Quora now officially embraces reviews, letting users include star-ratings with their responses

Quora is bringing a new kind of content to its Q&A platform today, in the form of reviews.

If you’re a regular user of Quora, you’ll have noticed that many of the existing Q&A pages already involve reviews, but by officially embracing a review-based structure, Quora is making it easier to surface these responses through categorization.

Launched to the public in June 2010, Quora aggregates questions and answers around topics, with users collaborating through editing questions and suggesting edits to existing answers. Now, users will be able to follow a new ‘Reviews’ topic, and means they can now include a ‘star’ rating when they respond to a question.

This is a significant new direction for Quora, which will see it go up against the myriad of existing online user-generated review sites, such as Yelp or IMDb. Compared to the existing set-up, which makes it difficult to find reviews because of the inherent language variables across its user base (“Should I watch House of Cards”, “Is House of Cards any Good”), this will make it much easier for users to identify aggregated opinions on movies, music, shops…and everything in between.

Quora says that readers will know the real identity of the writer and thus will be able to assess the writer’s expertise. While any topic can receive a star-rating review, they will be subject to certain moderation policies. If a review page does not already exist for a specific topic, users can request and create the review page themselves, and only one review page can exist per topic.

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