My comments that I posted in the comments on the original blog post, slightly modified:

===

Quora most certainly does solve a problem: “Tacit knowledge extraction”

I have a question, whose answer may not exist anywhere in written form (e.g. no reference book, no wiki, no manual, no whitepaper, etc.). The answers do however lie in the heads of people, very very smart knowledgable people. Quora has created a system whereby a user with a question can pose it in a forum where those with the answer will see it and feel compelled to answer.

Quora is performing tacit knowledge extraction at the macro-level. However, there is no reason that this same problem can’t be solve at the institutional level as well, using only a slightly modified version of the solution the Quora team has built.

===

On the issue of badges and traditional game mechanics, I wholly disagree that Quora needs such features, and I would even argue that it would be a worse product if it did have them. For the most part, the game mechanics you are referring to are almost all behavioral game mechanics, whereby intrinsic motivation is replaced with extrinsic motivation in the form of totems and tokens (badges, mayorships, in-game money, etc.).

When you apply extrinsic motivators where intrinsic motivators already exist, you get three results:
(1) An increase in short-to-medium term user engagement, but this comes as a cost of
(2) Losing intrinsic motivators that a difficult to regain once lost, and
(3) A possible loss of contribution quality, because users are now engineering their answers for upvotes and not focusing on answering the original question. Oftentimes these two will be aligned, but not always.

The correct type of game mechanics to apply (and that for the most part are already part of Quora in some ways already) are combinatorial game mechanics that don’t reward individual achievement, but collaboration and cooperation. These types of game mechanics are far more subtle than the behavioral game mechanics used by companies like Zynga.

StackOverflow is unique in that it is largely based on combinatorial game mechanics, with the use of some behavioral game mechanics to guide the user into exploring the webapp. Notice that I said exploring. As webapps get larger, you need to establish “exploration patterns” to the app to make sure the user gets the most out of the app. SO uses badges for this. Many other sites use single-use tooltips such as those that can be created with guiders.js. Here they are using extrinsic motivators for a behavior that will only be performed once (exploration by definition is only done once), thus there is no product risk from usurping/deadening the value of intrinsic motivators using extrinsic motivators.

There is however one exception on SO where they use behavioral game mechanics to solicit user behavior that should be performed in perpetuity, which is to hand out depth of knowledge badges for contributions to certain topic verticals. There is a serious possible long-term consequence of these badges for tasks in perpetuity, but it may be a long-time before we find out whether the risks outweighs the benefit.

For example, SO hands out bronze, silver and gold badges for topic X. This is replacing an intrinsic motivation (helping your fellow developer with the problem; reciprocal altruism) with an extrinsic motivator (bronze/silver/gold badges. A possible consequence of this approach is that some people (how many as a percentage, we don’t yet know) may only actively participate in the site until they achieve the badges they want in that vertical as part of their reputation. So the first risk here is the possibility of a drop in topic engagement after the user has achieved all totems for that topic.

And example of a better game mechanic, that is typically viewed as traditional game mechanic, but has been implemented in Quora as a combinatorial game mechanic is the notion of a topic leaderboard titled “Top Answerers”, which I believe is upvote weighted.. First, the upvote weighting makes sure that quality of answers is more important than quantity of answers for a topic in determining who is ranked most highly. Second, there are no notifications alerting top answerers that they’ve become top answerers. It’s not like the user wakes up one day, checks Quora and sees a feed item saying “Congratulations, you are now a top answerer for the Javascript topic.” Doing so would shift the focus from intrinsic motivation via reciprocal altruism to extrinsic motivation via the fostering of competition among top answerers.

Finally, Quora’s product management approach of only displaying just enough quantity/quality metrics to the end users prevents misplaced emphasis on competition and PeopleRank. The only places you really see competition metrics in the interface are upvotes on an answer and number of answers in the top answerers leaderboard.

I could even be argued that Quora may want to experiment with not listing these two numbers at all. For example, Hacker News recently did away with displaying the number of upvotes alongside topic comments. This removal of competition metric from the interface effectively turns a mixed behavioral/combinatorial game mechanic to a pure combinatorial game mechanic. I forget the exact thread where Paul Graham discussed the benefits of removing upvote count from comments, but the fact that his change has stuck is proof that a combinatorial approach that is subtle and may not look like game mechanics at all to the untrained eye is better than a behavioral approach that rewards undesirable behavior.

===

Ultimately, Quora is fun for people who would rank highly on high-need-for-cognition. That’s it’s target audience. It does not and would not want to modify the product to target people with a low need for cognition, since doing so would reduce contribution quality and drive away the users who have a high need for cognition and contribute heavily.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1951356

===

The only point in this article that I agree with is the “echo chamber” effect and feed utility problem. However, feed utility is not a problem unique to Quora. Twitter and Facebook both suffer from feed utility issues due to signal to noise ratios in the feeds. This is one of the biggest problems in social network design and each social network, by virtue of catering to a different audience with different needs will have to find their own solutions to improve signal-to-noise. I know, I’m working on a startup with a feed with a very focused task and all feed improvements revolve around serving the needs associated with that one task. (FYI We’re not in stealth, since if you know me personally, I’ll gladly share it with you, but I’m not about to post our product design on the web just yet.)

On this last problem it may be interesting to have two feeds. A feed of all the stuff I like and find interesting via follows of people and topics. This is the serendipitous, consumption focused feed. And a second feed that includes all the topics that the user contributes most often to. This second feed should help solid contributors get back to contributing instead of having their time sucked up with consumption of all sorts of useful and useless knowledge.