Quora Raises Questions

3:08 p.m. | Updated Fixed estimated valuation of Quora. An earlier version of the post incorrectly stated Quora had $86 million in financing.

My son is 13 and looking for a great East Coast summer camp. He was thinking maybe he’d investigate a camp where he could learn to program an iPhone app, but still enjoy the traditional, more active camp activities.

Unfortunately, that’s too targeted a question for me to post to my 1.3 million Twitter followers. A friend recommended Quora.com, a crowdsourced question/answer site that, lately, has been getting a lot of buzz (and has an estimated valuation of $86 million).

There’s an unbelievable richness of answers on Quora. Someone asks, “What does [Facebook co-founder] Dustin Moskovitz think of the Facebook movie?” and there’s an answer — from Dustin Moskovitz. Or someone asks if Amazon is working on an Android-based e-reader and there’s an answer (yes) from a programmer who was involved.

But if you’re getting the impression that Quora is, so far, for geeks, you’re right. I created an account — and began a descent into bafflement.

The account sign-up process says that Quora can use your Facebook or Twitter identity to save you time — so why did I have to enter my e-mail address and make up a password anyway?

Then there’s this whole business of “following” people. During the sign-up process, Quora showed me five random friends from Facebook and asked if I wanted to follow them, without explaining what that meant, what the ramifications were or how I could choose anyone else besides those five. Similarly, I was then shown five topics (Television, Fiction and so on) and asked to choose which I wanted to “follow” — no explanation, and no way to specify topics I’d prefer.

(And yes, I’ve been through the Help section. Not a word about what following is all about.)

Then I was in — but I couldn’t find any explanation of what Quora is or how it’s different from Aardvark or Digg or Answerbag.com or Yahoo Answers. There’s a “How do I get started using Quora?” question that you can click, but the answers are baffling from the beginning: “1. Follow some topics that interest you. 2. Browse questions that interest you. 3. Add answers to questions you know about.”

Not a word about what Quora is good for (are opinion-based questions like mine fair game or do they waste other people’s time?) And nothing about how to post a question of your own!

I thought maybe I’d search the existing database of questions and answers. There’s a text box at the top of the screen, but the button at the right end doesn’t say Search. It says Add Question, which is not what I wanted.

Clicking the Ask Question button produces an error message that tells you to search for it first, and then if you don’t see the question you’re asking, click Ask Question a second time. But doing that produced only a series of instructional boxes that specified the proper format for questions.

We won’t even get into the 162 e-mails that Quora sent me in the next hour. Most were “So-and-so is now following you on Quora,” a concept that totally baffled me, since I hadn’t been able to utter a word on Quora. Following my what? I just want to ask a question!

I love crowdsourced answer sites. I’m crazy about Aardvark, and I wrote up several others in a recent Scientific American column. And I see that the technically savvy are having a blast on Quora and learning a lot.

But for now, the only question I have for Quora is, “Why not make this thing easier for normal people to figure out?”