Quora has more mass appeal and is more of a time waster site than Stack Exchange. It's like a smarter, more gamified, Facebook-y version of Yahoo answers. The friends I introduced to it said they can spend all day reading about "what it's like to be a hitman" and asking Mark Cuban questions about his youth and stuff like that. Some of the questions re: what server to use, etc are answered by founders promoting their companies but nevertheless I think Quora has 2 valuable virtues:
1) You can get firsthand info from the horse's mouth, like read about what it's like to be a 25 year old self made millionaire, or what it's like to work with ashton kushter, or what it's like to get an investment on shark tank. You can ask what it's like to get a life sentence in prison and a real prisoner will respond. You can ask Larry Summers his opinion on something and he'll respond.
2) Quora organizes the information on the internet. Some of the stuff you could find by googling, but who just googles random questions? The flow of the site is pretty nice because you go from one interesting answer to suggested related questions.
(I am just a Quora user although I know a bunch of people who work there.)
You mean you can just ask people things and they might answer you?
I guess I need to throw away my phone, my email, my instant messenger, my IRC client, my fax machine, my postage stamps and hell, the telex machine at the local police station.
Have you looked around the site? Most of the questions are not things I'd think of asking anyone. People also seem to be more inclined to answer on quora than probably a random forum or stranger's email.
Are you saying that Quora is fundamentally not valuable bc there are other ways of communicating? I guess if you wanted to learn about plants, you could go learn the Dewey Decimal System and go to the library and look it up in an encyclopedia... or you could about it on Wikipedia. Your response doesn't make sense to me and I don't know the purpose of this discussion at this point.
I just started using Hacker News recently and have never really interacted with internet communities at all prior to this year so I'm open to the possibility that I'm not communicating clearly, or that you're being facetious.
The idea that Quora has some magical monopoly on asking famous people questions is so patently and self-evidently ridiculous that I didn't know where to begin.
Except with my old standby, that trusty workhorse: sarcasm.
Why do you think it's just for famous people or that it's a monopoly? Are you really going to track down a prisoner and ask them what they feel about getting a life sentence?
I don't know why you don't like Quora (or maybe you do and thought I was saying it's a monopoly for famous people? In which case I'd clarify that's not what I believe, nor what I believe I wrote). Do you dislike Quora because you think other people wrongly think it's a monopoly? I don't think anyone thinks that. If you browse the site I think its value will make more sense to you because it has a lot of interesting content, as evidenced by random news sites scraping content from Quora.
I don't have a stake in Quora but I was trying to understand your perspective. It's cool if information/debate is not your goal in this thread. Maybe you want to be erroneously critical because you find it funny or enjoyable- that's fine and doesn't affect me. My perspective is that Quora is fun, well done, and a valuable source of fascinating information despite not being a monopoly.
Quora organizes the information on the internet pretty well too. Even if you can get the same information via googling, you often wouldn't google the information. I've found myself learning a lot about topics I'm interested in that I don't tend to set up Google alerts for. For example, you can find a lot of interesting information about India when you read answers to "What are the most surprising facts Westerners could learn about India?" that would not typically show up if I just googled "India," which I would probably not randomly do anyway.
1) You can get firsthand info from the horse's mouth, like read about what it's like to be a 25 year old self made millionaire, or what it's like to work with ashton kushter, or what it's like to get an investment on shark tank. You can ask what it's like to get a life sentence in prison and a real prisoner will respond. You can ask Larry Summers his opinion on something and he'll respond.
2) Quora organizes the information on the internet. Some of the stuff you could find by googling, but who just googles random questions? The flow of the site is pretty nice because you go from one interesting answer to suggested related questions.
(I am just a Quora user although I know a bunch of people who work there.)