Was that not the whole point of the patent-system? That there is an incentive in doing/thinking first?

I disagree that patenting was meant only for the small guys. Patenting was meant to make innovation happen and fast. Simple as that. Social welfare policies are designed for the small guy.

In any case how expensive is it to file a patent, or get a job with the company which has the patent and work with them.

The so called small guy you talk about does not give a damn about innovation. He wants to be the next Steve Jobs.

Let's admit it. Money is important for everyone. Apple, Samsung, Small guy, Big guy. Everyone.

What one can discuss is how to collect taxes from people and deploy that to support indie innovators(if may call them so) who want to fly solo.

> Was that not the whole point of the patent-system? That there is an incentive in doing/thinking first?

No. The point of the patent system was to provide an incentive to documenting your inventions and sharing them with others.

pose your query like a question, also the query should be 4 words long..

Ah, that's probably it. I always use keywords, except when I can't get a hit for the life of me, which rarely happens.

Well, I don't think its about the money. Its a desperate move. Heres my theory on what happened:

Quora was started by an elitist group. They made content policies that were very elitist (similar to HN in a way) emphasizing quality and trained their early adopters to vote only the VERY BEST of content.

They then moved away from the gated status and allowed others to enter their community. The new-comers were however not as qualified to write as the old user base and obviously most of them never got any upvotes for the content they created. So the new users got programmed to believe that up votes are scarce on quora and therefore they themselves stopped up voting on quora.

Well the only problem with this was, up voting also meant sharing. So by training users to not up vote in a way, they cut off their sharing. So now old content stopped circulating and that explains why most people think quora is dead.

To solve the problem of content circulation slowing down, which would heavily impact the discovery of content, Quora first launched a feature called 'Boards' some time back. (Even though this invited comments on how Quora is just copying pinterest). That probably got the engine up and running for some while.

However this still did not fix the problem. I think the most popular board on Quora has something like 5000 followers. Thats it! So the content is still not circulating well.

So then they came up with the Views feature - a feature turned on by default and which would convert every view into a vote and could turn on their content engine back up again.

What people don't get is - The guy who started eHow is an investor at Quora. It has always been about long tail content, getting traffic for long queries on google, content circulation etc...

Quora is not innovative at all, there is no great model there.

Its just eHow done more cleanly.

Except it's written by users, so it's really Yahoo Answers with real names.

eHow is garbage content though. They might target search traffic in the same way but the answers on Quora are actually good. Perhaps thats what you meant by 'cleanly' but I took that to mean design only.