How Can Quora Balance Quality and Openness?

Despite the booming interest in the service, Quora has been very cautious about opening up. The obvious reason is to avoid becoming another Yahoo Answers. But is that even possible?

Quora sets to differentiate itself by building an image of superior quality. Its initial focus has been to elect experts and influencers, in order to drive higher quality answers and discussions. Curation plays an important part in the service: moderators will quickly remove irrelevant posts and collapse poor quality comments.

Recently, the service reverted to an invite-only model outside of the U.S. and a few select countries. This may be an attempt to control the growth of the community, similar to the early days of Facebook. This cautious approach is not only limited to its community. The service only opened up to search engines last August. Access via RSS feeds is limited. Recently it released a very limited API, coupled with the arrival of the first Chrome and Firefox extensions.

Sponsor

What was once a quiet forum has been disrupted, for better or worse as power users such as Louis Gray (and the other usual suspects) brought their large followings. This seems to skew the dynamics of the site:

• several people notice the power users’ answers,
• these answers will receive considerably more votes than anyone else participating in the discussion,
• other users add their grains of salt, either to get attention or simply to join the conversation,
• the quality of replies tends to decrease, since by definition not everyone is an expert.

It would be unfair to criticize influencers for driving interest in the service. In the case of more casual services such as Friendfeed or Google Buzz, the added flow is clearly beneficial.

But this is different for a service that thrives on quality rather than quantity. What can be done to Quora’s mechanics to prevent noise?

There are several ways around this problem. SomethingAwful is known for charging its members to participate in its forums. This has the merit of filtering out trolls and passive users. ASmallWorld relies on referrals to create the impression of a tight-knit network. Wikipedia has a group of administrators who are selected from among its most active and reliable contributors.

Restricted voting, Posting Limits

However, these alternatives might be perceived as drastic by the community. They might not even work in this case. What possible solutions would fit Quora’s DNA? Giving users a call to action might be a different approach. For example: showing questions that need more followers, encouraging users to add questions in topics that are not active, or to add questions or tag friends to certain topics. One way to de-clutter the feed would be to separate questions, votes, answers and friend activity, which would make top users appear less frequently.

On Quora, quality means more readable answers from insightful people. It might make sense to limit the amount of answers one can post in a day. Voting is another thing to consider: On Digg, the friend following feature led to an oligarchy where a few power-users such as MrBabyMan would dominate the front page.

To avoid this, why not restrict voting only to people who follow and have contributed to a topic? Maybe also limit or group the amount of posts by one person in the feed at one time? Or why not make answers anonymous? If all else fails, maybe they should request that influencers vote up one humanitarian post per day!

Should Quora become more democratic or try to remain an aristocracy? As I explained in a previous post, the startup community is a meritocracy, so it might make sense to build a system that reflects it. This millennia-old question has no simple answer. What better place than Quora then to ask: How do you think the it should evolve?

Discuss