Question
How do I re-frame a question on Quora?
Answer
I made the following remark in the comments to another Q&A, and Sean Hood asked that I repost it as an answer here. Here goes (with a couple of edits and a bit of expansion).
Interesting conversations usually evolve in response to somewhat misframed questions, and forking a reframe usually kills the discussion. It also has the same problem some open-source software projects have: too much forking spreading the intelligence too thin (it's a social problem, there are good technical reasons to fork things frequently in some cases).
I am actually fairly happy keeping an illegible, somewhat murky stream of reframing going on within the original Q&A itself; all you need is to make the administration somewhat sloppier. Leave a lot more gray areas to be governed by community norms rather than rules for reviewers. Making the governance overly clear makes it more brittle.
You buy more system vitality at the cost of a little sloppiness in responsiveness norms.
Unfortunately there are some reviewers with authori-teh who don't know what it means to steer with a light touch. If they start to dominate, this golden goose will die.
There is a theory of how governance systems that seek too much legibility in what they govern end up imposing an impoverished mental model of a complex reality onto that reality, thereby killing its vitality. It's a Procrustean bed effect. The fable of killing the Golden Goose can be read as an allegory about this idea.
The theory is due to James Scott, in his classic Seeing Like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
Quora must remain somewhat illegible to remain vital and stable. A big part of this is allowing some gray area/slop room for reframing around every question, and wisely deciding when the loss of vitality in one question due to forking a reframe is worth the gains of greater clarity around a new and related question.
One way to achieve this is for reviewers to be chosen partly on the basis of demonstration of such good taste. I understand that right now managing the sheer volume is the priority, and the best sort of reviewer is one willing to just plough through a lot of review decisions, but it would be an excellent idea for the reviewer community to develop an ongoing conversation about legibility and taste.
On a related note, it might be useful to somehow make forking one possible route in the "Suggest Improvements" feature, where some experienced reviewers actually have the authority to force a fork (and move a subset of the answers to the new question) without asking the writer of the answer which is being used to seed the fork. Without such a feature, some great answers (cough!) get downvoted into oblivion.
Interesting conversations usually evolve in response to somewhat misframed questions, and forking a reframe usually kills the discussion. It also has the same problem some open-source software projects have: too much forking spreading the intelligence too thin (it's a social problem, there are good technical reasons to fork things frequently in some cases).
I am actually fairly happy keeping an illegible, somewhat murky stream of reframing going on within the original Q&A itself; all you need is to make the administration somewhat sloppier. Leave a lot more gray areas to be governed by community norms rather than rules for reviewers. Making the governance overly clear makes it more brittle.
You buy more system vitality at the cost of a little sloppiness in responsiveness norms.
Unfortunately there are some reviewers with authori-teh who don't know what it means to steer with a light touch. If they start to dominate, this golden goose will die.
There is a theory of how governance systems that seek too much legibility in what they govern end up imposing an impoverished mental model of a complex reality onto that reality, thereby killing its vitality. It's a Procrustean bed effect. The fable of killing the Golden Goose can be read as an allegory about this idea.
The theory is due to James Scott, in his classic Seeing Like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
Quora must remain somewhat illegible to remain vital and stable. A big part of this is allowing some gray area/slop room for reframing around every question, and wisely deciding when the loss of vitality in one question due to forking a reframe is worth the gains of greater clarity around a new and related question.
One way to achieve this is for reviewers to be chosen partly on the basis of demonstration of such good taste. I understand that right now managing the sheer volume is the priority, and the best sort of reviewer is one willing to just plough through a lot of review decisions, but it would be an excellent idea for the reviewer community to develop an ongoing conversation about legibility and taste.
On a related note, it might be useful to somehow make forking one possible route in the "Suggest Improvements" feature, where some experienced reviewers actually have the authority to force a fork (and move a subset of the answers to the new question) without asking the writer of the answer which is being used to seed the fork. Without such a feature, some great answers (cough!) get downvoted into oblivion.