10 Membranes

Brief Thoughts On That Website Everyone Keeps Talking About

Yes, that one. You can’t look at Twitter, or one’s RSS feeds without seeing it plastered everywhere. Quora. There are two things I think worth mentioning. 1.) what the discussion around Quora reveals about digital culture, and 2.) more prosaically the potential of the site. 

1.) Digital culture is built on an economy of backlash. As soon as Quora became remotely popular, the start up du jour, then everyone started to say how the interface totally sucked, how it was being used in a stupid way, how it was underwhelming and really not that original and basically Yahoo Answers so who cares anyway, it’s full of spammers and idiots and people all the questions revolve around tech. Oh and it was never going to be as big as Twitter, so there. This seems to have become a common view within about five minutes and once again confirms the most iron law of the internet: regardless of whether something is good or bad, if you have heard of it, you will hear the backlash, and the backlash shall be forceful. This constant backlash is tiring and boring and petty. Often it doesn’t feel genuine, rather people feel the need to posture, play acting the backlash in anticipation of a coolness that comes from going against the latest cool thing. 

2.) On Quora’s growth potential: I think it is enormous. Techcrunch argued that it wouldn’t be bigger than Twitter; others have argued that it is basically about searching for information, and will always lose out to Google; others have argued that it is insufficiently social to compete with Facebook and Twitter (and I’ll admit, the interface isn’t 100% perfect, without backlashing of course). However Quora sits in the sweet spot of the Venn diagram between Google, Facebook and Wikipedia (haven’t yet seen a discussion of Quora/Wikipedia). That is a great place to be. It emulates key functionality of all three, but also by being in that centre brings something unique. The internet is about communication and information and entertainment and Quora has positioned itself well for all of those. If they develop the site well I see no reason why it couldn’t scale to join the big boys. 

Anyway, that’s enough of that, if we see one more thing about the Q-word we’ll all go completely mad and that backlash probably will be justified.