"Quora's philosophy can be summed up as why should the serfs get a share if they were dumb enough to work for free in the first place?"
Different currencies. The owners of Quora are being paid in US dollars, the content creators in both attention and reputation. Both attention and reputation are currencies that will translate to dollars more and more as we progress towards an, in-part, reputation-based economy. With everyone having access to information what will matter will be your curation of that information, and your commentary. The better these are the better your reputation will be in those content areas, and the more your endorsement will be worth (in both reputation and dollars).
"A reputation based economy is what we're moving towards", we should be resistant to that. I think it would be fair to say a "reputation based economy" is a synonym for crony capitalism -- I'll only do business with you if I know you.
This is a socially unfair economy at best, and at worst will generate inequality as social cliques will continue to preserve and enrich themselves and "the people they know". If we're going to move more toward social and economic fairness this isn't the direction to go.
I'm comfortable knowing that Whole Foods takes dollars rather than Klout points or retweets. That way anyone who can make a dollar can eat and not worry about starving because they failed to impress some arbiter of social currency. Reputations aren't fungible hence they are flawed as a just economic currency.
a meritocracy is a resource allocation system and functionally equivalent to an economy for considering your proposition that reputation based systems lead to bad allocations; i'm questioning that proposition.
"progress" towards "reputation-based economy"? wtf is this anyway? Sounds like sucker-economics to me, just like "we don't have a lot of money to pay you right now but this project will be great for your career!". To hell with that.
> Different currencies. The owners of Quora are being paid in US dollars, the content creators in both attention and reputation.
I think this is spot-on. I answered questions on quora for a while, but eventually left once I realized I was getting nothing out of it besides (some) "reputation" on a closed-off website. The reputation (and any associated ego/self-esteem boost) might be enough of a reward for some to justify continuing, though.
> Both attention and reputation are currencies that will translate to dollars more and more as we progress towards an, in-part, reputation-based economy.
I am not sure this is or will be univerally true. It does work for some people, though they seem to be a minority. Not every twitter-celebrity can convert that status into a way to support themselves financially.
@Communitivity, you said "With everyone having access to information what will matter will be your curation of that information, and your commentary". The problem with this view is the curation of the curators that is occuring in our reputation based economy. When popularity is the main arbiter of quality the cult of unfair celebrity runs wild, just like in the non-internet world. You need to assign fairness to content, otherwise its like what rustyconover has said, its just another system of social inequality that benefits only a small minority.
That is an excellent observation. I was in the Open Reputation Management Systems Technical Committe at OASIS. During the initial discussions there we mostly agreed that reputation has to be multidimensional, for exactly that reason. I may have a great reputation in XML, but have credibility in .Net. Popularity is still a concern, but there mechanisms that can mitigate this. For example, a feedback mechanism where the reputation changes of someone feedback into the reputation of people previously voted on that persons reputation. So someone who used a mechanic with a high reputation and down voted him when they found out his reputation was unwarranted would also impact negatively the reputation of the people who gave the mechanic the unwarranted increase in reputation.
Different currencies. The owners of Quora are being paid in US dollars, the content creators in both attention and reputation. Both attention and reputation are currencies that will translate to dollars more and more as we progress towards an, in-part, reputation-based economy. With everyone having access to information what will matter will be your curation of that information, and your commentary. The better these are the better your reputation will be in those content areas, and the more your endorsement will be worth (in both reputation and dollars).