Some of you will have noticed Quora Compass by Nick Nicholas on Assorted Polls:
Much as the Political Compass tries to simplistically plot peoples’ political orientation, the Quora Compass tries to simplistically plot users’ attitudes towards Quora, on two axes that I find of interest: “Loyalist” vs “Insurgent” (substitute your own epithets), and “Knowledge Repository” vs “Social Media”.
The Quora Compass is simplistic. The current form of the poll is even more simplistic; just two scaled question answers, with much selection bias. It would be nice to workshop something with a few more questions, and I welcome suggestions. But I find the concept interesting, and I will be updating the results of the poll here.
So. The Quora Compass classifies users along two axes. As Jennifer Edeburn formulated the questions,
- Insurgent: Quora has many flaws and really needs to do a lot of work to reduce my frustration with the platform
- Loyalist: Quora is fine, sure there are mistakes made occasionally but I’m sure they have a good reason for everything they do.
- Knowledge Repository: I don’t really feel that it adds value to have a group of users that I comment or exchange with routinely.
- Social media: I value the time spent conversing with my friends about my answers or theirs more highly than I do the time spent reading randomly in the feed or answering questions.
For convenience, I’ll call the last two categories Expertists vs Socialisers.
The Compass is all about the quadrants; and inspired by this:
I will name the quadrants as follows:
- Loyalist Expertist (closest alignment to the goals of Quora): Dogs
- Loyalist Socialiser: Dolphins
- Insurgent Expertist: Bees
- Insurgent Socialiser: Cats
If I were to put caricatures on this chart:
If I were to put Quora friends on the chart, according to their self-nominated scores:
And these are the results of the poll so far. 127 results. [Updated: 2017–04–20]
- Loyalists: 60; Insurgents: 48; Neutral: 19
- Socialisers: 30; Expertists: 66; Neutral: 31
- Loyalist Expertist (closest alignment to the goals of Quora): Dogs: 31
- Loyalist Socialiser: Dolphins: 11
- Insurgent Expertist: Bees: 30
- Insurgent Socialiser: Cats: 13
In first posting:
Fairly even distribution, except that Dolphins are rare: if you are loyal to the aims of Quora as an expert forum, you have confidence in Quora’s moderation policies. But the allegiance to Quora’s aim as an expert forum is more pervasive than the confidence in moderation.
Currently [UPDATE 2017–04–20]: Clearly many more bees and dogs—expertists—than dolphins and cats; since the initial results, cats are as rare as dolphins.