I'd argue that Quora by itself is nothing more than a search engine optimization scam.
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'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.
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.
when is the last time you got a "heads up" before an algo change?
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.
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.