Firstly, is there any chance we can have a story without someone using the word "bubble"? This is not evidence of a bubble. More to the point, it's a boring prediction because it doesn't add anything. Some years from now we may well be in a bubble and the person who happens to be right that day will say "See? I said we were in a bubble" and the previous 1000 days of being wrong will be summarily ignored.
Basically it's pointless.
As for Quora, I stand by my original assessment: I don't see this going mainstream. Q&A seems to be something that works well for particular verticals (eg programming aka Stackoverflow) but doesn't seem to be a general purpose or widespread tool. This is in part cultural (eg I believe Q&A is very big in Korea).
I see this more as "bubble thinking" and in this context "bubble" has nothing to do with valuation but more that the people who use and value Quora live inside a bubble. That bubble is the Valley. VCs and Valleywags only know other VCs and Valleywags and all of those people use Quora so they make the mistake of thinking it's far larger than it actually is.
Quora does not have the mainstream breakout appeal that, say, Pinterest or Instagram does and honestly I don't think it ever will (you can quote me on that). Neither does (or will) Stackexchange.
That's not to say either won't exit for 9-10 digits but that's another story entirely.
Quora has done a fantastic job of marketing itself to VCs/Valleywags but I see Q&A much like I do Foursquare and the whole check-in thing. It's a (to borrow a Mark Suster term) FNAC (feature not a company).
IMHO Quora will suffer the same fate every social/curation site does: eternal September. If it ever does grow massively the influx of new people will change the site and those early adopters people like to follow now will move on to the next thing. It's Slashdot, Digg, etc all over again.
I may be (read: am) biased, but I don't think there is (currently) any finer system in the world for technical, more-or-less-science-based Q&A than Stack Exchange.
So the open question is, how many technical, mostly-science based topics exist that work on the Stack Exchange Q&A engine -- and how large can they become? Many have been tried, some are working; see the statistics at http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic
At the very least, Stack Exchange produced Stack Overflow, which is already absolutely enormous, growing like crazy, and well on its way to becoming the Wikipedia of programming. We can't really say that about Quora for any topic, can we? Will Stack Exchange ever recreate that level of success on any other topic? I don't know. I suppose you could plot growth curves of the various sub-sites and estimate how long it'd take for them to reach the size of Stack Overflow.
And also watch out for Branch.com - it takes Quora model of "Experts Q&A" to "Invite-only Experts talking on a roundtable". Potentially disruptive as it plays on psychology of "exclusiveness" - Evan and Biz stone are betting on it via Obvious Corp.
If Quora got the adoption that Yahoo answers did, it would end up with answers like Yahoo answers has and similarly talented engineers. The only way Facebook holds onto their talent is that the idiots typically don't make friends with the rest of us. Even reddit looks childish these days.
Front page reddit is pretty awful with the exception of /r/askscience (and well, honestly, I subscribe to /r/aww because I love looking at pictures of cute animals), but reddit is actually REALLY great if you find a couple of high traffic subreddits that don't hit the front page and turn off all the default subscriptions. I just wish they'd let subreddits arrange some sort of feeder model amongst themselves. (So stuff posted in /r/haskell could bubble up to /r/coding with sufficient upvotes, for example). That subreddits are siloed is the biggest technical problem.
The front page just has the lowest common denominator problem.
I view quora as a highend QA website that connects me to experts. I have access to people with deep understandsings of technology, business, science, lingustics and culuture all while being "peer reviewed". I dont think the lower class and noneducated will flock to it, but it would be invaluable to anyone in the knowledge economy.
> I view quora as a highend QA website that connects me to experts.
I've thought of Quora as having everybody except experts on it. Here are the first five questions I see on Quora's quantitative finance page:
1. Who (companies or individuals) are some well-respected recruiters in quantitative finance?
2. What metrics do you use to figure out if a commodity is undervalued or overvalued?
3. For a fresh maths/stats PhD, are there any advantages to starting a career in an investment bank instead of a hedge fund?
4. What is the purpose of Financial Engineering?
5. What is the most common topic beginners struggle with when it comes to Computational Finance?
Now here are the first five I see on StackExchange's quantitative finance page:
1. Nelson-Siegel model is not arbitrage-free
2. Autocorrelation and Markov Regime-Switching
3. What are some examples of non-financial risks and contingency plans?
4. Is it ever possible that---because of illiquidity---exercising an out-of-the-money option is better than directly buying the stock?
5. What's the best way to test/validate an interest rate lattice model
Only one of these sites has experts on it. (Full disclosure: I'm a moderator on the Quant SE site. It took a lot of work to get that board up to expert level. I don't see the same kind of effort applied from Quora.)
I think what happens with Quora is that experts answer questions in their own field, but they don't ask them. So the questions may seem elementary, while the answers are not.
this is what's so creepy about the place. why does class need to come into it? class has never been an issue with hn - even in its better days - yet it's become something core to quora.
Probably means highbrow rather than class level - you can be lower class and still appreciate high culture. Though I personally don't get Quora - unless it's some sort of faux research department for one of the big tech companies (i.e. destined to be purchased).
I had the same impression, which is some of what drove me away from it. I'm okay with meritocracies, which StackExchange seems closer to, and is especially the case with e.g. math forums, but Quora seemed to be much more class-based, where there were lots of people without any particularly strong skills who were part of the "elite" community due to wealth/lineage or something.
More problematic, though, was that there was increasingly a lot of "soft spam", answers that were more somebody promoting their tangentially related startup or book than actual answers. I'm not even against relevant self-promotion, but it feels like it's more of a problem at Quora than here; HNers tend to stick to more relevant self-promotion, and there's stricter community policing on popping into a thread with a pile of buzzwords and a link to your webinar that's sort of vaguely related to the thread's topic.
I see a lot of potential for the "lower class and noneducated" in the Q&A space. Questions about relationships and social issues often cannot be answered by merely browsing websites. Everyone views their own situation as being unique. People love giving advice on these issues, even if the right answers aren't black and white.
>Some years from now we may well be in a bubble and (...) the previous 1000 days of being wrong will be summarily ignored.
I might be misreading you, but it seems you don't think a bubble can last for 1000 days. It did in the 90's. I think your kind of attitude leads people who cry 'Bubble!' to say, after 1000 days, 'Um, I guess I was wrong. Damn, being wrong just cost me a 10x return on my investments I wasn't making. I better start investing before I lose even more!'
I literally remember reading a comment from someone in the late 90's 'Not buying a house 3 years ago has cost me 400,000.'
Well, in retrospect, no it didn't, it was just a bubble.
The protection against a bubble isn't waiting until it's a long, well-established bubble: the protection against a bubble is having lots of sales and lots of cash stored away. If you're punished too much after a bubble-pop in your valuation (get priced at a tiny price per earnings) great: you can now buy back your shares and mint money by selling them again when your price to earnings is something reasonable.
on the other hand, if you don't have sales, your price to earnings is infinite. Then it's not the bubble you should be worried about, it's getting customers.
Basically it's pointless.
As for Quora, I stand by my original assessment: I don't see this going mainstream. Q&A seems to be something that works well for particular verticals (eg programming aka Stackoverflow) but doesn't seem to be a general purpose or widespread tool. This is in part cultural (eg I believe Q&A is very big in Korea).
I see this more as "bubble thinking" and in this context "bubble" has nothing to do with valuation but more that the people who use and value Quora live inside a bubble. That bubble is the Valley. VCs and Valleywags only know other VCs and Valleywags and all of those people use Quora so they make the mistake of thinking it's far larger than it actually is.
Quora does not have the mainstream breakout appeal that, say, Pinterest or Instagram does and honestly I don't think it ever will (you can quote me on that). Neither does (or will) Stackexchange.
That's not to say either won't exit for 9-10 digits but that's another story entirely.
Quora has done a fantastic job of marketing itself to VCs/Valleywags but I see Q&A much like I do Foursquare and the whole check-in thing. It's a (to borrow a Mark Suster term) FNAC (feature not a company).
IMHO Quora will suffer the same fate every social/curation site does: eternal September. If it ever does grow massively the influx of new people will change the site and those early adopters people like to follow now will move on to the next thing. It's Slashdot, Digg, etc all over again.