[TheOtherHobbes]

Which is all good, but currently your graphics are defining your brand. And the brand at the moment seems to be selling cutesy niceness for kids and younger teens.

The platform sounds great, with solid potential. But if I found it as an outsider I'd be unlikely to explore it, because as an adult the site doesn't look like it's intended for me.

Personally I've found Quora conversations both interesting and useful. The branding is adult and the comments in my feed have genuinely fresh insights based on experience. There's some random opinionation, but not much, and conversations are rarely adversarial - possibly because they're more like monologues, and everyone gets a turn, and there's little incentive for drive-by commenting or flaming.

The point being that it's not just about moderation, but about the structure of the exchange and the culture. Quora seems to work because - ironically - there's very little direct interaction and challenge. I doubt that's the only way to run a community, but I wonder if it may actually be impossible to have public debates on difficult topics like politics without having to choose between heavy filtering and moderation, or one-sided communities with echo-chamber levels of agreement.

[kwgardner]

Thanks for all the input! We're pretty young and still figuring out how to talk about ourselves and present ourselves to the world, and we'll be refining things as we go.