Were people ever in Quora? Isn't it one more of those 'free' sites that exploit the free labor of random people to sell questionable content? I don't get how someone can get so attached to his own image that considers himself to be part of a company that he s clearly not a part of.
Then it gradually degrades (maybe the pressure of putting ads on to make money), the quality has gone downhill dramatically. It's been a few years, I have no longer considered answers from Quora as worthy.
It’s something that had a lot of potential, but like so many other things it fell victim to the quest for profit and engagement.
> Answering questions also can make you feel smart.
Not so much. Though, when I read answers that I wrote years ago, I think my past self was a lot smarter than my present self.
I’d also view Wikipedia and Stack Exchange with their GFDL and Creative Commons licenses as being the textual equivalents of the FOSS world. Both are projects that I’ve benefited a lot from so it’s nice to be able to give something back.
I was trawling back through my Stack Overflow answers which go all the way back to the closed beta. Some of them I looked at and thought "am I getting old or stupid, past me seems super decent at this stuff". I wondered if it was just me but it's a relief to know someone else has these feelings.
I was somewhat active for a while writing answers, but every time I wanted to ask a question the algorithm "forced" me to generalize it more and more to the point where I'm no longer interested in the answer. And I also felt the same with the questions Quora wanted me to answer.
I've stopped using Quora because of that move, too. I remember it was actually done in two parts - first they limited the context (to something like 300 characters, I think), then entirely removed it. Sigh.
The new anti-feature of blending different questions/answer is... one of the worst functionalities I've ever experienced. I guess they're trying to focus on the addict/timewasting audience at the expense of the more balanced one.
It briefly had hn like quality to it.
Then they got acquired (I think) stuck a login wall in front of it and the spark died.
The problem was that quora paid people to flood the site with "quality" questions they didn't really care about the answer to. So the other people were often an illusion.