Quora: Knowledge Sharing for the New Decade

We’ve had Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia for a while, but the former is often low-quality and the latter is an encyclopedia, not a place for personal expertise. Quora, founded by Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever, is trying to fill the gap. It’s a Q&A platform that feels like a more intellectual version of a social network.

Quality through Identity

The big difference with Quora is the emphasis on real names and credentials. When you see an answer about the early days of Facebook from the former CTO, you know it’s authoritative. The upvoting system (inspired by Reddit and Digg) ensures that the best content rises to the top, but the "Social" layer (following people and topics) makes it personal.

The Technical Stack

Quora is built using Python and a custom framework they developed. They’re also making heavy use of LiveNode, their system for real-time updates without page refreshes.

# A conceptual Quora 'Question' model
class Question(Model):
    text = StringProperty()
    author = ReferenceProperty(User)
    tags = ListProperty(Tag)
    upvotes = IntegerProperty(default=0)
    
    def get_top_answer(self):
        return Answer.all().filter('question =', self).order('-upvotes').get()

Outlook

Quora is currently in an invite-only phase, and the quality of discourse is incredibly high. The challenge will be maintaining that quality as they scale to millions of users. If they can succeed, Quora could become the definitive repository of "human knowledge" that isn't found in books-the messy, experiential stuff that we usually only share over coffee. It’s an ambitious goal for the new decade.

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