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Comment by celdon25 | Hacker News Reader

I'm very disappointed with how Quora turned out. It seemed to be on a strong trajectory a few years ago, but has now devolved into Yahoo Answers 2.0. There are still good answers here and there.

But there are far, far more answers that look like this (with an alarmingly high number of upvotes):

> "I read a study once that said <insert thing> was bad for you. <couple sentences of possibly made up statistics>. Unfortunately, I forgot where I read it, or I'd post it here, sorry!"

I feel like if it were not one of the Silicon Valley TechBro™ companies, Google would have already de-ranked results from this site to the second page by now.

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If X, can Y happen?

Normal human: Yes, usually because X leads to these conditions which make Y more likely. This lead to these interesting effects like Y1, Y2. These have to be dealt with with rules like A, B, C.

Quoran: Let me tell you a story. I grew up in Jakarta, where, each day, I waited for a mango truck to hit a rut in the road with a puddle. I got cancer. [5,000 words later] X is the cancer, Y is the mango. Therefore I always learned to respect puddles.

I'm amazed at how many people speak nonsense with seeming authority, with bad or unread or irrelevant sources and credentials that are either fake or maybe just don't mean much. Yahoo Answers was clearly just random people answering your questions. Quora is full of people pretending to be experts giving perniciously wrong answers that sound authoritative. That's far more dangerous, in my opinion. When your girlfriend's friend recommends you a crank cure, or your cousin who was in jail once tells you that you can't sue for damages, you're more skeptical of the claims. When that person calls themselves a doctor, or suggests they're a legal expert, but really they're a poorly trained nutritionist or LEO at best and not true experts, then people get seriously fucked over.

Makes me wonder if there's a market for a Quora like site where credentials are manually verified by staff.

There are subreddits that are more specific that operate in that market, such as r/askscience and r/askhistorians. In these subreddits, anyone can ask questions, but answers are given by people whose credentials is added as flair.

They did a bit of a bait-and-switch. They started with paying high-profile people to be there, and moderating hard, then the floodgates got opened, and what happens everywhere that loses exclusivity happened; everybody decent got bored or fed up and left, and it turns into idiots arguing back and forth.

Almost every single answer there now is some sort of /r/thathappened story of someone telling about how they were either:

A) Smarter than someone else B) More Generous than others

It really just feels like people awkwardly trying to humblebrag but without the humble.

Many great writers left but they still have lots of valuable content. It's just hidden inside the crap that grows when opening a user-content site to the entire world.

As usual in these environments, the quality of the content you see is directly related to who you follow.

I'm also disappointed with the sharp decline in quality of the answers. Another thing I've noticed is an increase in clickbaity pictures in answers, specially of scantily clad women.

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