The Sudden, Mysterious Exit Of A Quora Cofounder Has Silicon Valley Baffled
<i>We still have ridiculously high engagement rate for 8% of our users, but that number hasn't gone up and nothing else we've done has managed to move the needle to get further users hooked.</i><p>This leads me to think: does the needle really have to go up? According to pg's latest awesome essay on growth, the answer seems to be <i>yes</i>. But as the hacker news site has shown, <i>no</i> can also be a valid answer. pg's goal with hacker news is to keep a high quality of discussion, and not to grow the site to more users.<p>As you bring in more users, you are bound to reduce engagement of existing users; this is justified if the growth is an order of magnitude higher (eg. when Facebook went from ivy leagues to colleges to high school to public). But for a site like Quora, I doubt if growth at the cost of pissing off existing users is justified at all.