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technology
understand
That's why there's no adverts on the site now, it's all psychology. That's why there's credits, it's all psychology.
What is the point of Quora credits?
Do we really need them? I have a feeling they will be going away in future iterations...
technologyunderstand
tynamite
Deleted quora user
Ouch — we’re running on a gerbil wheel. Sometimes the truth hurts.
tynamite
Me
That's why you're allowed to ask questions that can be easily answered with Google here, because Quora wants to be the website that can answer every question, and overtake Wikipedia in Google search results. So to do that, it needs to use us, before Quora switches to its ulterior aim and design.That's why there's no adverts on the site now, it's all psychology. That's why there's credits, it's all psychology.
tynamite
Deleted quora user
I agree about the “using us” but at least it’s consensual and the users receive benefits (in addiction to useless credits).
tynamite
Me
The voluntary reviewers love it!
For the Quora admins to have a better metric than followers, to be able to more accurately quantify: the credibility of ones answers, and the scarcity of their knowledge. (We are all animals running in a gerbil wheel. Metrics are being used, to quantify us. Don't be fooled. This is a social networking site.)
Because of this, people with less answers than me (1700), can have more credits than me on average and PeopleRank, provided that their knowledge (answers), includes more scarce information than others. And by scarce, it means answers they give in fields that little others know about, specialist knowledge.
For me, I gain 14.49 credits on average per answer.
For someone with specialist knowledge (scarcity), I would expect someone like Alex K. Chen to have a higher credits per answer, even though he has less answers than me.
And I would expect someone like Jan Brandt to have a higher credits-on-average score, for her scarcity specialist knowledge answers on AOL cds.
Whereas someone who posts shit answers, would have a lower credits-on-average score than me, despite having less answers.
Quora admins using the amount of followers to determine someone's credibility and scarcity, is a bad metric to use, for many, many reasons. So by implementing credits, it solves that problem.
From a user perspective
I joined Quora in 2010 when it was in beta. On people's profiles, there was a Direct Question feature which is now deprecated. It let you ask people questions directly aimed at them, on their profile. You would go to someone's profile to do this. And there was a section on their profile where you could find the direct questions aimed at them.
Most of these questions were unanswered. Quora then fixed this design flaw, by adding Ask To Answer with Credits! Now people have an incentive (carrot) to answer the questions others want them to answer, they never intended or want to answer.
Problem solved!