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Comment by jasonwilk | Hacker News Reader

Smart people, have bad ideas.http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html

I'm not saying this app is entirely a bad idea. I had Zuckerberg telling me for 20 minutes that this site is awesome. I just became ridiculously bored after the first week of using it and I'm concerned the founding team isn't gaining real-life perspective as to whether or not the idea is any good.

Perfect example: Someone asked a question the other day "What does Max Levchin look for when hiring", and guess who responded to the question? You guessed it, Max Levchin himself. In the real world, this wouldn't happen and as the user population grows, the celebs roll out and the people looking for questions about brushing their dog's teeth roll in. I don't see the value beyond it's current elitist state.

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Why? "Ordinary" non-techie people don't have questions that their friends/others can answer?

Bootstrapping with a targeted and "elite" crowd is pretty much ideal. Then you get the community to be self-sustaining since it has both an organically narrow focus (avoids being spread too thin) and gets attention within that community through a mutually recursive process of being useful to them and attracting people respected in that community.

The one main potential objection is that this site has no value to non-techies (even when the community grows beyond just techies), but I have no idea how one could possibly argue that.

And no, it didn't catch my interest right away either, but I see its utility. (I want fewer "distractions" in my life, not more.)

You're assuming that the product is not going to evolve past its current state. There are many features to be built, and I'm sure they haven't even scratched the surface yet.

Regardless, the primary feed is set up so you're following things you want to follow and your relevant network. This acts as a crucial and necessary filter to avoid too much noise.

Also I've browsed around many topics, and it's definitely not limited to technical subjects. If done correctly, I really think this could be a nice complement to Wikipedia.

I disagree that this is a bad idea. I think it's a good idea that hasn't been done well and it remains to be seen whether quora is up to the challenge. (btw, if anyone has an invite, i'd love to check out the site: padlane@gmail.com).

Invite sent.

You challenge my point and you don't even have an account. Argument Fail

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