"people dont use quora any more, why are you lying to everyone?" ~ Kylie Kendall
Bwahahahahaha!!
In response to this tweet by @Slate.
We're all dying to know how Quora could fire a man as handsome as Charlie Cheever:
You want to know why Quora fired Charlie?
Or you want to know what Quora is planning on doing next?
It's unclear that Charlie was let go. Perhaps he quit.
It's also unclear if Quora itself wants to be mainstream, or wants to be something that just a few of us use.
It's not completely clear that he was fired, but I believe the evidence suggests that he was.
He's not a prodigious tweeter, but why has he been quiet since the day he was fired? If his termination was voluntary and amicable, why no announcements about what happened and where he plans to go?
Why has he not answered any of the burning questions on Quora regarding his termination of employment?
Why did D'Angelo give that stiff public relations-y answer about how "we decided it was best"? Why not "Charlie became interested in another project and decided that Quora is now established enough to continue without him, allowing him to pursue this new avenue of self-fulfillment yadda yadda yadda."
Why is no one from Quora saying anything right now? Other than a few vague things about how weird things are now?
And why the hell is D'Angelo's twitter account protected?
From Semil Shah's Quora post on Charlie's mysterious termination of employment:
Thank you, Charlie, for helping create what is one of the most important properties on the web.
I wonder what he thinks of reddit, which I guess gets 100X the traffic Quora does. That's 2 orders of 10X awesomeness!
Not sure what Semil thinks of Reddit. Will ask him.
Meanwhile, back at Quora, anonymous says:
My intial assumption was that Cheever had a different vision about how to address the problems Quora is facing and how to recreate the vibrant and active community Quora had in beta. Once a company is established and dominant cliques form, there is very little a company can do change its culture. If Cheever had chosen this battle, he would have surely lost.
However, a source close to the Quora/Facebook/Exeter engineering clique made a comment which was both shocking and disheartening. He said that part of the reason Cheever left was because he was giving push back over the Scala rewrite of the Quora backend. Cheever was leaving and Albert Sheu was taking over Quora internal infrastructure.
If Cheever left over a Scala debate, that's really sad.
I did look up the aforementioned Slate article and found this wonderful question:
What's the most spectacular fan fiction you can come up with as to why Charlie Cheever is leaving Quora?
Good times.
I like Reddit. I don't think of it as anything related to Quora. Reddit is definitely a very important site and community. I don't spend much time on there but have in the past.
Interesting.
Quora could disappear from the Web, and only a small number of people would notice.
If Reddit disappeared from the Web, there would be mass riots...