out.
Wired magazine quoted one entrepreneur as saying Quora is “a micro-university” and a startup attorney as calling it “the modern-day equivalent of the Library of Alexandria.” It isn’t “all that,” but it is a big step up from Yahoo Answers. There is a lot of quality control that up-voting and down-voting affords. There are also admins on the site who delete questions that aren’t up to snuff.
One of the ways in which Quora could be useful to librarians, in my opinion, is that you can answer the questions you pose, so you could track useful questions and answers, as long as they are applicable to other users on the site. So, for example, say someone wanted to know what organization evaluates hearing aids since Consumer Reports doesn’t. If it took effort to find the answer, and you knew the question might not come up again for a few years, it would be worthwhile to add the question and answer on Quora, so that you might reference it again down the road – it would be easy to find the answer via the search bar, especially if you add appropriate topics, which work like controlled vocabulary. (You can add new topics. For example, I added “Douglas County Libraries” to add a question and answer on using our downloadables on ipads.) Since the site is indexed, it also would be easy to find on Google.
See also: “10 Tips on Using Quora for Business” at Inc.com and “How Small Businesses Can Use Quora” by ReadWrite Biz.
Finally: Why is Quora named Quora? “A quorum is a group of people coming together and reaching a consensus,” Cheever explained on Quora. “It also rhymed with ‘Flora,’ which is about being healthy and alive. It was also the only name idea where the guy would actually sell us the domain.”
Quora screenshot -
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