In just one week, although Quora only has a little over 100,000 users, the number of page views and the number of searches on major search engines have soared to the top ten web pages in the United States.
Not only is Quora being discussed in Silicon Valley, but students in major universities are proud to have Quora accounts.
A large number of American college students have questions and hope that people with Quora accounts around them can help them ask questions on Quora to get answers.
This is like ChatGPT in later generations. ChatGPT is unusable for IPs in mainland China. Although everyone is discussing this new thing, there are still only a few people who have actually used it.
This has also created a business opportunity, which is to help you ask questions to ChatGPT, and the fee for asking questions is not cheap.
You can still use TikTok without using ChatGPT. There are many alternative entertainment options. As for using ChatGPT as a productivity tool, using someone else’s account is inconvenient and involves leaking your personal privacy.
Because ChatGPT conversations will be saved in the account. If you finish a conversation with someone else's account and then delete it every time, you will have to exercise ChatGPT again, which is very inconvenient.
But today, when there is a lack of Internet entertainment, and there is no Facebook, no Instagram, and no YouTube, college students feel as uncomfortable as having ants crawling on them if they cannot play Quora.
Everyone is already dissatisfied with Zhou Xin’s threshold. The threshold in the Riot Games community can be solved by buying the cheapest game, which is only 10 US dollars. This is a trivial matter for users who can afford a computer. Please bear with it. Tolerance is over.
You can't buy a Quora account with any money. Even if you go to Ebay to buy a verification code transferred by someone else, it starts at $50. Not everyone can afford this price.
So much so that everyone launched a "We need Quora" campaign on major forums to show their dissatisfaction with Quora's high registration threshold.
Quora has the influence among college students through Larry Sanger, and has sent some verification codes to college students, but the number is very small.
Each university is allocated less than two hundred registration verification codes.
The voice of potential users is so high, which is a sweet trouble for any Internet company.
It's just that the speed of the spread is too fast, which is inconsistent with Zhou Xin's original business plan.
"Newman, the question we need to think about now is whether we should follow the previous pace or relax the restrictions on user registration."
There are only three people in the management of Quora: Zhou Xin, Jimmy and Larry Sanger. Zhou Xin is responsible for strategic planning, Jimmy is responsible for specific management, and Larry Sanger is responsible for product operations.
When the two joined Quora, they brought the entire Nupedia employees with them, which was equivalent to Quora acquiring Nupedia.
Zhou Xin gave them a total of 10% of the shares.
Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wells have seen this scene before. Their friends are looking for verification codes to register their accounts. You can see posts asking for Quora registration verification codes in any online forum.
When we started Nupedia before, we didn’t even have a thousand users.
Now it only has 100,000 users, but it has suddenly reached tens of millions of users.
For example, there are only 100 people subscribing at the beginning, but each chapter can have 1,000 messages.
Although they all have entrepreneurial experience, they have no experience in becoming popular. Larry Sanger believes that he needs to discuss the operation of Quora with Zhou Xinlai.
They don't have experience, Zhou Xin does, and Zhou Xin can't be more experienced when he makes one product after another and it becomes a hit.
Zhou Xin did not speak immediately, but paused for a moment to organize the words in his brain: "We can discuss what we should do based on the situation.
First of all, user suggestions are only for reference. We cannot be interrupted by user suggestions.
Secondly, regarding whether to release restrictions on user registration, I think there are several options.
The first is to directly open the user registration limit, and any user can register. The advantage of this is that we will quickly acquire a large number of users, easily exceeding one million, or even tens of millions. The problem is that as the number of users increases, management becomes more difficult.
We need users to register with their real names and manage their responses. Now we can manage the scale of 100,000 users. After one million users, the management difficulty will increase exponentially.
Moreover, the surge in the number of users will bring about a rapid decline in the quality of answers.
Now when a question is raised, at least five of the first ten responders truly understand the question and can give valuable answers.
Once registration is open, after a question is asked, it may only get a valuable answer from the first fifty respondents. The other answers will either have limited value or answer the question.
Similarly, after the number of users increases, the proportion of users with sufficient judgment will decrease. The answer with the highest number of approvals may not necessarily be a truly valuable answer. It may be that his answer is in line with the psychology of more individuals.
For example, regarding political views, after opening registration, extreme views will gain more approval.
Simply put, completely opening up user registration restrictions will lead to a decline in the quality of the Q&A community. If Harvard recruits all college students, its reputation will decline. It cannot guarantee that every graduate's level is above a certain level. "
Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wells were quickly convinced, because the online encyclopedia they had built before, Nupedia, was a purely academic online encyclopedia, and editors had to have at least a Ph.D.
They naturally agree with this elite community’s approach of raising the bar.
Before chatting with Zhou Xin, they were originally worried that Zhou Xin would not be able to withstand the temptation and would be coerced by public opinion and open up user registration on a large scale.
As a result, Zhou Xin thought about this matter more deeply than the two of them.
Zhou Xin considered many points that they had not considered.
Jimmy Wells and Larry Sanger looked at each other, and they both knew what the other was thinking: Newman was indeed Newman.
Jimmy Wells also had questions: "Then if we don't open up user registration rights on a large scale, what will happen to other knowledge question and answer communities that copy our model and use this wave of craze to attract these users away?"
This is also a question that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and even entrepreneurs in all industries, need to think about, that is, how do you maintain your advantage in the face of homogeneous competition.
Larry Sanger shared this concern.
This is a typical mentality of wanting to be both a prostitute and a prostitute. I don’t want to open registration rights to all users, and I don’t want users to go to similar question and answer communities to enjoy similar services.
Zhou Xin asked rhetorically: “If we liberalize user registration, can other Internet companies stop developing knowledge question and answer communities?
In other words, will other companies not compete directly with us because we have a large number of users?
Many times, slow is fast. "
