A Guest Post: lol quora

Quora is the biggest pseudo-intellectual circlejerk ever. While there are many posts that are informative, I'm not sure if the community really can sustain itself. It's a platform for people to feel important about themselves, rather than a place for real experts to answer questions.

You can say that the necessity to login with a real identity and the culture of writing long articles to respond to questions means a higher quality experience, but fundamentally people stick to the groupthink that they know will get voted higher on the page. Because most of the time it's not always facts that are being used to answers on Quora. They're just opinions being cleverly disguised as facts. That's not a good way to answer a question. -____- And if the question was really about asking for an opinion in the first place, Quora is not at all the best platform to get an optimal answer for it. There's absolutely no room to debate. 

Quora generally has two types of answers, the answers to factual questions, and feel good stories/positivity. Then there are the gems about once in a lifetime experiences that probably should be shared. These are good.  While the answers to the factual questions may be helpful, they are really just establishing a relationship between questions and facts that could be pulled from Wikipedia. I don't think feel good stories contribute much to Quora's goal of increasing the world's knowledge. In fact, they just feed into the whole groupthink mentality.  

There's also stuff like this: http://www.quora.com/Harvard-University/How-can-I-come-to-terms-with-the-fact-that-so-many-people-I-know-got-into-Harvard-when-Ive-worked-nonstop-for-my-entire-life-to-get-there-and-didnt-make-it

Bitch, get off Quora and take your butthurt tears to College Confidential. Quora users shouldn't even answer these questions. But they do because of the allure of upvotes. 

I know this will get a lot criticism, but it's the same problem that every site that has upvotes has. Quora is just particularly bad because a real name is associated with it. So people try their best to maintain approval of others. I'm predicting that in the future, just like Reddit, Quora will be used as a marketing tool. At that point it won't be any better than BuzzFeed. 

Here's a potential solution for Quora. Implement an anonymous upvote system that doesn't contribute directly the first answer to a question. Instead, it should influence a machine learning algorithm that actually picks the best posts. I'm sure the engineers there are already working on the machine learning - they just need to cut the stupid public upvotes. Give everyone on Quora a "tenure" of sorts and let them speak their mind without fear of getting downvoted to oblivion.