Who is behind quora




















But for years, Quora has also explicitly forbidden the Internet Archive from indexing their site. In their robots. People share a lot of sensitive material on Quora — controversial political views, workplace gossip and compensation, and negative opinions held of companies. Over many years, as they change jobs or change their views, it is important that they can delete or anonymize their previously-written answers.

We opt out of the wayback machine because inclusion would allow people to discover the identity of authors who had written sensitive answers publicly and later had made them anonymous, and because it would prevent authors from being able to remove their content from the internet if they change their mind about publishing it.

As far as we can tell, there is no way for sites to selectively programmatically remove content from the archive and so this is the only way for us to protect writers. If they open up an API where we can remove content from the archive when authors remove it from Quora, but leave the rest of the content archived, we would be happy to opt back in. The Internet Archive is a historical archive of the public internet, and Quora asking for the ability to selectively modify their archives is absurd.

When you run a social platform with content generated by the community, you have a larger responsibility not to burn their collective work to the ground. Part of that responsibility is participating in the web, and giving back what you take from it. According to Cheever, Quora's goal is to capture as much of that subjective knowledge as possible.

It seemed a shame not to have someplace to share that. The site's design is fairly simple, though not as intuitive as it could be. You can begin with the page—framed as a question, naturally—about getting started on Quora. Or, if you're not one for reading the manual, you can begin by sifting through random questions that are displayed in the center of the screen.

Up on top there's a big search bar. Using keywords, you can find questions that others have already posed or choose topics to follow so that the site can begin serving up queries more suited to your interests. You can also start following people. That way the questions they ask, answer, and follow will show up in your feed, not unlike on Facebook. You can vote up answers you think are helpful "helpful," along with "authentic," being the favored compliments among Quora loyalists and vote down those that aren't.

All of that activity shows up in your feed as well. Like on Facebook, real names are mandatory, so there's a social cost to acting the fool. The service does allow for anonymous posts, however, which helps when asking about a personal health issue, say, or responding about your own experience as a fellow sufferer.

Browse topics within the tech industry and it's easy to see why the rhetoric about Quora has been so high-flown. The amount of knowledge that has been poured into the site is phenomenal. Users ask questions about raising capital, or about booting a cofounder who fails to pull his weight, and almost immediately a discussion sprouts up among seasoned engineers, investors, and CEOs. Sometimes, it's almost comic how questions will draw cameo appearances from the exact person who can offer the most insight.

How did Friendster blow it? Jonathan Abrams , the company's founder, is among those who posted answers. Why did AOL make a particular decision? Stray from the startup scene, though, and Quora can look disappointingly like a ghost town.

Marc Bodnick , who works in product marketing at Quora, insists the site isn't just about Silicon Valley; he points to movies, where the site is supposedly "amazing. Quora's Oscar coverage, Bodnick says, was similarly amazing. But look for The Fighter, a film that saw two actors take Academy Awards in February, and all you find is a single question "Is that Christian Bale's real hairline?

Certainly it would be unfair, less than two years into Quora's existence, to judge the site by what's missing instead of by what's there. But Hollywood is an instructive example, because it highlights not just the gaps in the site's breadth but the huge challenge Quora faces in filling them.

Let's stipulate right off the bat that the film equivalent of tech CEOs—the Martin Scorceses and Natalie Portmans of the world—won't be showing up to answer questions very often. But to replicate for movies what the site has accomplished in tech, Quora will at least need to lure the producers, the critics, the film scholars, the gaffers, and so on: experts from overlapping but very different communities, some of them far-flung around the country or the world. And that's just for movies; now imagine that same problem multiplied by a hundred or by a thousand.

Quora wants to replicate the exhaustiveness of Wikipedia, but to do so it would need to achieve the ubiquity of Facebook. The odds against emulating either web titan are steep; the odds against both, enormous. The basic concept for Quora was born in the fall of , when D'Angelo had already left his CTO gig but Cheever was still working as an engineer.

Over Chinese food near Facebook's offices, the two discussed what they called "latent markets"—areas of online behavior in which consumer demand was clear but existing solutions were lacking.

Maybe the biggest example, they realized, was sites devoted to answering questions. But few searchers can be satisfied with Yahoo Answers , where the silliness of the questions a recently featured question of the day: "What if you ask a woman if she's pregnant and she's not? The early leader in social networking, Friendster, had terrible technology. The advertising-heavy MySpace, which dethroned Friendster, was a bit like Yahoo Answers: chaotic and low-rent, prone to spammers and scams.

Yet both were immensely popular—until Facebook came along and figured out how to do social networking right. D'Angelo and Cheever seemed almost destined to be part of Facebook's rise to dominance. The former's relationship with Zuckerberg dates back to high school: The two became friends at Phillips Exeter Academy , where both had been late arrivals, transferring to the school in the 11th grade.

D'Angelo might have been the better programmer—according to the fall Exeter Bulletin , he took eighth place in that year's USA Computing Olympiad. When D'Angelo was a junior at Caltech, he put his studies on hold to spend a semester helping his friend during the early days of Facebook. After completing his degree, he immediately headed north to Palo Alto to become the site's VP of engineering, and Zuckerberg soon created the role of CTO for him.

It seemed harmless enough, but technically, Cheever, like Zuckerberg, had violated university policy. Unlike Zuckerberg, he took his admonishment without protest—and he graduated.

As far as Cheever can recall, the two men met only once at Harvard—when his future boss tried out for his Ultimate Frisbee team. But he soon changed his mind when two Harvard friends in Seattle told him at a party that they were leaving their jobs at Microsoft and heading to Facebook. Still at the party, Cheever fished out the old email and replied to the recruiter.

Cheever is tall and slim, with blue-eyed, Lifetime-channel good looks and scruffy hair. When called upon to do so, he tugs at his midsection, clasps his hands between his knees, and contorts in his chair. But when Cheever left in March , the pair immediately started working on a project they called Alma Networks , after the street in Palo Alto where Cheever lived.

That summer they made their first two hires—Rebekah Cox, a top designer at Facebook, and Kevin Der, an engineer—and set to work building their online service.

That fall, the four were ready for users to try out the site. They launched as a private beta and gave out the invitations to friends and friends of friends. The Quora community finally votes on an answer, either up or down, similar to the popular social platform Reddit. The answers with the most upvotes are highlighted and viewed the most. Quora acquired the political discussion platform Parlio in March The deal marked Quora's first and only acquisition to date.

Ghonim, who found fame via social media during the Arab Spring, wanted to help readers avoid and identify bias in the media. The acquisition of Parlio has helped Quora continue to focus on generating quality conversations with experts and a community of enthusiastic learners. The success of Quora can be attributed to a strong and educated user community, an appealing user interface, and advanced processes that highlight the best responses that directly benefit the user community.

Ultimately, Quora has gained solid traction among its competitors, including Stack Overflow, Dice. However, whether the site's advertising venture becomes a detractor for its visitors remains to be seen. Company Profiles. Building Credit. Tech Stocks. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Investopedia. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.

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