Connect with Top Minds in Your Field on Quora.com Spaces

The website Quora.com is in the process of adding features enabling maintainers of Spaces, or collaborative blogs, to make money. As a founder and maintainer of popular Quora Spaces, I realize many people outside and even inside the Quora community do not know what Spaces are, what can uniquely be done with them, and why to use them. This post is intended to clear up the mystery.

Spaces are forums where a curated community can write and share information about a specific topic. I started and maintain several popular Quora Spaces. Some of my Spaces have over a million views, and one has hundreds of thousands of followers. If you want a primer on how to write for Spaces, you can check out my tutorial in the Medium publication Better Marketing.

Why Spaces?

Quora Spaces are for people who would like to continue learning about specific topics while connecting with a community of knowledgeable and interested people. They are similar in many ways to Medium publications. However, providing content, sharing it, and discussing it is much easier. On Quora, Spaces enable much closer interpersonal interaction than the other feature of questions and answers. The Quora community includes many high-level professionals and other experts. Quora Spaces is a tool for users to interact more closely with these people. To give a few examples of who I frequently interact with, in some of the topics I write about:

• Members of the technology community include angel investor and “Patriarch of Silicon Alley” David Rose, investor and G3 Systems CEO Gordon Miller, Salesforce.com senior director David Seidman, Open Source-enthusiastic Verizon senior director Gil Yehuda, consulting superstar Tom Nault, Google senior engineer Michael Safyan, GE senior engineer-designer prominent in the Providence technology community Aaron Martin-Colby, and countless others. Quora has a particularly high concentration of technology intelligentsia.
• Noted professional writers include New York Times #1 bestselling author Mercedes Lackey and New York Times Notable author C.S. Friedman.
• Noted Israel-Palestine peace activists include Gush Shalom cofounder Adam Keller and Federation Movement co-chair Emanuel Shahaf.
• Noted biologists include Holly Root-Gutteridge, who does very interesting research about dog communication at the University of Lincoln.

They tend to be very accessible if you write respectful comments that shed insight on their answers and posts, especially those they have written or shared recently. Few other platforms enable such close, organic contact with experts of this caliber.

Quora is especially good for people who have or want to gain high-level expertise in several traditional disciplines. It’s possible to maintain Spaces about multiple topics, significantly contributing to each topic.

For example, my background in zoology as well as Judaism enables me to draw comparisons between the power dynamics of spotted hyena clans and Israel-Palestine, both topics in which I maintain popular Spaces. These days I spend a lot of time on Quora making these comparisons, presenting what I consider the best solution to Israel-Palestine — sensitive centrism leading to a maximally cooperative, minimally conflicting synthesis of Israeli and Palestinian positions. I often discuss how gentle and cooperative leaders can build the alliances needed to gain power, as the especially friendly and non-aggressive hyena Waffles did when she rose to the alpha position of North Clan in the Masai Mara. If you want to learn more, here is how I became interested in the Israel-Palestine topic and ended up starting the peace Space.

Traditional scholarship has a very different dynamic from Quora. It is rare for people to fuse disciplines as far-flung as animal behavior, religion, and politics. Also, even though spotted (laughing) hyenas are highly intelligent animals with complex societies, the sound-byte of being compared to laughing hyenas is usually taken as an insult. By presenting myself as the hyena — one of the gentlest Middle Eastern Quorans, as Waffles was just about the gentlest member of North Clan, and a forceful advocate on animal Quora for hyena reputations — I can leverage the long-form, interdisciplinary, community-based nature of Quora to hopefully avoid this issue. For slowly revealing the analogies, a format naturally suited for the reader to take in something complex and let it sink in is best.

Quora provides this format, allowing me to discuss the geopolitical issue from a unique angle. On Space Unity is Strength, I have built a strong community of people from all over the world, who are focused on solving aspects of this problem. My own story is different from most but is a particularly striking example of the unique properties of communicating through Quora Spaces.

I hope you can try the Spaces feature. Here is a tutorial about the basics.

Exercise 1: Identify two areas you are interested in. Find Spaces in these topics that have recent posts, and follow them. (How to do this is in the above tutorial, “How to Write and Contribute to Spaces on Quora.”)

Exercise 2: Find 3–5 Quorans who write about the topics you identified in the previous exercise, and whose Profiles look especially interesting. Ideally, they should have between a few hundred and several thousand followers and posted recently — these are the Quorans most likely to respond to you. Follow them. Upvote and comment on their answers and posts. Regularly check Quora to see if anything comes back from them.

Exercise 3: Comment on this tutorial, telling us about what you tried and what you found.