We humans love getting ‘rewards’ — a feature Quora built
Sometime back I read an article “Why starbucks spells your name wrong”, the conclusion was to reward their customers without spending a penny.
A similar phenonmenon I recently obsereved with Quora; their feed has been gone under many changes.
First Version : It was endless, one woud keep scrolling down and newer questions would keep coming.
Second Vesion : There came a smaller change, where in they limited the number of questions that appeared in your feed i.e. there was an intermediate break point with a “Load More” call to action to continue with the not ending questions
When I was newbie to Quora, initially it was astonishing fact to see numerous questions and their elaborative answers; a good source to gain knowledge. Slowly it was a bit frustrating that the questions never end, hard to keep track of time that I spend on the site.
There was definitely a work around; remembering the first question in your feed, so that you know that you have read all the new questions that have been added to your feed.
Current Version : Quora now maintains a record when you last accessed the site and what was the last question (point) you left off and marks them in your feed.
Not just the last instance you checked, but the complete history when you opened Quora for reading new questions.
IMO, this is a subtle feature that they have added that not only rewards the reader ( I get a feeling of satisfaction of reading all the questions since my last visit ) but also let user be free of remembering the last question they read to keep track
Quora might have thought of this as a feature, considering the increase of number of question being added to their system. But the way I see it, they are gaming with the reward system in a similar fashion Starbucks did it.
