Quara has announced that users can now spend their credit to promote their content. Spending credits will allow users to broadcast to a larger audience. If it ia a promoted item it will appear with a special icon on the reader’s screens. So if you have something important to share, or a burning question, you can spend some credits and get your word out to a larger audience.

If you haven’t used Quara before here’s a discretion of what they do from the Quara blog site:

“Unlike traditional social networks, Quora gives you access to people who haven’t explicitly opted in to follow or friend you. This makes the product powerful, but it means that one person’s actions can affect many other people. Credits mediate the flow of information so that people aren’t overwhelmed by the increasingly vast number of other people who have access to them. This allows us to continue to build features that let you access large audiences and diverse groups of experts, and furthers our goal of connecting you with everything you want to know about.”

The whole system of currency is based on your reputation. If you answer questions with clear articulate and knowledgable answers you earn credit. If simply mock people and provide no insight or clarification, your reputation will suffer and you will earn very little. I guess it’s social capital at its very finest. Anyhow, it costs capital to post questions and now, to promote questions to larger audiences. But, if it’s a subject or question that you really need addressed, it must be worth it.

Here are some responses from users on the blog site about the addition of ‘pay for promotion’ at Quora:

“One tiny thing you might wanna consider: if you’re requiring an expenditure of 50 credits to ask a question, perhaps make the slider cap out so the user is left with 50 credits.”

Awesome. Thanks, Adam, for the announcement and a big thanks to the Team’s tireless efforts to make Quora a better place.

“I think this is awesome. Promoting an answer has already got me two upvotes out of the blue. My only concern is that even at 100 credits, that would mean I need 10 upvotes to recuperate my costs and that’s a high number of upvotes for the average answer.”

“It’s gambling. Spend some to promote a question with the hope or either getting more answers or upvotes. For those that want to play and really enjoy tracking the credits it’s a great feature. It’s going to change the nature of Quora more.”

“I’m just a little worried that good questions from new (ie not power or “celebrity”) users will get buried by the whole commodity market of credits, and people with influence (ie people with lots and lots of credits) will be able to pack user feeds with posts and questions which are more relevant to them than to everyone else.”

“Wow, 50 Credit cost to ask a question is HUGE! My gut reaction is that it will do a LOT to improve question quality on the site, as well as help reinforce the idea of questions being reusable.”

So it sounds like people are generally excited about the addition of the new feature, but there is some concern too. I haven’t used Quora so I wonder if this new ‘pay for promotion’ could drown out some highly relevant or interesting topics or questions. If the whole point is gaining exposure to get feedback or answers, how does a new user gain enough clout, or credit to even make using Quora worth while? I would really be interested to know. I guess I should use Quora to find out.