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Comment by doggerel404 | Hacker News Reader

But quora is still around and very useful- maybe even more so than during the hype period

I've found Quora to be just full of spam these days. They don't take the problem seriously at all. And they keep trying terrible and spammy incentivization tactics to keep people engaged.

Yeah, I noticed the SEO folks are now trying to game it, making the content even more useless. Self promotion is a huge issue with Quora.

The core "problem" with live audio is that you are drinking straight from the source of information as it is produced. With Quora, there is a ton of drivel or even spam, but that useless content sits around for a while and gets filtered out by some combination of moderation, voting, and search rankings. In contrast, with Clubhouse, you are instead highly reliant on personalities who are building reputation by having a high signal to noise ratio, which doesn't scale once the whole world is involved.

Additionally, the high-value people on the platform are themselves often there because of the other high-value people. If most of the rooms you go to speak in are just filled with a thousand fans, maybe you'd be better off using that tile to talk to your half a million followers on Twitter or Instagram. The experience of a small private club simply doesn't scale.

> you are instead highly reliant on personalities who are building reputation by having a high signal to noise ratio, which doesn't scale once the whole world is involved.

The major problem with any internet community, even moderated ones. It's just too much text, too many people, and no real conversations occur.

You could even see it decades ago on IRC servers, which solidifies my view that it's a fundamental social limitation not a technology problem. Groups always split from the #general channels into their own smaller cliques because once a server grew large enough, even a moderated #general was impossible to communicate in.

Too many people in one space is just not conducive to conversation and you also no longer get the self-moderation of pseudo social connections. Since there's no real conversations occurring in #general/any busy chat, it's just lots of, there's less need for people to care about what they say in regards to it's implication on others.

The absolute extreme of this phenomenon is a busy twitch chat, which is a sight to behold.

What kind of useful answers can be found on Quora these days?

Mainly articulate opinions on various questions that are open ended. "What regrets do you have?", that kind of thing.

It's actually more useful than that. Even for queries with objective, straightforward answers, if I get a search result with a Wikipedia article and a quora answer I almost always go with quora. The Wikipedia result is an article written by a faceless group of people and there's no way for me to gauge the quality other than included references (which are very hit and miss on a good number of articles). The quora result is a variety of answers from a bunch of people with real names attached (in most cases). I can pick which answer I think feels more authoritative or detailed, or mix and match answers. I think having a real name behind the answer and each answer not just being a mishmash of contributions from anonymous sources results in higher quality answers I can trust (or at least make a decision about what level of trust I want to have in the answer which is very helpful when you're getting answers from the internet). Also having a bunch of answers to compare and contrast instead of just one definitive answer actually helps

Most of the names though are unknown. Unless it is a really famous person, so it is virtually the same thing as wikipedia which actually has proper information compared to Quora.

You are the only person I know about who would choose quora over anything but yahoo answers.

I use it for just about everything. In fact if I could limit my google search answers to just quora, stackoverflow and reddit I would be satisfied.

Quora has much more staying power than Clubhouse, which was a novelty even in its honeymoon period.

Interesting.

    site:quora.com OR site:stackoverflow.com search query

results in mostly one or the other winning on Google. However, they are the only ones who show up in the results.

When you are doing an assignment for school that could be answered in 10 words but the teacher has placed a 500 words lower limit for it

This describes so much of the content on the web nowadays and it’s just exhausting.

I thought I was the weird one with my ultra-succinct communication but I now know the endless walls of text reflect the corrupting effect of needing to please search engines.

That explains a lot of the crap I see. Google something very specific like how to setup a testing library? You'll get an article from dev.to with a 3000 word wall of text containing not only a verbose description of what is unit testing and why you should unit test, but also the author's life story and maybe a recipe for mojitos

The actual content was a couple of shell commands and like 3 lines of JSON

Worse still are those auto generated spam sites that have an FAQ index on the top of the page looking like a Wiki but are actually just empty content pulled in from multiple sources.

Man, where the hell did those come from? All of a sudden in the past few months they are all over my DDG search results.

The sky is blue. Why is the sky blue? Philosophers have wondered for millennia about the hue of the firmament. Some say that…

Luckily we have GPT-3 now...

I would love to use GPT-3 in reverse, to convert search results into the 30 words that actually answer my query.

Just an hour ago, I was looking for beaches in Florida - Quora provided some great answers for me

I find Reddit to be much more useful these days when searching for answers.

I agree that Quora is still around.

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