Quora Is Interesting; Self-Important Posters Make It Annoying

Quora's the rapidly growing question-and-answer web platform started by former Facebook executives Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, was a fun place to read and post questions and write and post answers. But of late, as Quora has grown in users (estimated to be about 150 percent for January 2011 alone), some of the posted entries exhibit an annoying self-important pseudo-intellectualism that has grown to such gargantuan proportions the whole of Quora's making sick.

There's no one post that sparked my move toward this view of Quora.  Well, OK, that's not true.  There was one that started off with the rather funny idea that "Social Media Experts" were those who had 25,000 followers, or some such garbage.  In reading the post, which I prefer not to link to or mention in detail, it was obvious the author was trying to say "I'm much better than those people."

Who cares!

As I commented at Quora, I always thought Twitterers like Ashton Kutcher, known as @aplusk with (as of this writing) 6.3 million Twitter followers, were the real social media experts, not someone with 25,000 or whatever followers.

But then the author used that idea to go off on some long-ass rationale of how they think these so-called "Social Media Experts" get to be that way; since I didn't except the initial premise, I thought the whole post was a joke.

But then, as more self-important posts and posters have emerged, and others on Quora have expressed the idea that they have to write "something profound" just to keep pace, my stomach's begun to churn to the point where my personal intestinal Defcon needle is pointed at "HURL!"

Now, it's just plain not fun to read Quora.  My expectations were that the Q and A style would be more helpful and supportive, like that of Linkedin.  But that's not the way Quora is turning.   More and more, we get posters who have to create a dialectic designed to make you think they're smart.

Personally, I could care less.  There's nothing wrong, and everything appealing, about admitting you don't know something and showing some degree of real curiosity.   That's what's so cool about the Sports topics section of Quora.

Sports is the one subject that has no experts, everyone has an opinion, and people who think they're "all that" are always humbled.   Maybe if I stay exclusively in the sports area of Quora, my personal intestinal Defcon needle will move back to normal and I can stop drinking Pepto Bismal.