A SocialMedia site.
Great link, Seb, thanks!
Say more – why is Quora your favorite knowledge accretion spot? And what keeps it from being an anti-favorite?
Quora has lots of good design decisions :
- Big space to write in. Doesn’t try to squash your writing into a thin column surrounded by adverts but uses most of the page for writing (and leaves the rest as white space). Readable fonts and uncluttered design.
- Very good community. Mostly smart.
- The “one answer per user” rule gives a kind of egalitarianism. No one can dominate the conversation around a question simply by virtue of being willing to write more than anyone else.
- Vicious penalty for pissing people off - one downvote hides your answer - means that people are civil, and tend not to waste their answers making facile jibes at other people. Also, any obnoxious stuff just gets hidden very quickly.
- The private “thank” option is a very nice way to reward people that isn’t mere voting.
- The gamification / points system doesn’t really touch me personally. But it may be helping to reinforce quality in a way I don’t understand.
- Autosave of answers and comments. Unbelievably useful. Makes you confident typing longer, more discursive answers and points, over several sessions.
Before SmallFederatedWiki, I said Quora was the most exciting thing to be in the wiki space—lots of wiki ethos in the place.
I hadn’t seen quora before or maybe I did and turned somewhere else after 20 seconds as it provides no feed to include into wikis. I made a user account and read a bit in quora. Nice. For what I can tell the English is elaborated and I’d be a bit shy asking something. I was wondering if making a user account probably for a city-wiki and asking for related web-sites and facebook groups to be included into the wiki is a good idea.