Quora answer: What would happen if all collapsed answers were deleted?

Apr 08 2013

 

Those who on a regular basis have our answers collapsed unfairly would leave.

Quora now has this tag line

“Quora connects you to everything you want to know about.”

Quora used to have this tag line:

“Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers
created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. Over time, we
aim to have each question page become the best possible resource for
someone who wants to know about the question.”

Notice the change.

What they don’t say in their first tag line is that the content is censored. Now some of this censoring is good, in as much as it keeps spam off the site. But other censoring is bad in that Administrators seem to be omnipotent, and if you have an unpopular opinion then you are likely to have your answer collapsed which is to say hidden from view so that most users do not see it.

The best answer might not be the popular answer, and this is where their design starts to go astray.

The best answer is the most insightful one, normally, but many do not want those insights to clutter up and complicate their views of the world.

The second tag line we see today is more direct. It says it connects you to knowledge. But what it does not say is that this knowledge is filtered by a lowest common denominator filtering mechanism, which means that what ever you see will probably reinforce your prejudices rather than challenging them. And we must question whether this is knowledge or mere casuistry and pabulum rather than knowledge.

What we can say is that Quora has tapped into a desire of people to gain knowledge by confronting the alternative answers to a given question. But due to design flaws in Quora that are left unaddressed, it is unlikely that much knowledge is actually going to be acquired and even less insight.

See my tag line at What is a good tagline for Quora?

http://www.quora.com/Collapsing-and-Collapsed-Answers-on-Quora/What-would-happen-if-all-collapsed-answers-were-deleted

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