• GigaOm, Monday, January 31, 2011 3:50 PM

To some degree, question and answer platform Quora owes its early success to the heavy involvement of influential tech blogger Robert Scoble. Calling Quora "the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years" didn't hurt either. Over the weekend, however, Scoble decided he was no longer a fan because, among other reasons, he believes the Quora community is turning on him. "It might seem as though this dustup is of interest only to Scoble fans and other Silicon Valley insiders, but it has focused another spotlight on some important hurdles that Quora has to face as it tries to grow," writes GigaOm.

Namely, Quora needs to scale in order to justify its $300 million valuation, but bigger crowds means less control, and fewer thought leaders like Scoble. "That commitment to quality is something that co-founder and former Facebook staffer Charlie Cheever has reiterated in interviews ... and is the key to avoiding the fate of similar services such as Yahoo Answers, which have been overwhelmed with low-quality content to the point where they are functionally useless."

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