Quora.com is now being hyped as the next big social media thing — a crowd-sourced version of wiki-answers, combining features of (and integrating with) twitter and Facebook. Someone asks a question to an online community, the members of the community provide a set of answers and then the community vote on which they believe to be the best answer. The winning answers might receive a financial reward. Apparently this technology managed to solve in a matter of weeks some problems that NASA scientists had been working on non-stop for years. But this could also drive out individuality, and tend towards a status quo. As with Wikipedia, dominant personalities are as easily able to dominate online as they are in the real world. Crowds are more likely to value the misguided opinion of some big cheese than a lone voice of sanity. Worryingly, some councils plan to use it to get local people to agree what cuts should be made to budgets. For politicians crowd-sourcing has X-Factor appeal. 20 people vote to cut a local youth club and councillors can say “you wanted Wagner/cuts, you’ve got them.” On the other hand it wouldn’t take much for our unions to organise a unified response to such councils — to intervene and answer “no cuts”. What do other readers think?
