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Why Quora Will Fail

Every tech trend needs a few naysayers, and for fast-rising question-and-answer site Quora, Vivek Wadhwa is doing the honors. In TechCrunch over the weekend, the UC-Berkeley visiting scholar argues that the quality of Quora's community -- and the content it creates in the form of thoughtful questions and answers -- just can't scale. "The quality of answers will decline," Wadhwa believes. "The people whose opinion I value, such as Quora's #1 respondent, Robert Scoble, will simply stop posting on the site when they get drowned out by the noise from the masses. They will turn away after having their posts voted down (so that they look less important than their peers) and being personally subjected to the types of mindless, anonymous attacks that you see in the comments section of TechCrunch." In Quora's defense, among several new projects, the startup says it's developing an algorithm to determine user quality. Still, in Wadhwa's opinion, the question and answer market is destined to be separated into massive sites like Yahoo Answers -- which attract tons of traffic, but low quality discussions -- and "gated" online communities like LawPivot for expert legal advice and Focus for business experts. "This is where people with common interests will gather and exchange ideas."

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »

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