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Comment by noahc | Hacker News Reader

I view quora as a highend QA website that connects me to experts. I have access to people with deep understandsings of technology, business, science, lingustics and culuture all while being "peer reviewed". I dont think the lower class and noneducated will flock to it, but it would be invaluable to anyone in the knowledge economy.

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> I view quora as a highend QA website that connects me to experts.

I've thought of Quora as having everybody except experts on it. Here are the first five questions I see on Quora's quantitative finance page:

1. Who (companies or individuals) are some well-respected recruiters in quantitative finance?

2. What metrics do you use to figure out if a commodity is undervalued or overvalued?

3. For a fresh maths/stats PhD, are there any advantages to starting a career in an investment bank instead of a hedge fund?

4. What is the purpose of Financial Engineering?

5. What is the most common topic beginners struggle with when it comes to Computational Finance?

Now here are the first five I see on StackExchange's quantitative finance page:

1. Nelson-Siegel model is not arbitrage-free

2. Autocorrelation and Markov Regime-Switching

3. What are some examples of non-financial risks and contingency plans?

4. Is it ever possible that---because of illiquidity---exercising an out-of-the-money option is better than directly buying the stock?

5. What's the best way to test/validate an interest rate lattice model

Only one of these sites has experts on it. (Full disclosure: I'm a moderator on the Quant SE site. It took a lot of work to get that board up to expert level. I don't see the same kind of effort applied from Quora.)

http://www.quora.com/Quantitative-Finance

http://quant.stackexchange.com

I think what happens with Quora is that experts answer questions in their own field, but they don't ask them. So the questions may seem elementary, while the answers are not.

> I dont think the lower class and noneducated

this is what's so creepy about the place. why does class need to come into it? class has never been an issue with hn - even in its better days - yet it's become something core to quora.

Probably means highbrow rather than class level - you can be lower class and still appreciate high culture. Though I personally don't get Quora - unless it's some sort of faux research department for one of the big tech companies (i.e. destined to be purchased).

when i used it, there was very clearly a class thing going on. this was clear from the questions on social etiquette, dress codes, etc.

I had the same impression, which is some of what drove me away from it. I'm okay with meritocracies, which StackExchange seems closer to, and is especially the case with e.g. math forums, but Quora seemed to be much more class-based, where there were lots of people without any particularly strong skills who were part of the "elite" community due to wealth/lineage or something.

More problematic, though, was that there was increasingly a lot of "soft spam", answers that were more somebody promoting their tangentially related startup or book than actual answers. I'm not even against relevant self-promotion, but it feels like it's more of a problem at Quora than here; HNers tend to stick to more relevant self-promotion, and there's stricter community policing on popping into a thread with a pile of buzzwords and a link to your webinar that's sort of vaguely related to the thread's topic.

I see a lot of potential for the "lower class and noneducated" in the Q&A space. Questions about relationships and social issues often cannot be answered by merely browsing websites. Everyone views their own situation as being unique. People love giving advice on these issues, even if the right answers aren't black and white.

I dont disagree, but I think ask.com, yahoo q&a, reddit and even to some extent metafilter as a better fit for those types of questions.

Yes but that already exists (Yahoo Answers)

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