Quora is a website for asking and answering questions based on subject matter expertise. This sounds fairly commonplace – several websites of this nature exist. For those of you who have used it however, you know that it’s a powerful social media platform because it could bring path-breaking innovation in the existing online publishing industry. I would consider it to be a major competitor of Wikipedia, Reddit, and the omnipresent Yahoo Answers. Here’s a link to the portal so you can check out the interface for yourself.
Here are a few features/advantages that I consider to be disruptive.
Question Feed
The question feed is probably my favorite thing about the platform. Imagine a page which is tailored to show you the most critical questions that you have had about topics that you are interested in. Want to get career advice from the best mentors in your industry? Want to figure out why Elon Musk succeeded where others failed? I envision Quora’s feed becoming a bleeding edge artificial intelligence platform that answers questions BEFORE you’ve had a chance to fully construct them in your head or Google them. It knows your personal and professional interests. It could potentially help you learn things more quickly than you could ever have learned yourself (because you are learning from the crowd-sourced real-world experience of the very best visionaries in the world).
Upvotes from Friends
The network effect is, without a doubt, effective. It has been effective for Facebook, where you can see which photos/posts your friends like and you ultimately get addicted to this viewing experience. It has been effective for Instagram, where products can go viral overnight if the right celebrity posts photos about them. And I believe it could be more effective for Quora, where you can see the questions that your friends like. I particularly like this feature because I believe that my generation is highly competitive. We compete to be the most fit, the most knowledgeable, or the highest earners within our circles. But we cannot get there by ourselves, and we know this. So we look towards not only visionaries but also friends to determine how to navigate life. What are our friends Googling in order to succeed? What kinds of things are they really after? What makes them tick? I envision the upvotes/push notifications becoming a streamlined version of our best selves. If an employer or acquaintance ever wanted to understand who you are as a person and what you are truly after, all they would have to do is look at your viewing/upvote history on Quora. A big data way of summarizing a person and understanding their true personal and professional motivations.
Conclusion: I strongly believe that Quora is utilizing just a fraction of its true power as a social media platform. What makes it addictive is that it is not shallow. Now, it is not terribly scholarly and serious. In fact, it is quite fun but in a way that challenges your beliefs, your mindset, and your capacity to learn. And that’s the true unique value proposition and future of Quora. Who wouldn’t want to support a social media platform that enhances you and expands your outlook with each incremental minute you spend on it?
She behaves as if she was beautiful - it is the secret of her charm. 