Blinded by Groogle: Quora Begins Addressing Issues Resolved Years Ago by Others

Quora has described a new feature, which it calls "Promote," as the ability "to take any item on Quora and spend credits to increase the number of people who see it in their feed."

The top-rated response to this announcement -- by Jonas M Luster -- objects to the change, saying that it creates:

a two-class society of haves (money, existing rolodexes) and have-nots (knowledgeable people whose blogs weren't SEO optimized and who didn't spend money on Twitter spam tools or Facebook campaigns).  "In here", in Quora, a cook could say something semi-smart and be heard. A rape survivor could ask something or provide insight and be seen and interacted with by all of Quora. A farmer could talk about cows and milk and a life coach about her work with disabled children.

This is a fair comment.  However, the argument itself -- between Quora's upgrade and the sort of objections raised by Luster -- is a bit like arguing if it's possible to build a machine that can carry a couple hundred passengers from New York to Paris in less than 24 hours.

The fact is, it's been done already.  So, too, with the ability to give expertise a voice based on its value to the community (as opposed to simply its "influence score," or its ability to pay) -- and it's been proven to work with large, scalable communities. 

It's just that "Groogle" has made it difficult for Quora and others to understand scientific progress in the field, so that issues arise which could have been resolved long ago.  In fact, based on the above exchange, and the existing science behind "collective intelligence," it's easy to predict the next changes Quora will need to make, and the sort of objections its users will raise.

The Groogle of Gumroad.com

Gumroad, a site for selling knowledge content, is described by TechCrunch as "the buzzy one-man startup launched by Pinterest and Turntable app designer (and 19- year-old college dropout) Sahil Lavingia."

The word "buzzy" alone sets off alarms -- what does that mean?  Buzzy to whom?  Even if it represents a concrete value, such words only perpetuate the likelihood of contracting Groogle, because they are based on who you know, not what you know.

The idea of a "college dropout" being the latest in "cool" appears to be a symptom of Groogle.  TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis, when interviewing Mr. Lavingia says that "everyone should drop out of college."  In truth, she is too young and inexperienced to make such a judgment, and even Mr. Lavingia has the common sense to say he's actually on "leave of absence" from USC. 

"If everything turns to hell", says Lavingia, "I can always go back."  But Ms. Tsotsis -- and, it seems, a growing percent of the Groogle-verse (for example, Peter Thiel's "20 Under 20 Fellowship" program) -- prefer the idea of a "college drop-out," as it seems to raise the value of their young entrepreneur in the minds of the "buzzing" Valley-bees.  Especially if he hopes, as the "buzz" suggests, to create a $1 billion company. 

This would all be so much harmless teenage angst if Lavingia's start-up, Gumroad, hadn't received -- according to yesterday's TechCrunch announcement -- a commitment of $1.1 million in seed funding from investors Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikrant, Collaborative Fund and Danny Rimer.

Gumroad's investors appear to ignore decades of research -- and patents -- in the field of content pricing.  The big issue, says Tsotsis, is security.  No, it's not.  Security is a minor issue compared to what's required to allow content buying and selling -- and the ultimate requirement: dynamic pricing.

In fact, dynamic content pricing has already been resolved, and is actively working on the Internet amongst large communitities.  But getting the Groogle-verse to understand this fact, and deploy in a large scale, is difficult when there's so much buzz -- and bucks -- in Silicon Valley drowning out the real achievements in the field, including (yes) the achievements of people who haven't even dropped-out of college.

Internet Entrepreneur Semil Shah, a Self-Described "Big Fan of Quora," Could be Infected with Groogle

"There's a speed issue," writes Semil Shah about Quora, "when credits or cash are involved, and then a quality issue. Right now, the credits are free, but how would my expectations and requirements change if cash was involved? I would not be surprised if, years from now, this functionality is available within Quora and quite effective."

If Quora were to decide to implement a system that provided higher quality or faster responses for higher amounts of cash, Quora would, in effect, be about 10 years behind the times.  Such systems not only exist, and are scalable, and have been tested with hundreds of thousands of users, but have also been patented a decade ago.

Tim Chang Claims that Social Game Mechanics is a Recent Invention

In a recent article in the New York Times, Tim Chang of Mayfield Fund makes a Grooglesque assumption -- about how Twitter, Facebook, Quora and Zynga have invented social and game mechanics for a broad market.

“Twitter, Facebook, Quora and Zynga have invented social and game mechanics for broad markets,” says Tim Chang, a managing director at the Mayfield Fund, one of HealthTap’s venture capital backers. “If you can take the best of those mechanics and apply them to a single vertical, that can be very powerful.”

In fact, these mechanics were not invesnted by the above companies.  Industries in finance, trade and transport services have used game mechanics for decades to lure and retain customers for their products, such as credit cards, reward cards, flight mile rewards and so forth.
 

If anything, game mechanics is becoming passe. The next step is possibly, 'no rewards, no gimmicks. You get what you give'. 

Plus, game mechanics are game mechanics - they are employed to give users certain benefits based on their actions. The idea that it would work better if applied to a single vertical market, as Chang suggests, is not supported by research.