I started using
Quora more intensively a couple months ago, getting hooked by the notifications and credits mechanism (as aptly described by Marc Bodnick [1]). I love using the service, but for one shortcoming.
Right now, the feed I see when going to the home page doesn't surface that many interesting questions and answers. Accessing it on the go from my smartphone when I want to kill 5 minutes often results in a sub-optimal experience, without much interesting content to look at. What's surprising is that, on the other hand, Quora's "top content for you this week" email often gives me content I'm happy to read (about 80% accurate in predicting my centers of interest). Why cannot the same type of filtering be applied to the home feed?
I'm guessing the main reason why my homepage feed isn't very interesting probably is that I am not following enough interesting people / topics / boards for more interesting content to appear into my feed. However, I'm not really sure who to follow, and some of the topics I'm interested in (say, "Sales" or "Startups") seem to have a lot of posting taking place in them. I'd like to avoid subscribing to too much noise.
This would seem to indicate that there's an opportunity to improve discovery of people and topics to follow. I guess that based on whose answers I have upvoted in the past as well as the answers those people have upvoted, there should be ways to identify and surface people and topics that would be interesting for me to follow.
Side note: I see Quora more like Twitter, where people follow others based on their centers of interest, than Facebook, where you're more likely to interact with real-life friends (as outlined by Dustin Curtis [2]). Of all the people Quora automatically suggested I follow when I joined the service, virtually none posts interesting content for me.
[1]
http://www.quora.com/Quora-Addiction/Why-is-Quora-so-addictive/answer/Marc-Bodnick
