The Quora Partner Program Is a Scam
medium.com
medium.com
I'd also have argued the same about Medium half a decade ago. It still is, in my opinion, but the people putting content on it have significantly improved.
I could apply similar reasoning to Medium. I don't like Medium at all, but it obviously houses a bunch of quality content.
Having written a bunch of stuff there, I can't argue that it doesn't have some good content. And I could imagine it being quite profitable eventually, because it is very much built as bait for long-tail search. But the reason I'd call it a scam is that the people who wrote that content are not going to get paid in proportion to the work. Of course, giving the way quality has dropped over the years, it may also end up being a viewer-side scam the way many other search-focused content companies end up being.
Yeah, Quora was useful to me in dark times; it was nice to be able to feel like I could sincerely help a single person. And sometimes those answers helped a lot more than one person. I wrote some things I'm really proud of there. But eventually I felt used and a bit addicted, so I got out.
In retrospect, I'm glad I did. Every time I look it seems sadder, farther from what drew me to it.
Whenever I want to just read an answer it keeps pushing these notifications and asks me to answer questions. It was this aggressive behavior by Quora that made me quit contributing.
I wonder if there is something inherently wrong with online business models that doesn't allow good old sites like Quora to sustain their quality.
GP: I agree. Although I don't accept how Medium forces readers to sign up and subscribe, sometimes there is good content on it.
For content sites, definitely. You get value from reading things relevant to you. But they get paid when they distract you from that and trick you into reading whatever advertisers want. From a short-term revenue perspective, the optimum is just enough content to trick you into visiting the page and staying there long enough to get distracted by an ad that you click on.
This is in contrast to sane businesses, where there's a close correlation between delivering value and getting paid. E.g., a coffeeshop makes money when you buy a cup of coffee, and continues to make money when you like it enough to keep coming back.
It gets ridiculous when it even drops the damn programming language or the database, as if knowing how hibernate works was going to help me with the go mongo driver.
Then I search DuckDuckGo. Its SEO garbage isn't nearly as bad as Google is... yet...
If I don't find anything there then I'll ask real humans: coworkers, slack or discord chats on the topics of the tags, friends, some technical-smart family.
when is the last time you got a "heads up" before an algo change?
Here's what's most likely really going on: - Quora is trying to incentivize searching for answers to genuine curiosities on Quora. To do so, they prod with money. - Quora has rules to identify spammers who are gaming the system. - This person was clearly a spammer who was only interested in making money at the bottom of the barrel and was banned.
Sounds like everything is working fine.
Of course, it will attract malicious actors, if the entity asking questions sends a bunch of bots onto quora to perform ad fraud or however Quora earns money on the asked questions. But Quora will probably never be able to prove the partner was behind the bots.
I'm sure there's plenty of companies that close their eyes to certain categories of specialized spambots or content farmers if they're earning money off of it and it's not malicious. It's only when the advertisers complain that they would start doing something against it.
That is beyond silly.
The author does not in fact admit that he's only interested in the monetary gain, quite the opposite actually: he writes "asking questions became like a sport to me".
Motivation isn't and cannot be a criterium to judge what makes someone a spammer, only the quality of the content.
There's absolutely valid criticism of Quora here on the following points:
- "prodding" people to work for them with promises of money (actually more than just promises, the money was represented as already belonging to them).
- Then, when someone has provided a considerable amount of content for them over the course of a month, banning them without a warning and failing to pay out the promised money.
- Being unwilling to give proof for or even specify what the user was banned for.
It's really not much different from a company hiring someone and promising commission-based payments, and then one day before payday firing them without giving a warning or a reason, and refusing to pay out any commissions for the whole month the person worked for them.
But hey, it's the "sharing economy" now, so that makes it OK!
What the author is doing is gaming the system and taking away the full intent of the hypothetical test/growth strategy. He is doing the equivalent of opening up a merchant account to collect 5% credit card reward cash back and paying 3% in merchant fees to net a 2% difference. Obviously the intent of the credit card company wasn't to get their raw transaction numbers up- it was to incite new and genuine transactions onto their card.
Similarly, Quora, while may want to get their raw numbers of questions up, they wanted to get this goal achieved while preserving the integrity of their platform via genuine content.
What's silly about that?
Quora offered money for questions, OP provided...questions for money. If they were spam questions, then can him. They quantity is irrelevant unless it was part of the terms of service.
No. What you said was completely nonsensical.
> If they can make the case that prodding with dollars will incite users to come back to the platform to get their genuine questions answered, then this is worth it.
The only case anyone who knows how humans work can make in good faith is that prodding with dollars will incite users to write more questions. They can install other mechanisms to allow only questions that fit some criteria, but "genuine" is a completely idiotic one when you're already paying money.
> What the author is doing is gaming the system and taking away the full intent of the hypothetical test/growth strategy.
No. There is exactly zero indication that he was doing that. He did exactly what their strategy incentivized: he wrote more questions. It's possible that they did not meet some crtieria they want met, but then they need to publish those criteria and tell people that not meeting those is the reason for a ban.
> He is doing the equivalent of opening up a merchant account to collect 5% credit card reward cash back and paying 3% in merchant fees to net a 2% difference. Obviously the intent of the credit card company wasn't to get their raw transaction numbers up- it was to incite new and genuine transactions onto their card.
That meaningless word "genuine" again. The example is also really bad because the credit card company would lose 2% on every transaction anyway - completely independant whether it's "genuine" or not. Not something they're going to do to begin with.
> Similarly, Quora, while may want to get their raw numbers of questions up, they wanted to get this goal achieved while preserving the integrity of their platform via genuine content.
Quora cares jack shit about "genuine", or about "integrity", for that matter. They want to make money via ads. So they're willing to essentially pay $X to get a question that will bring in $X+Y worth of ad views.
And in fact the "partner program" UI looks like that is factored in - there is no fixed value of a question, it seems to vary strongly with the number of views - and that heavily implies that the payouts are actually based on generated ad revenue.
And that makes it extremely scammy to tell someone they've "earned" (the actual wording they use) thousands of dollars for over a month, and then suddenly pull the rug and say "you've banned and we won't pay out the money you earned".
There elephant in the room here is ad clicking fraud. I'm willing to bet that what really happened is that Quora is running some kind of click fraud detection system which determined that ad clicks for the author's questions had some kind of suspicious pattern and flagged him as fraudulent.
Now it's possible that he was running some kind of bot net to click ads on his own questions, in which case he certainly deserves to get banned, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the "genuineness" of the questions, but rather that of the ad clicks.
More likely, it was simply a false positive. And there Quora support really should be more helpful and transparent.
Now Quora would still be fine terminating the partner program with the OP for whatever reason they see fit. What is not okay is that he did not get paid for the questions he asked, because that was the nature of their partnership.
It looks like Quora is trying to avoid paying for a service (questions) they received within a contract (the partner program) they themselves proposed. The term scam does not seem too far fetched.
Ending the partner program when you fail that test might make sense, but quora not paying for the questions they asked for seems unfair, possibly fraudelent. But if Quora wants quality questions to come out of this partner program, they'd better take a good look at their incentives. Maybe reward people only for their 5 best questions every month or so.
As a former Quora Top Writer [1], I'd say Quora's Partner Program is a bad idea. They're substituting an extrinsic reward, money, for intrinsic rewards (like wanting to know the answer to a question). That is proven to reduce quality, originality, and learning. [2] Like all affiliate programs, spam is not a side effect of the program; it's built in. In the POSIWID sense, it's the purpose.
Assuming his screenshot is correct, Quora must have been making plenty of money from him if they were willing to pay him $2k for a month's work. And now they're making even more money, in that they're going to keep the $2k, and all the profitable questions he asked. Plus they also get the feeling of performative virtue that comes with banning the naughty spammer.
In reality, it was always a double bind. They were paying people to do a thing, but not wanting them to act like they were paid to do a thing. And whichever side you fall on, Quora wins and you lose.
But this sort of doublethink pervades Quora. From the get-go, it was supposed to be an elevated discussion, a coming-together of great minds and great writers. But they have been burning something like $20m/year for a decade. That bill was always going to come due. They were always going to have to act a lot more like the grubby, money-motivated properties from which they pretended to be different. Now that they're at the 10-year mark, presumably their many investors are eager for return, so I expect this is just the start of the shenanigans there. And given the number of good writers in the audience, I'm sure we'll hear about it in detail.
[1] Specifically a top writer in 2013 and 2014: https://www.quora.com/profile/William-Pietri
[2] See, e.g., Kohn's Punished by Rewards: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004MYFLDG/
I don't quite understand the program. I would've guessed this program pays people to ANSWER questions, not ask them. Quora has a shortage of questions, but not a shortage of answers? That surprises me, or are people also paid to answer questions as well?
Sometimes asking the interesting question is the hard bit.
If they get lucky, they may also be able to show an ad to somebody who got there via Google with a vaguely similar question. They spent a number of years getting a very good reputation with a "Top Writers" program, attracting people who wrote good answers in exchange for merch (but not cash). That provides a lot of inbound links, and now they're monetizing it.
In fact, I'm not sure why anyone wastes time writing content at all for a business that uses that content to serve ads—at least not without a legally binding contract with clearly described payment obligations.
For some reason quite a few senior people in my field seem to take time to post extremely authoritative answers to questions on Quora. I don't see any other site coming close to the quality.
And while the good answers seem to get upvoted a lot (the ones I see at least, but that's an obvious case of selection bias if there ever was one), but plenty of terrible or even wrong answers seem to get upvoted a lot too.
If the highest quality answers were also the most well compensated, wouldn't that be the ideal situation? If you have a bunch of paid professionals standing by to answer questions then genuinely curious people might come to your platform to ask. I have no data to back this up, that's only intuition.
Most of the question could be easily answered with the first result from Google or are purely opinion based.
Definitely curious what foul play he was accused of.
I hadn't heard them accused of doing so just to avoid paying out. I wouldn't put it past them, though it does seem like Hanlon's razor would apply -- that it's stupidity rather than malice.
In the case of Quora Partners, the program attracts large quantities of very repetitive questions with little guidance on which ones cross the line from merely boring ("Who was the star of movie X?") to unacceptable ("What fruit starts with A/B/C/D...?" "What is 74+1? What is 50-3?...") Even if I knew their questions, I couldn't tell you if they'd find it acceptable.