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发帖数: 3464 | 1 Let me start with a disclaimer: I am not writing this in my capacity as a
university professor or researcher; I don’t claim to be an expert on social
networking; and I will be happy to be proven wrong—I have no vested
interest in the success or failure of Quora. And, given the fire I’ve
already taken for tweeting an opinion that defies the Valley’s infinite
wisdom, I know that this post will offend many in Silicon Valley—as did my
piece on why I Craigslisted my iPads. But I just don’t believe that Quora
will “rule” or become anything like Facebook or Twitter. It has been a
very nice private club; but it’s not for the general public.
Quora is a new question-and-answer site on which a few notable members of
Silicon Valley’s tech elite have expressed their opinions. Some of the
discussions have been very informative; some, completely misinformed. Some
questions are of general interest, such as: Will there be a tech sector
crash in the near future?; some are obscure: Who are the most successful
entrepreneurs with Iranian roots?; some are just plain silly: How much does
Netflix spend on postage each year? Quora’s membership is growing largely
because of the attention that TechCrunch has given it (including the Best
Startup award). Over the last month, I have received dozens of messages from
TechCrunch readers asking what I think about Quora and why I am not using
it.
The answer is simple: I think that Quora will continue to be an excellent
resource if the same people who have been hyping it, and who have invested
in it, keep posting their thoughtful answers. But I believe that the excess
hype is destined to make Quora a victim of its own press. The quality of
answers will decline. The people whose opinion I value, such as Quora’s #1
respondent, Robert Scoble, will simply stop posting on the site when they
get drowned out by the noise from the masses. They will turn away after
having their posts voted down (so that they look less important than their
peers) and being personally subjected to the types of mindless, anonymous
attacks that you see in the comments section of TechCrunch.
Not to say that there aren’t many other smart people who will post good
answers. But when there are hundreds of answers to a given question, by
people you have never heard of (often with fictitious names), how will you
separate the wheat from the chaff? And how will you distinguish fact from
fiction? You certainly can’t trust the rankings of the respondents when
these rankings are themselves generated by Quora users.
Quora says it will educate users on its policies, guidelines, and
conventions and that it will moderate answers more effectively. It claims
that the site does not allow anonymity. But you can easily sign up for a
Quora account with any of your Twitter accounts (you can create as many of
these as you want—with fictitious names). You can then vote down answers
from people you don’t like, edit questions asked by others, and post your
own views. You can talk about your own products and services, and disparage
others’; in other words, it is a spammers’ paradise. How is Quora going
to manage hundreds of thousands—or millions—of unruly users, when even the
mighty Google seems to be losing the battle for spam?
Right now, Quora is tech focused. Its fans proudly proclaim that its usage
will spread, just as usage of Twitter did; that it will become a platform
for everything from product research to customer service to education.
Robert Scoble expects it to create a “great community and way for people to
communicate about what’s interesting in their lives in a new way”.
Silicon Valley is again drinking its own Kool-Aid; it is looking at the
world through its own prism. This is a common problem here, where we jump
from one fad to another; where venture capitalists start investing in
similar technologies and drive company valuations through the roof; where
TechCrunch hypes the technology du jour and causes entrepreneurs all over
the world to drop what they are doing in favor of building copycat
technologies.
Quora isn’t going to be a Facebook or a Twitter. It is not likely to even
catch up with the current market leaders in the Q&A space—Answers.com and
Yahoo! Answers (which both get more than 40 million unique visitors a month,
compared with Quora’s meager 150,000). Unlike Facebook, where everyone
socializes, and Twitter, where ordinary people tell their friends what they
are thinking, a Quora-like tool is only for those who want to learn what
their intellectual peers are saying on, or to research, a particular topic.
This is for the tech types—who dabble in technology and dream about things
like startups and funding.
What is more likely to happen and makes far more sense is that a new
generation of private, gated communities will grow and evolve. This is
where people with common interests will gather and exchange ideas. For
example, for people seeking legal advice, there is LawPivot, and for
businesses looking for experts, there is Focus. For techies, there are
sites like StackOverflow, Slashdot, Hacker News; for children, there is
Togetherville; for business students, there is PoetsandQuants; for
entrepreneurs in India, there is StartupQnA; for Indian accountants, there
is CAClubIndia; and China has its own groups, and so do many other countries
. Why do the Silicon Valley elite believe that everyone will flock to a U.S
.-based tech site like Quora?
I am not delusional enough to believe that I can predict the future or guess
what the technology landscape will look like a couple of years from now.
But I can make one educated guess. My guess is that TechCrunch will stop
talking about Quora within a few months and that we’ll be discussing the
next big fad.
**Photo Credit: Andrew Fair
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a
Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law
School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and
Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter
at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com. |
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