CancelQuora
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Quora was founded by a bunch of Facebook refugees hoping to replicate the model of attracting a lot of users, [magic], profit. They were particularly intent that [magic] was not going to be "show ads to eyeballs", and they tried lots of other things. Turns out there was a reason none of those other models were in use by anybody else. Some of them were truly horrifically bad (like paying people to ask questions, which produced exactly the crapflood you'd expect.)
So it's in a funny position. They spent a ton of time attracting really good writers, some of who actually hang on. But monetization turned out to be exactly the same thing as every other social media site because that's what works. They don't think of themselves as social media... but they're not really anything else.
Personally, I think the Q&A format is fundamentally limited in that the low-hanging fruit gets picked early and what's left is too specific to be answered meaningfully. StackOverflow manages it, by running itself on a shoestring, and being the definitive site for a specifically lucrative market (computer techies).
As it is, Quora's next turn is towards AI, and they may end up ditching the human beings altogether. I see no sign that they've got any particular secret sauce for AI, but they've tried everything else.
Is there anything stopping phone companies from training models based on your voicemail messages? Imagine if data brokers started collecting and selling them? Sure the whole fraud thing is a an obvious problem, but how about your best friend's voice on a voicemail saying "I've got something of life-or-death importance to tell you. Call me back when you get this message at nnnnnnnnn," and when you call, it's your simulated best friend breathlessly answering "OH thank god you called back. Please listen carefully: You're in grave danger every moment you spend in your home without a reliable security system, and here at... " And probably some even weirder than that.
I've already started seeing low-quality bulk-generated images pop up in my image searches... That's a problem I didn't forsee a couple of years ago.
Context: I worked at Quora from 2012-2014.
Such platforms work best when they're left on their own to work organically with a little bit of moderation for obscenities, hate speech, etc. In general, the platform takes care of itself as the best quality answers typically command the most upvotes/views (though I've seen a great bias towards political content relative to technical and other non-political topics in this regard).
The makers absolutely ruined it though when they introduced that paywall, they should have explored other monetization options, there are plenty of them.
They do almost no moderation within the spaces, and many of them are devoted explicitly to racism. There is also a ton of explicit hate-speech trolling, much of it apparently coming from 4chan.
I actually made friends on Quora.
Then they tried to monetize it in various ways (and I don't mind paying for things!) and it went downhill fast. Just junk questions and answers, and a lot of fringe political ideas and topics, and people promoting their MLM businesses.
For me this was the biggest moat for Quora.
Back in the day, you could have someone who has a legitimate background in geopolitics chiming in a question and answering it with politeness and bringing sources for further in-depth reading.
And this was about in most of the categories of the site.
Looking at Quora now, I can see the same level of questions and answers as Yahoo Answers, but with the aggravation that you have "power responders" that use LLMs and lazy Wikipedia copy-pasting to chase clout in the platform.
I do not know the context of replacing content moderation, but I believe that was a not-so-good decision for the platform.
If Quora was a fountain service that serves water from several clean/reliable sources, the _only job_ that the platform should do is to ensure that people do not take a piss in the upstream water.
What you say here was definitely the draw, but that was true as an answerer, too. I don't exactly consider myself an "expert" on anything, but I was a fairly senior budget officer in the 1st CAV division headquarters before getting into software and both details of military operations and the federal budgeting process are things I had an insider view that I also see being discussed both in web forums and news media with a lot of naivete and wrong information. I was happy to answer questions about these topics, and it was nice to have the setup with your real name, official qualifications, and specific people vouching for you. It worked for a while and high-quality answers drifted to the top.
But that all changed in 2016. The US presidential election between Trump and Hillary ruined the Internet. For over a year, every top answer and most of the top-ranked members giving answers were purely partisan. The only way to get noticed and rewarded was to say something flattering to one political party and insulting to another. Nobody cared about the quality of information any more. This just didn't hit Quora. It hit the entire Internet. It probably helped ruin Twitter and Facebook as well, though I didn't care as much because I didn't really use them anyway. Really, it ruined the entire global information ecosystem. As much as news media had been going downhill ever since CNN kicked off the 24 hours permanent news cycle in the early 90s, I feel like a threshold was crossed in 2016 that made it no longer tolerable and no longer worth even bothering to consume news.
Maybe some of Quora was insulated from this and wasn't ruined until a later monetization push, to the extent they somewhat cordoned you by interest, if you managed to only follow questions on purely tech or business topics and ignore civics and world affairs. Certainly, I think this is largely what has saved Hacker News. Being the only place on the Internet I still read anything, it's interesting to observe that apparently Israel is at war and I didn't even know about it until watching football last night.
In the last few years, my workplace added them to their blocklist. I didn't realize that one of the reasons was Quora is very spammy with emails.
Classic case of a company not understanding their value prop and accidentally destroying it.
Stack Overflow was publicly available two years before Quora was.
Examples:
- 3 Sept: "I caught my 13 year old daughter using pads for her period without my permission. What do I do now?"
- 24 August: "My 15-year-old son punched his pregnant baby sitter’s belly and she punched him back. She now has a miscarriage and my son has a bruise. Is she wrong for this?"
- 23 August: "My 15-year-old step daughter told me to wash her back in the shower. What should I do?"
- 21 August: "I caught my 14-year-old son and his friend’s 41 year old dad holding hands. Should I be concerned?"
This site is garbage, and some of its users clearly are, as well. Go ahead and cancel it, for all I care.
There is nobody curating it. It's all automated.
This applies not just to Quora, but every company with an "algorithm": Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, etc.
But they sure as hell could manually scan their emails. That's the really demoralizing part. They might lose a war of escalation but they don't even try in the most conspicuous places.
This exactly
Unlikely. Google recently added more than 100M search traffic to Quora[0] (and Reddit, and LinkedIn and other garbage UGC sites) because they don't know how to address the "people appending reddit" problem.
They literally threw legitimate content creators under the bus and are now _forcing_ searchers to go to Quora and all these are low-quality sites that, in the the majority of the cases, do nothing but link out to answers that are found in actual blogs/articles.
That’s not a Google problem. That’s a problem with the Internet.
Your average independent website or blog puts up some heavily biased answer that is just limited to that one writer’s perspective.
Honestly the barrier to entry for a blog is very low and the benefit isn’t very high unless you spam it with ads, so who is exactly taking the time to make a blog?
Google created the SEO mess that makes non-redddit sites undesirable for most searches.
The high quality sites ARE reddit and the like.
No normal person is going to spend the time to make and maintain a blog, especially if it doesn’t make them any money unless they spam it with ads.
That also describes each individual Reddit comment. Reddit's magic is that it places them all next to one another for easy comparison.
This has nothing to do with a writer's perspective but Google's inability to address basic indexing issues like understanding whether the page is actually useful in a sense that it explains the root cause of the problem, or does it say shit like "this has been answered already, just search for it".
Since they started to roll out this update I am constantly running into either:
- Useless Reddit posts with 1/2 comments.
- Useless forum posts that are locked behind registration.
It's not that there's a problem with these sites inherently, the problem is that Google is promoting pages that basic NLP could tell you is worthless because it doesn't actually provide an answer - it's a question in of itself.
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E: I also know how to downvote and not make a comment. It doesn't exactly invalidate what I said.
More realisticly you're searching for "list folder in linux $CAVEAT_A $CONTEXT_B" and all the results are useless because one of the key words are silently dropped for each ad filled auto-generated result.
Then you'll search for "how to A in B?" And all the results are how to do the opposite ("how to B in A"). Where both directions are logical but order means something different.
1) Average people are really bad at separating signals and noises.
2) Quora is actually good but I somehow have been using it wrong
3) I'm old and grumpy and don't understand how the internet works anymore.
How could not Quora have a super high bounce rate and get punished by Google? It's almost impossible to find any useful information there.
For me, it was the first time I noticed a cultural division between capital and labor. If you spoke to builders, Quora was a non-entity or seen as a joke; whereas Stackoverflow was a productivity supertool. However, when talking to VCs, influencers, and people "up the food chain" they saw far more potential in Quora. They didn't look down on Stackoverflow, but they just saw it as another tool, like a screwdriver: very useful, but it was nothing more than a better mousetrap.
I suppose ultimately the Quora crowd was both right and wrong. Right in recognizing Stackexchange's influence ceiling but wrong in recognizing Quora's reach and impact. And I think, in part, it's because Quora needed something that Stackoverflow had in spades: Quality content and a less hostile interface. Quora truly inherited the crown of Yahoo Answers, but unfortunately took all of its warts (low quality content) with it.
it's not even about the monetisation part. imo it all went downhill when they started to allow incredibly low-quality content onto the site. I open my feed and it's filled with stuff like "what's your favorite food" "what scares you" "what are some common tech hacks etc. etc" it's incredibly annoying.
I'm still pretty hopeful about Quora and I think they can still turn this around as there's a sizeable population of subject experts on the website who keenly answer questions and share insights.
Quora's one of these counter-intuitive cases when a product could've been better off with a dozen or so people working on a shoestring budget instead of raising venture capital and trying to do 10 things at once as they in fact did.
They replaced it with a bot which actually does a better job, in my opinion, despite also having a ton of howlers.
Maybe something has changed? Younger people who were only recently made aware of Quora are being roped in, and they are learning things we've taken for granted.
But you aren't crazy, it's 2023, and you can just ignore this. You already know the story.
As they added features I lost interest. I go back from time to time. I don't recognize it. Not sure if it's good or bad. Maybe I'm not longer their target market? I just feels overwhelming and less quality driven. Just me?
My experience with quora is probably like most peoples.
- You find out about quora
- read some interesting questions and get some answers that provide new insight and mental models that update how you think
- find some interesting and famous people replying to questions taht you read.
- Day 2 find out that there are just only so many interesting questions that can be asked and the site doesn't have alot to bring you back.
- after a week, realize that this is a site that you'd want just a monthly summary of interesting questions and answers to read.
- after a few months realize that even that is too much as there just isn't enough interesting content being generated to keep you interested.
You start to realize that most questions aren't really that interesting.
one of the typical ones was "what's something that's cool for rich people to do but trashy for poor people to do?" and you realize very quickly that the answer is a very basic, everything.
And all the answers boil down to, the poor person does these things because they have to but the rich person can do these things and then go back to being rich.
"Wear teh same clothes for a week". If you're rich, you're toughening up and becoming stoic, if you're poor its because you have no choice.
The difference is always the rich person has a choice and can always just revert back to being rich at any time.
It's not a bad site, but its the perfect example of a site that should be 4-5 people maintaining and running from an add supported boot strapped model.
If that site ever takes venture capital they'd be in trouble as there isn't a revenue model that makes sense for such a small and niche site that I can see. They'd have to start locking answers behind a paywall or making certain "luminaries" answers pay only which would break the site.
They were in the 2014 YC batch [0] (after already raised $100m). After YC their total funding jumped to $220 million.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch
> - read some interesting questions
Sorry, for me it never reached point two on your list.
> what's something that's cool for rich people to do but trashy for poor people to do?
That's a yahoo answers/AskReddit bottom tier question that recurs weekly.
As far as I could tell, that made it much prized among that set of South Asians who were either in Silicon Valley or desperately wanted to be. It led to some very unfortunate culture clashes.
Its appeal to India seems to have broadened from there, and it still seems very popular.
There is enough good content to enable one to believe that there's still some merit to the site, if only they could get a handle on the abuse. Unfortunately, they've given up trying. It largely reflects American culture wars (though other cultures are also there, and bring their own culture wars).