Quora and credits

Over this past weekend I started messing with Quora again. I happened to search for a few things on Google and Quora answers kept popping up in the search results. So I decided to revisit the site and see what was up.

I wrote about Quora on this blog over a year ago. At the time, people were asking whether Quora was the future of blogging, to which I responded – in this instance, correctly – that Quora was in fact NOT the future of blogging. But there were aspects of it I enjoyed and I predicted – incorrectly this time – that I would keep using it.

I think I dropped off because once the novelty of asking and answering wore off, I just didn’t see a use to coming back continuously. However, after messing with it over the weekend, I’m intrigued by their Credits system. They describe it on their site as:

Credits make content you care about on Quora more prominent. This prominence can help questions get answered, or get more attention for answers and posts.

You’ll spend credits to add a question, ask someone to answer, or promote content. You’ll earn credits when people vote up your answers or follow your questions.

This credit system actually might make me come back to Quora and start exploring it again. It’s interesting to me that they created a value system that promotes the activity the site is based on (asking and answering questions). They didn’t create useless badges or meaningless levels the way most sites do. And after using the credits system for a few hours over the weekend, I find myself wanting to answer questions to build back up my credits. Already slightly addicting.

So I created two new questions (one for fun, one for real) and then used my credits (somehow I had 500 or something) and promoted my questions to over 200 people. Actually, here’s what I did with the credits:

So we’ll see if people actually answer my questions or not. Should be a good test to see if people are really into the credits system or if its just another gimmick. But my prediction is that its probably a nice tool to increasing the level of engagement on the site. We’ll see if that prediction proves correct ;)