Seeing as I live in New York, I am by definition not part of the Silicon Valley in-crowd.
My experience on Quora has been extremely positive. Right now, it's one of the best online communities for quality of content.
People who call Quora a nasty community because of downvoting have no idea what they're talking about. Wikipedia in 2004-5 was nasty. Personal attacks all over the place, edit wars and tag teaming (troll raids by influential people, justified by the "3 revert rule"). There was one guy who created a bunch of sock puppet accounts and attempted to attribute them to me on a still-infamous hate page, in which he claimed about 50 accounts, most nonexistent, were my sock puppets when many of them were later established to be his. (Half the accounts weren't used for anything but have obscene names.) That is what I call nasty. Downvotes on Quora aren't anywhere close to that.
I haven't seen Quora get even on the same planet as what Wikipedia was when I last edited (which was more than 5 years ago).
I don't agree with the decision to collapse answers based on 1 downvote, but if I'm really interested in a question, I'll usually read all the answers anyway, so I don't find it to be a major hindrance. Besides, being downvoted isn't a big deal: fewer people read your answer; so what?
Quora's great, at least from my experience. It might be that I stay away from extremely charged topics (e.g. politics) but I've never encountered any of this stuff-- and I've seen it a lot on other internet communities.
I also live in NYC. I go on Quora a lot, and have contributed a decent amount of content, but I do feel that there is a lot of hype around it. The quality of the content is very good for some things (Machine Learning), for others (The Sopranos), not so much. I enjoy going on and reading content, but I cant see a situation where the site is ever mainstream.
One thing that really surprises me is how much some people think the speed of the site matters to the average user. I think the technology they built is amazing, as a software engineer, I am constantly impressed with everything they are doing. I have recommended the site to most of my non-tech friends and they laugh when I try to explain how cool that technology is (I even taught a few of them what Comet is). For the site to become mainstream, I think assumes most people are actually interested in reading/creating quality content - but that is the minority.
I'm a lurker on Quora, but would like to state that I've really enjoyed your answers on Quora. You're the only person I've actually bothered to go through the history of on Quora before.
Right, definitely an amazing answer from Mr. Church breaking down employee contributions and how to (if to) fire them! ++would recommend, answers do not contain bobcat
My experience on Quora has been extremely positive. Right now, it's one of the best online communities for quality of content.
People who call Quora a nasty community because of downvoting have no idea what they're talking about. Wikipedia in 2004-5 was nasty. Personal attacks all over the place, edit wars and tag teaming (troll raids by influential people, justified by the "3 revert rule"). There was one guy who created a bunch of sock puppet accounts and attempted to attribute them to me on a still-infamous hate page, in which he claimed about 50 accounts, most nonexistent, were my sock puppets when many of them were later established to be his. (Half the accounts weren't used for anything but have obscene names.) That is what I call nasty. Downvotes on Quora aren't anywhere close to that.
I haven't seen Quora get even on the same planet as what Wikipedia was when I last edited (which was more than 5 years ago).
I don't agree with the decision to collapse answers based on 1 downvote, but if I'm really interested in a question, I'll usually read all the answers anyway, so I don't find it to be a major hindrance. Besides, being downvoted isn't a big deal: fewer people read your answer; so what?
Quora's great, at least from my experience. It might be that I stay away from extremely charged topics (e.g. politics) but I've never encountered any of this stuff-- and I've seen it a lot on other internet communities.