I used to spend hours a day on Wikipedia, falling trap to the Wikipedia Effect of reading an article, then linking off to another topic, somewhat related, somewhat not. By the end, if I started reading about the Cuban Missile Crisis, I had somehow ended on a page dedicated to the story of how Jay-Z replaced Royce Da 5’9 on “Renegade.” It was, in short, a great way to lose a few hours while simultaneously educating myself.
Recently, however, I’ve found myself killing the small amount of free time I have on Quora. Sometimes I come with a certain topic that I want to learn about, other times, just to see what’s being discussed in my feed of things that interest me, and there’s even some times when I just randomly type a word that pops into my head to see what people are discussing.
Quora, according to the Quora page on Quora (surprisingly, this is separate from their “about” page, which seems like a missed opportunity) is defined by its founder as ::
a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.
At first glance, Quora really isn’t all that different from Yahoo answers, which has been around for years. But what really separates it is captured this response from Oleh Kovalchuke in the same Quora string ::
Quora is a social video game.
It is also a collection of opinions with attribution.
The latter half of his response is what Yahoo Answers, and countless other similar services are. The former half, however, is what truly separates it. Quora has phenomenal social mechanics built in, that not only help the best answers rise to the top, but that cause people to want to write the best possible responses.
In doing a few Quora searches around sports related topics, I’ve come to make an important distinction. Though Quora asks for people’s opinions, it is striving to find the single, best answer. What makes sports debates different is that there often isn’t a correct answer. The best homerun hitter of all time can’t be proven, but a case can be made for multiple players. Whose better, the Yankees or Red Sox will obviously lead to a great debate, but no clear winner will emerge. And so, I can’t help but wonder, if there’s potential to create a platform for debating sports. To reward those who put forth great arguments. And perhaps, on some level, to finally settle the great sports debates of all time, while simultaneously catering to the daily sports news story cycle. In other words, a digital water cooler.
