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Comment by kfarr | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I was thinking last night after hearing his involvement in this, does anyone else realize that Quora is basically unusable now? I mean it started from such a noble cause to answer all of humanity's questions to literally tricking end-users into clicking ads...

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It’s not just this, you are given answers to related questions when the answer to your actual question is further down. Possibly to increase stickiness? It doesn’t make sense.

This is the most confusing thing any time I've clicked a quora link. I have no idea what I'm looking at. Who designed that? It's crazy how bad it is. They probably got a promo for it lol

It used to be good/great in the past but nowadays I avoid Quora like the plague, due to its massively confusing interface.

Quora is the text version of the Chumbox.

The chumbox is slang for the part of news site web design you... try to ignore. These sites managed to optimize their design for <10% of users who will click just about anything.

> I mean it started from such a noble cause to answer all of humanity's questions to literally tricking end-users into clicking ads...

I'm pretty sure you've just described the web.

Cough cough Reddit.

I'm honestly curious how Quora is still in business. I wouldn't say I was a heavy user, but I used to use it fairly frequently, and then it just became a minefield of walls and dark patterns such that whenever I get a Quora result in search I just go somewhere else. I used to hear people talk about Quora but now I never hear any sort of discussion about it from tech types, besides jests and disdain.

I completely realize that my experience may not track your average Joe, but I read an article from this summer that said Quora was planning an IPO, and I just am trying to wrap my head around how there would be any decent valuation.

Their SEO is very good. "I got it from Quora" is still an answer which carries some weight. And a lot of those answers have a long shelf life - easily 4+ years, even 20 in the case of, say, an answer about Steve Jobs.

So you have a site, with a lot of valuable links, on a platform where anyone can & will create more, with widespread name recognition. That's valuable.

Their SEO was/is technically extremely poor (per Google's rules) and should have gotten their content largely banished from Google. They were intentionally violating one of Google search's primary SEO rules: do not show the Google bot and users a meaningfully different site. Quora was doing exactly that, providing a very different experience to the non-signed in search user (arriving to the site via search results) vs Google bot. Google let Quora get away with SEO murder (speculation on HN has always been that it was due to the close relationships in SV), which is the sole thing that has kept Quora propped up (otherwise its traffic would have been properly obliterated for its blackhat SEO practices).

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