Does this count?
Or is Quora itself just at a loss for what to say to me lately?
Author: Deano
Deano’s answer to: “What is the longest amount of time you’ve spent answering a question on Quora?”
I've done an hour answer before, then gone to bed, then woken up and realized how much I had missed… Dropped in a second hour. Then, as comments/votes came in, realized it was stupid not to search out some decent pictures, which sometimes had great accompanying text…
Anyway, long story short, with all the little follow-on tweaks and embellishments, my answer to "What is it like to work as a "pusher" in Tokyo's subway system?" probably clocks in at around 5 total hours of thought/research/writing. Which is probably a sad statement about my "skillz".
What is the longest amount of time you've spent answering a question on Quora?
Deano’s answer to: “What is the future roadmap of Quora?”
For posterity, I include this "joke" answer to a question about Quora's future plans… At the time, I was mostly just trying to be funny, but as it turns out this answer proves itself a perfect example of everything that is wrong with Quora: written on May 24th 2011, this answer is the top rated (of two) answer, voted up by 3 other users, but is in constant mortal danger of being collapsed and locked for not taking things seriously enough… Of course, that utterly ignores the fact that the Quora team itself has failed to answer, or even non-answer-answer it since Oct 13, 2010 03:01 PM. 
Deano’s answer to: “Can Quora be customized for companies/organizations?”
As a generalized idea, I'd say that the Q&A + voting + commentary format is a more natural user experience for the majority of corporate workers, when compared to the more general "wiki" experience.
That the latter has been successfully pitched/sold into companies (which often have difficulty making good longterm undirected use of same) is a very good sign that a "Quammer" or "Quorkia" type enterprise edition of Quora could do equally well, especially if combined with various types of dashboards/stats to help surface participants well-respected within their department/across the company (which is otherwise generally only possible anecdotally in most SMB-and-smaller level organizations.
Deano’s answer to: “Should ‘Thanks’ count as an Upvote?”
I think there are several backend ranking metrics for which thanks could be useful… Say as a ratio of "answers to thanks" to help identify reputation/non-spamminess in a given user's contributions on-site. Such a metric could help people skip over initial moderation queues or post per day limits faster, or affect the weighting of their own up/down votes somehow.
As a straight upvote, I'd agree with Vicky Stringer, what's the point? If you can do both separately, there's no need to combine them… And whether it is simply as a gesture, or as a subtle means to suss out high quality participants, Thanks has clear extant or potential use cases that obviate the need for its elimination.
deano.com 