How has your experience on Quora affected your perception of your self?

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I have always had a social media presence, the only questions were whether they were big platforms or tiny ones. Quora was the first platform that was both a) mass market, the biggest of the big, where I could conceivably actually interact with non-Internet celebrities, and b) encouraging of my areas of interest.

The other social network I still contribute to, Hacker News, is big, but not quite mass-market like Quora.

The dynamics of Quora are also interesting. Anybody can ask any question and anybody can answer. This is a pretty interesting dynamic, and I often find myself writing things I’d never have written were it not for the prompting. This answer is precisely one of those.

Quora’s main value for me is as an outlet for my desire to write. I don’t care enough about writing to want to do it even if nothing was pushing me to. But it provides just enough impetus for me to get motivated enough to write something where I wouldn’t have done so before.

And writing is something I’ve found quite valuable over the years. It allows me to operate on the mechanisms of self in a way that nothing else provides. There is nothing more fundamental to self than the concepts and ideas that are being used to organize and inform thought.

Any time I take something seriously enough to write about it, my understanding of it changes. This goes double for ‘hard’ topics.

Quora, by providing impetus and outlet for my writing, is at the very moment fundamental to the my capacity for change in ways that are relevant to others. If it didn’t exist, I would have to recreate it. Like every other technological platform, I’m glad it exists and would be sad if it went away.