SROYS

There is a question on Quora about “What turns people off about Quora?” - I think I found my answer when this reply of mine somehow got collapsed right after posting because of some vaguely described reasons in their faq. Here’s the link and my answer:

http://www.quora.com/Quora/What-turns-people-off-about-Quora

I use facebook to connect with my family. I use twitter to follow the people I want to follow. I am now using Quora to read about and connect with people in the startup community. People go to Google for search, gmail for mail - people need classification of what the product does. More examples - airbnb, dropbox, elance, 99designs… the list goes on and on.

There is a trend here. It’s rare that a site would come up and say I can do all subjects - one such rare site is wikipedia. But on wikipedia the users are alligned to believe that they are building the greatest encyclopedia that ever existed - people want to be part of that - they want to own their subjects there.There needs to be an alignment of goals when building a product - for Quora it’s getting forced into being the greatest startup community Q&A site. But that can be changed if they allow people to own their subjects and content.

The only way to get out of it is to have many subject matter experts take up sections - but unfortunately many such people are running their own communities or personal brands. So the hook could be if they allow plugining in of their content into quora in such a way that the experts still own and control the content and it’s revenue. Maybe the solution could be to build ports for the popular softwares used by these community leaders so that all the content can be aggregated on Quora and then curated by the much larger community which would be formed.

Or another approach could be to extend the current Quora search engine and get all the Q&A sites to join and get indexed. Then build a layer that can be applied on top of all these single existing Q&A sites. The community owners would love the extra exposure that may come their way and Quora will become what it set out to become. I believe it will also significantly reduce the infrastructure and effort that will be required to keep the information up as it will get distributed.

The idea is to let these community leaders keep their community but be able to plug it into Quora.

That is the only way they are going to suceed into becoming the greatest Q&A product that ever existed. The idea of this change/addition is a daunting task in itself but it sits well with their goal.

Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. We organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.