Former Facebook CTO and Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo, talking to Om Malik at GigaOM:

The real reward is in the response to your answer and the fact that millions can read it. You already see more people giving and sharing knowledge for free. Lawyers and other professionals are using Quora to build their reputation and build their bonafides.

I haven’t seen many lawyers on Quora yet, but I’ll start looking for them to see exactly what D’Angelo means . I wonder if some use cases implicate ethics rules.

Susan Wu, on Quora:

All products inherit the values of their creators and have a sort of corresponding ‘morality.’ When you create an algorithm, it’s optimizing for something — it might be that you think “saving time” is a value worth optimizing for. Or it could be that what you’re trying to optimize for is quantity (quantity of access, of distribution), which can often come at the cost of quality and depth of interaction. Or like most of us who are successful Americans, we automatically assume that our stance on individual rights and belief in the individualistic survival of the fittest / the elite will rise are “ideal” or “optimal.”. Another example is our cultural bias towards the “cult of the celebrity.”. And we tend to measure success by economic output.

This is geared toward inhabitants of the Silicon Valley “island” on which so many people become detached from reality, but much of it applies generally to life in a first-world country, as well.