Or more like the next thing i think we need. TL;DR Quora needs more conclusions and less opinions One of biggest accomplishments of the internet has been Wikipedia. Apart from some cool stats that highlight how much it is used, Wikipedia stands out because

(1) It’s free

Absolutely free, it’s not ad supported kind of free. It has a singular purpose to make the collective knowledge of humanity accessible to all and it doesn’t rely on monetization and instead straight out asks for donations.

(2) It was written for free

Yup, some kind humans just got down and decided to write detailed articles on a humongous variety of topics for no reward or recognition whatsoever. This story tells us something great. 1. There is hope for companies who don’t want to use ads to keep themselves afloat 2. People will do amazing things for free Ok, till now i’ve actually been praising Wikipedia, what happened to “the next thing we need” i was going to speak about Wikipedia is a organized collections of facts. The blogosphere is a disorganized of collection of  … well everything. Being a free form platform for expressing anything, blogs have seen the outpouring of human expression like nothing before.  Facebook, twitter, etc. too could be called blogs mixed with networks (networks based on social connections, personal interests, etc.) We’ve got everything on the blogosphere from angry teenagers venting to beautiful poems to scientific and technical literature. The subset of the knowledge that went into making Wikipedia was facts, the other subset that we need to grow and expose more broadly is the subset of opinions. What is the best way to shave a beard?  Most fun way to travel for London to Paris? Hottest startups in India? Best places to purchase electronics component in China? What are pros and cons of Russia invading Crimea? All of the above questions do not lend themselves directly to an encyclopedic expression, they’re subjective. The hotness of a startup isn’t something that can be measured by putting a thermometer into the mouth of its founders. Also whats hot for you may not be so for me. What we need is an aggregation of the hive mind, a Wikipedia of conclusions. Something that bridges the gap between thousands of disorganized opinions to an aggregated answer. The magic of blogs was that they unleashed knowledge locked up in peoples minds and put them on the common platform called the internet. With a simple search you were able to find some really insightful posts about any topic. This misses out on the most magical aspect of the internet: collaboration. Collaborating, we produce something that is greater that the sum of its parts.  The whole open source software has been about collaboration via the internet. I build something, you build something on top of that, ad infinitium. We’ve done it for facts, we’ve done it for code, we can do it for opinions/the tough (and not so tough) questions that we face. Sidenote: Quora is probably the best suited platform to do this. But it’s focus on user growth as opposed to quality of collaborative knowledge growth has ruined the experience for many to its users.