In follow up, I'm now receiving e-mails notifications about people following me on your site!

There are some major identity issues here. Are you a social network? Why am I getting notifications of people following me, which now I must clear, on a site I'm going to for answers on something specific? These social network tactics were fine for Facebook, but people are over it. You need to deliver meaningful relevant content, not spam users with meangless e-mail to attempt to get them to revisit the site.

Way too much Facebook in your Quora, so to speak.

DOES THIS SEEMS REASONABLE:

Send me an email on:

Question-related

Someone answers a question I'm following

Someone edits a question I'm following

Someone edits details of a question I'm following

Someone adds a topic to a question I'm following

Someone removes a topic from a question I'm following

Someone comments on questions I'm following

Someone edits the wiki on questions I'm following

Someone edits the short wiki on questions I'm following

Someone shares a question with me

Someone adds a related question to a question I'm following

Someone redirects a question I'm following

Answer-related

Someone comments on answers I've written

Someone votes on answers I've written

Someone removes my answer

A moderator edits my answerSuggested edits on answers

User-related

System notifications

Personal notifications

Someone starts following me

Someone asks me to answer a question

Someone shares a question with me

Someone makes me an admin

Someone removes me as an admin

An admin changes the status of my account

Someone edits my topic biography

Someone sends me a message

Topic-related

Someone gives me topics to follow

Someone endorses me on a topic

Someone suggests topics to me

Someone edits the name of a topic I'm following

Someone edits the wiki of a topic I'm following

Someone shares a topic with me

Someone merges a topic I'm following

Someone adds an alias to a topic I'm following

Someone removes an alias from a topic I'm following

Someone deletes a topic I'm following

Someone adds back a topic I'm following

SERIOUSLY?

More importantly, how does one delete their account?

Adam:

Site is good, easy to use. Fix your e-mail validator (you can, afterall have a domain name that starts with a number). The facebook only signup thing is a bit of a hiccup (especially with the HN crowd) even with your priors.

As for the site itself, I would recommend ditching this whole "tagging" system. For example:

http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_the_typical_amounts_of_equit...

Having these tags: Compensation, Engineering in Silicon Valley, Salaries, Startup Compensation,Startups, Stock Options, ....

Is just going to be very overwhelming, and if you're letting users define these, it seems you're going to have a big problem with trying to eventually police the content, and thats just an endless can of worms..

How about some term extraction, fancy analysis, and leaving that to automated semantics?

On a side note, some of the main topic landing pages are pretty sensible, easy to use, and well defined. Some of the indexing pages seem to have an awful lot going on...

Mainly, the homepage once you're logged in. Very busy here, not even sure exactly what is going on, and its awfully repetitive..

There also seems to be topics/categories broken down, but no real way to browse them effectively -- although there is a "browse" tab which is really more of a "feed", adding a bit more confusion. It'd be nice to be able to consume these "Topics" in more of a directory type of style.. (eg, being able to look up "Dog Breeds" and seeing a list of breeds to click through/browse leading into the particular Quora for a specific breed itself..)

All in all, I think its an excellent start, but there's a definitive need to establish a much clearer picture of the companies identity.. Is this a new E-How, or is it a Wikipedia? More importantly, how is it really different from either? Right now there is a ton of grey area here for the end user, but hopefully a lot of this will work itself out as the ideas mature.

Best, earle.

EDIT:

Now that I really look at that homepage again (logged in), I really dont like it. There's almost no meanginful content on it -- everything is metadata! This needs to be rethought more in tune with identity/branding of the problem you're trying to solve. I dont think an end user ever wants to see a giant feed of a bunch of meta data if you're delivering a 'really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.' that should translate to content.

""" Follow-up question added to topic Programming. 8:22pm What are the disadvantages of having a degree in Math and working as a programmer? This is a follow-up question to What are advantages of having a degree in Math and working as a programmer?. 2 Answers • Follow • 2 Topics """

This "feed" stuff may work well for your news feed on Facebook, but it doesnt translate well to a Q&A site when I'm typing in something specific and you're dumping a giant list of unrelated meta-data with links all over the place. If someone is looking for advice on their health issue or tax problem, this is going to have to scale -- to potentially millions of questions and billions of answers. This feed and tagging system dumped into a "feed" just ain't going to get it done. This needs to be rethought, to better effectively deliver your stated vision of 'really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.' and that should translate to content thats relevant and easy to find.

Can you send the e-mail address you tried to use to bugs@quora.com? Our validator allows for domains that start with numbers so I think it was rejecting the e-mail based on something else.