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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

> Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup.

They break all of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high-quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they started getting on my case for not having topic bios, even though other people's were blatantly false, for not responding nicely when their favorites were being dicks in comments, etc. So I just quit cold turkey and haven't posted since. I only go back to read sometimes when I'm super bored, and that's about it.

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I helped write a bunch of Quora's rules and policies, and I also helped create the Top Writer's program. I probably hand selected you in the first two years.

I left Quora in 2014, but your first statement feels very true to me. I can't say what they did after I left, but I saw a clear willingness to have a fuzzy interpretation of the rules for power users.

There was a time when Quora would bend over backwards to have one person from NASA write answers. I felt that wasn't really a great strategy. I always felt it would be much more valuable to have 1000 NASA employees write their best answer, and to find a way to make that happen.

This clearly didn't happen, as the one person from NASA who wrote thousands of answers is still a very active.

Full disclosure: I deleted my entire account, questions (>100), answers (>1000), and edits (>100,000) in rage in around 2015, mainly because I'm immature, but partly because I didn't want Quora to have what I made after I left. Also, I created a new account, because I wanted to feel it out to see how it was now, in case someone comes looking :P

I think it's what they're breaking rules for that makes all the difference. Helping a few writers that pump out amazing content seems to benefit everyone and is worth it if there are tight controls on exactly what's allowed.

Right now the system seems to be breaking rules that hurt writers and readers alike, with no discernible benefit other than creating tons of ad inventory and SEO inbound traffic.

Monetization definitely complicates things. When I was there, there wasn’t any.

Exactly this. I used to love writing long-form answers but they would get shoved out of the way with either meme-filled images, copy/pasted nonsense from the web, or a few writers who have no idea on the subject but have a large following that upvotes everything including joke answers.

There's also seemingly no effort spent on stopping spam even with blatant examples reported many times. It's crazy to see questions get paid thousands while being a Top Writer means I get the opportunity to buy their merchandise.

Thank you for your time there. I end up on Quora quite a bit, at least when searching camparison based queries and the really long answers that cover a subject in (sometimes extreme) depth have been fantastic to read. I have read some answers that outperform StackOverflow, StackExchange, and UnixExchange in terms of quality and detail. I love reading answers from people that have intimate knowledge about a subject and don’t just post sourced images or links to documentation that the question asker didn’t understand the first time they read it (which is usually stated up front).

Granted, most of these posts are early 2017 and earlier.

This. I reported a "famous" author multiple times for violating a bunch of rules and I was retaliated against and my write/update 'privileges' suspended. Well, flunk you too, Quora.

Not to mention, the abundance of dirt quality content and insincere questions (and answers)

Yup I was also a top writer. The site had a lot of potential early on but I had the same experience as you eventually.

Same story. I quit when it became Facebook style with zero useful answers.

Do you know of any good replacement sites? (If you were to answer longform somewhere now, where would it be?)

well... http://stackoverflow.com for programming, and the family of http://stackexchange.com websites for many other fields.

Exactly this, for the past many years, when ever i have needed a good answer to a not-so-common problem, Stack Overflow cuts right to the chase and delivers a useful answer.

Quora's whole model is "like Stack Exchange, but with venture capital for a big IPO".

Everything after the comma explains why Quora is junk.

Quora is (was) open ended and allowed discussions. Most tech questions I have can't be written on stackoverflow. The most stupid one is "what book can I read to learn xxx".

Now they removed descriptions from questions, hide comments by default, so they are heading the same direction.

Stackoverflow is helpful as documentation with examples, but for engineering problems is of no help anymore. I usually have to ask in some dev chats and discuss there

Ask MetaFilter: https://ask.metafilter.com/ It costs $5 to get an account that lets you ask or answer, and they have paid moderation staff that keep answers on-topic and high quality. The signal-to-noise ratio is quite high.

Oo nice, thanks.

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