• GigaOm, Friday, January 7, 2011 7:07 AM

Experiencing significant growth, some are asking whether question & answer service Quora can keep up the quality of its content. "The site depends on high-quality answers, and has deliberately kept things small in order to cultivate a knowledgeable community," writes GigaOm's Matthew Ingram.

"But can it keep those virtues when membership is exploding and not everyone wants to play by the rules?" As Ingram notes, many services have failed to overcome what Robert Scoble calls the "chatroom problem," or fallen into what Gartner artfully calls a "trough of disillusionment." Another way to think of it is the "Yahoo Answers" problem. That service, while similar in approach, suffers from an overwhelming supply of stupid questions and equally stupid answers," Ingram believes. To date, Quora's founders -- former Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo and fellow Facebook alum Charlie Cheever -- have deliberately kept a lid on the site's growth to prevent quality erosion.

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