The Ridiculous Takedown of Robert Scoble

There’s this new site called Quora. You may have heard of it? It provides high-quality questions to user answers, and it determines the quality of these questions by user-vote. It’s also one of the hottest, most buzzed-about start-ups in Silicon Valley. Here’s a description from Quora’s “About” page:

Quora is 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.

“But Dave,” you might ask. “Don’t a ton of other sites already do the same thing? Doesn’t the quality of questions/answer decline over time? Aren’t they usually plagued with problems, in terms of the quality of their answers as well as infestation by spammers?” Well, yes. All those things are actually true about Quora, or likely will be at some point. But, you see, Quora has been able to attract high-profile personalities and knowledgeable people to its platform, which has led to some pretty awesome and insightful answers on the site receiving quite a bit of attention from a lot of important people. It’s also inexplicably led to a site valuation of about $100 million.

I’ve used Quora, and I don’t find it user-friendly enough to go mainstream, nor do I find it differentiates itself enough from competing services to make it worthy of all this attention. Yet. The Wall Street Journal’s review of the site adeptly captures the opinion of most laypeople on what it’s like to use Quora (if they’ve even heard of it, which most of them haven’t).

All that being said, I was struck with the absolute ridiculousness of an online exchange between several high-profile users, who have recently taken to their blogs to battle it out about the usefulness of Quora. You see, blogging titan Robert Scoble, who was one of Quora’s most popular users, recently declared that “Quora is a horrid service for blogging.” Turns out, Scoble thought that the site would transform the way he blogged and interacted with others. When Scoble brought his considerable fanbase with him to Quora, it allowed all his answers to get upvoted to the top, thus providing the illusion that this was just another platform for him to extend his brand. You could call the influx of Quora followers he brought in something along the lines of “The Robert Scoble Effect,” and in some ways, his became an unwelcome presence.

First of all, as others have already pointed out, it was never really intended to be a service for blogging. But furthermore, when a site such as Quora ostensibly rates answers based on the quality of answers, only to find answer ratings determined by an invasion of Scoble followers, it tends to get pissed off. And that’s exactly what happened. A post addressed to Scoble at the Quora Reviewer retorted:

This morning, after seeing some of your favored Quora answers down-voted into oblivion and experiencing the anonymous sting of an overzealous reviewer, you decided to lash out. Quora, you wrote, was ”a horrid service for blogging.” Sure, you said, “it’s fine for a QA site, but we have lots of those.” As if to administer a finishing move, you added that Quora’s competitors are actually bigger and better and badder – especially Stack Exchange, where “the answers are broader in reach and deeper in quality.” Well, sorry, Scoble, Quora is not your playground.

Arrington from TechCrunch also posted a rebuttal to Scoble. So, Scoble backed down. And I don’t think he should have.

Sure, Scoble might have had the wrong idea about the site’s premise. But whose fault is that really? Scoble for doing what comes naturally to him, which is to evangelize about hot new services and bring a ton of followers with him who are naturally predisposed to upvote his stuff? Or Quora, for not developing a system that will actually do what it says, and surface the highest quality content?

I’ve written before about the limits of crowdsourcing. The take home message of my previous piece is that crowdsourcing is extremely difficult. Writing an algorithm that will result in the best answers receiving the most votes is nigh impossible when your site has a limited number of users. Quora’s buzz is not built on its ability to do this, but rather the high-profile/knowledgeable people who have posted memorable answers to some of its questions. I agree completely with Vivek Wadha, who wrote:

I think that Quora will continue to be an excellent resource if the same people who have been hyping it, and who have invested in it, keep posting their thoughtful answers. But I believe that the excess hype is destined to make Quora a victim of its own press. The quality of answers will decline. The people whose opinion I value, such as Quora’s #1 respondent, Robert Scoble, will simply stop posting on the site when they get drowned out by the noise from the masses. They will turn away after having their posts voted down (so that they look less important than their peers) and being personally subjected to the types of mindless, anonymous attacks that you see in the comments section of TechCrunch.

Not to say that there aren’t many other smart people who will post good answers. But when there are hundreds of answers to a given question, by people you have never heard of (often with fictitious names), how will you separate the wheat from the chaff? And how will you distinguish fact from fiction? You certainly can’t trust the rankings of the respondents when these rankings are themselves generated by Quora users.

Let me draw new lessons from these analyses: In order for a site such as Quora to truly become useful, it must either 1) embrace its niche status and nurture its fledgling community (with the hierarchy that that entails), or 2) it must go mainstream enough that it can fulfill its vision of a truly crowdsourced, useful resource.

Let me expand on each of these. What I mean by embracing its niche is to say that when you have the relatively limited number of users that Quora does, naturally, some users will rise to the top due to their pre-existing influence or the consistent quality of their answers. It is possible to embrace this. Other crowdsourcing sites give special privileges (e.g. adminstrator status, “top user” status) to those who are most active, or who provide the highest-quality material. Likewise, if Quora’s top users begin to constitute an online oligarchy, Quora could channel their abilities to continue to improve its site.

Alternatively, if the site really does get enough mainstream adoption, then it could become something akin to the next Wikipedia, where the final product truly is a reflection of what the majority of people think are the best answers. Based on a variety of factors, I don’t see this happening.

[There is a third alternative that I haven’t listed: PeopleRank. If Quora can make its ranking algorithm better than that of any other site, then it has a chance to differentiate itself and truly succeed at its stated goal. It’s a daunting task. We’ll see how they do.]

The above ecosystems are obviously far more complex than I’m making them out to be here, but my point still stands. It is the apex of absurdity that a power user such as Scoble should be scolded for misunderstanding how to use a site such as Quora, especially when that site does not even come close to living up to its own mission. Scoble himself put it best when he wrote the following:

[Quora is] just fine for a QA site, but we already have lots of those and, in fact, the competitors in this space are starting to react. Mahalo just released a new version that has been getting lots of praise and at DLD I met the CEO of Answers.com and he said to expect a major update from his service (which has 1000x more users). Stack Exchange is growing faster than Quora and has many many times more questions and answers, plus I’ve found the answers are broader in reach, and deeper in quality (especially for programmers).

In the face of criticism, Scoble backed down. But it’s really Quora that should be criticized, for not creating a system that was be able to withstand the Robert Scoble Effect.

Steve Jobs: Hope for a Secular World

I really love this essay by Andy Crouch about the hope that Steve Jobs brings to the world. Jobs, you may know, recently took a medical leave of absence for an indefinite period of time. Crouch speculates on what the world would be like if he never returned:

Steve Jobs’s medical leave of absence is the top story in today’s newspapers. The Wall Street Journal says his brief and poignant memo raises “uncertainty over his health and the future of the world’s most valuable technology company.” These two questions—Jobs’s health and Apple’s health—are the focus of almost all the coverage today. But I’m interested in the health of our culture, and what will happen to it when (not if) Steve Jobs departs the stage for the last time.

As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.

Behind the Resignation of NPR News Executive Ellen Weiss

Like many, I was baffled by the strange circumstances surrounding the resignation of Ellen Weiss, a woman who had made her decades-long career at NPR, in the aftermath of the poorly-executed firing of Juan Williams. Paul Farhi has finally unraveled the mystery:

An internal investigation launched by NPR’s board in the wake of the Williams affair broadened into questions about Weiss’s command of the newsroom. While several employees acknowledged her role in building NPR into a radio-news powerhouse and emerging digital-news player, they also questioned her methods.

More than a dozen NPR employees, including some of its well-known hosts, aired long-standing grievances to investigators about Weiss’s management style, particularly the way she had carried out a series of layoffs and terminations in 2008. Weiss’s decision to fire Williams without benefit of a face-to-face meeting sounded familiar to those who recounted similar episodes, according to people who spoke with the investigating team.

More damning was the suggestion – hotly disputed by people close to Weiss – that Weiss had preempted her boss, Schiller, in telling Williams that he had to go.

Good Old Fashioned Detective Work

Mark Bowden’s “The Case of the Vanishing Blond” unfolds like a television police procedural, which is why it’s all the more impressive that it thrills you even in print form:

From the start, it was a bad case. A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her.

And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual.

The Psychological Perils of Solitary Confinement

I had a chance to catch up on a ton of articles while I was on the plane to/from Sundance (see all /Film’s coverage of Sundance here), so some of my postings over the next week or two may be a bit older than usual.

In any case, here’s Atul Gawande’s examination of whether or not solitary confinement is torture. The short answer to that question: probably yes.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of the general population. Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.

There are solutions to this. Take the British approach, for example:

The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills…The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

Of course, the U.S. would never allow such vast sweeping reforms. Our toxic political system paradoxically requires all politicians to be tough on criminals without actually examining the root causes of criminality and negative behavior in prisons. It’s a can’t-miss recipe to continue upon the horrible path we’re on.

Announcing the Chencast

Yesterday, as a mental exercise, I decided to see how long it would take me to buy a domain and set up a brand new podcast available for download in the iTunes music store. The answer? About 90 minutes (and 24 hours from the time I submitted it until the listing appeared in iTunes).

I record a ton of audio blogs with people who I find to be fascinating and articulate. I decided to try to make the best of them them available for download (by hosting them externally), and put them into a format that will be easier for people to consume (by making it available on iTunes). So, The Chencast is born!

This will not be a repository for ALL my audio blogs (which you can still find at my audioboo page). Rather, it will contain conversations at least 15 minutes in length, hopefully with an interesting person who has something interesting to say about something interesting that’s going on in the news, society, and/or culture. Being interesting is the critical factor here, if you can’t tell.

I have no idea what this will end up becoming, how frequent updates will be, or anything about the future of this enterprise. But I do know that the three episodes I’ve already uploaded are worth your time, if nothing else.

Whatever happens, hey, you should subscribe while the getting is good! I have a crappy website up right now, but where it’s really at is in iTunes. You can subscribe to the new podcast in iTunes by clicking here. Enjoy, and feel free to e-mail me to let you know what you think.

P.S. If you really hate iTunes, you can also subscribe to the show via RSS.

Adventures with Julian Assange

If you’re a journalism news junkie like me, you may find Bill Keller’s recounting of The New York Times’ interaction with Julian Assange to be a thrilling read:

The adventure that ensued over the next six months combined the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of handling a vast secret archive with the more mundane feat of sorting, searching and understanding a mountain of data. As if that were not complicated enough, the project also entailed a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian); an international cast of journalists; company lawyers committed to keeping us within the bounds of the law; and an array of government officials who sometimes seemed as if they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to engage us or arrest us. By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something — journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it — had profoundly changed forever.