1) You can get firsthand info from the horse's mouth, like read about what it's like to be a 25 year old self made millionaire, or what it's like to work with ashton kushter, or what it's like to get an investment on shark tank. You can ask what it's like to get a life sentence in prison and a real prisoner will respond. You can ask Larry Summers his opinion on something and he'll respond.
2) Quora organizes the information on the internet. Some of the stuff you could find by googling, but who just googles random questions? The flow of the site is pretty nice because you go from one interesting answer to suggested related questions.
(I am just a Quora user although I know a bunch of people who work there.)
I guess I need to throw away my phone, my email, my instant messenger, my IRC client, my fax machine, my postage stamps and hell, the telex machine at the local police station.
Using some form of communication.
Of which Quora is but one.
I just started using Hacker News recently and have never really interacted with internet communities at all prior to this year so I'm open to the possibility that I'm not communicating clearly, or that you're being facetious.
The idea that Quora has some magical monopoly on asking famous people questions is so patently and self-evidently ridiculous that I didn't know where to begin.
Except with my old standby, that trusty workhorse: sarcasm.
I don't know why you don't like Quora (or maybe you do and thought I was saying it's a monopoly for famous people? In which case I'd clarify that's not what I believe, nor what I believe I wrote). Do you dislike Quora because you think other people wrongly think it's a monopoly? I don't think anyone thinks that. If you browse the site I think its value will make more sense to you because it has a lot of interesting content, as evidenced by random news sites scraping content from Quora.
I don't have a stake in Quora but I was trying to understand your perspective. It's cool if information/debate is not your goal in this thread. Maybe you want to be erroneously critical because you find it funny or enjoyable- that's fine and doesn't affect me. My perspective is that Quora is fun, well done, and a valuable source of fascinating information despite not being a monopoly.
Quora organizes the information on the internet pretty well too. Even if you can get the same information via googling, you often wouldn't google the information. I've found myself learning a lot about topics I'm interested in that I don't tend to set up Google alerts for. For example, you can find a lot of interesting information about India when you read answers to "What are the most surprising facts Westerners could learn about India?" that would not typically show up if I just googled "India," which I would probably not randomly do anyway.
I'd personally be very hesitant to partner with Adam after reading this, considering how this incident played out. Well... who am I kidding, if I had the opportunity to found the next Quora I'd jump on it, but I'd be watching for knives the whole time..
The drama of these tech companies bores me except insofar as it relates to my personal account. Don't founders leave companies all the time, especially when theyve already made a lot of money? Also I feel like at some point all these decisions are mutual.
I dunno, there's clearly a risk there based on his apparent behaviour here, but there's also an obvious opportunity - who'd _not_ want a cofounder who's not only prepared but also able to dump $400mil into his own B round?
Whatever happened it feels like Adam wants to make the point that Charlie was essentially fired. "We" is a lovely ambiguous term. They royal "We"? I suppose it's meant to imply that Charlie also agreed. But "Best for Charlie to step away" is pretty telling. There's a whole slew of options you could use to make it sound like it was Charlie's idea (although he's probably too young to 'focus on his family'
I always thought Quora should monetize around an RFP type concept. It feels to me like 80% of users are there for technology recommendations from the horses' mouth.