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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is why Quora would be auto-generating an answer for this question in the first place.

The theory in the tweet that it's about identifying a frequent query doesn't really explain anything: the question already had two answers written by humans years ago, there was no need for them to come up with additional answers.

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Quora is already a dumpster fire. Everytime I go to quora from Google, I see the question at the top, but then right below it I see answers for different questions. You have to scroll past those, past a block of ads, past a sponsored answer (to another unrelated question), just to get to the answer, which itself is an confidently incorrect human that is just peddling their own website for SEO juice, and it is truncated at 2 lines, which means you need to click "read more" which spawns an additional set of ads that you need to scroll past to read lines 3 and 4 of the question.

I visited a link this week and saw ChatGPT as the top result and I thought the same thing. Is Quora signaling to me that you are better off not asking our community for questions, just throw it to the AI gods and good luck. Oh and look at these 3,000 ads and take these 209 cookies before you go.

Luckily I search with Kagi now, so I told it to just never give me search results with Quora in it. I'd prefer not knowing that dumpster fire of a website still exists.

I don't even ever clickthrough to Quora anymore. It's useless, you never get the answers to the question unless you login, and even then it shows only one or two answers and bombards you with other unrelated questions.

Agreed, there was only a narrow period a long time ago where Quora was usable and useful. It's been a domain I've skipped visiting in search results for maybe 10 years now.

> past a sponsored answer (to another unrelated question)

I bet you're wondering "How much money did Oprah make when she sold her Gustav Klimt painting for $150 million?" Well let me tell you, there's a brand new startup which let's you invest in this previously exclusive asset class.

<< Read More... >>>

Yikes! Applying "all related" answers to the original question is mostly nonsense unless you're lucky.

Quora’s CEO is on OpenAI’s board.

I wasn't surprised then...

It’s like if StackOverflow automatically added a link to lmgtfy to every new question. If people wanted ChatGPT’s answer they’d just go to ChatGPT or Bing.

Best way to lure VCs in their natural habitat and trap them.

I don't use Quora much, but this widget has been at the top of every page I think.

Quora never renders correctly for me. So I never click it.

It seems like a common occurrence for me to google some slightly obscure question and not see any directly relevant search results except a Quora link (usually the other results have my keywords but don't answer the specific question). When I click on the Quora link, I'll find that someone else has asked my exact question but there are no answers. I appreciate the ChatGPT answer because my next step would probably be ChatGPT and it saves me a few clicks.

(Based on the other comment, now I wonder if I just didn't find the human answers due to bad UI.)

Right, a case where there are no human answers (or no good ones) is one where it at least makes local sense for Quora to put in an AI generated response. I think it is not the right solution globally, but I can see how from their perspective having bad content is better than no content.

But this is them putting AI nonsense before good human answers. It can't be the right choice for any of the stakeholders.

It might be SEO shenanigans, trying to bump a page up in the search rankings with new activity.

And when Quora also shows answers from "related" (but IMO not strictly related to the original question in question) by default, I think these answers are mostly incorrect when being applied to the original question.

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