Will Quora defeat Answers.com

Answer 1

This will likely never happen anytime soon. Currently, Quora moderators seem rather unreasonable and the culture there has a bit to be desired. Quora does have more for you to do over there and more categories, but it is a more confusing site to use.

Answer 2

I have a theory that they are in to their business models in very different ways. Quora has strayed from their initial vision. You can see that in the compromises of their policies and their incorporation of bots and their loose adherence to any type of policy. They are after one thing and one thing only. To retain as many people on there as possible answering questions for as long as they possibly can. So for that reason moderation will not do anything to anybody. It's the wild west in terms of what is going on over there. Moderators that do participate, often they have favorites and they have people that they don't like. They hammer on the ones they don't like and the ones that they do like tend to get away with everything. That aside, the business models are fundamentally different from what I can tell. Hear me out here.

Due to the fundamental change in policies where they got rid of the real name policy they straight away from the looking for the most intelligent answer policies and they started just looking for any answers really. You look at their advertising. The advertising that's on that site there's no way that it clears the 20 million after all the expenses for the company are paid and extra etc etc. Not on that advertising. So there's another funding model that's underneath that people aren't aware of.

I've heard many different theories about this I have my particular theory is that what they're doing is they're developing the next generation AI. They are using bots they're training them to be able to interpret free text and when combined with demographic data, they'll be able to perform a more accurate and flexible targeted marketing for companies like Facebook or any online company that needs to do advertising but they need to focus it so that way they're getting the most potential clicks of the most buys as possible for the least amount of invested advertising money.

I believe Quora is training that type of an AI right now for that specific purpose and that's why nobody gets banned barely and that's why policies are so loosely adhered to that it's almost like there are none. So the underlying funding model is got to be from some big company like Google or something like that that is looking for the next generation for advertising something that's going to be more effective save money and get more buys out of people drive that consumer market harder. You do that with that kind of research if you can get an AI that can interpret free text and see what people are wanting see what type of people they are and then create marketing demographic models out of that, whoever does that is going to be rolling and money.

Where Answers they are still fundamentally about the purity of the quest. To share human knowledge to get as many questions and answers out there as possible and to validate people and allow them to share their knowledge. It's the purity that is the difference. Although both are profit driven models and both are ultimately looking for making money at this point answers is still fundamentally the grassroots movement that it started as in terms of its ideals. It's pure it's clean and it's true to it's intended form.

Quora, as much as I love the space and the site it is flawed because of that wild West model. With enough money, you can buy business accounts that automatically give you thousands of followers you could suddenly be important overnight, you can also have privileges granted to your account that normal users can't if you're willing to pay for it. They recently have made some changes to their real name policy which fundamentally cripples anybody that followed the rules previously.

What you have now, it's two groups of people. You have those that are self-identified and you have those that are operating under pseudonyms. When disagreements break out those that are operating under their true name are a significant difference of disadvantage. Because those working under the pseudonym will always be able to take things up a level beyond where the person who self-identified will. Because the person who is self-identified will have social norms and worries of whatever their conduct would be spilling out into their real life and embarrassing them or costing them opportunities there. Fake name people don't have that worry. So they can step it up as high as they want and if they are up against somebody that is self-identified and they take it to the real world outside of Quora, that person who self-identified loses every single time. Every single time. There's no laws that protect against that level of libel, there's no system in place that will protect you, you are essentially at the mercy of whatever sociopath or whoever is looking out to make an example out of you. Answers is still peer to his form and doesn't have to deal with that kind of thing yet. There should be a plan put in place though one day they will need to deal with it.