How Quora died
slate.com
slate.com
Whose sole job it is to (1) figure out what contributors are thinking and want & (2) advocate for them inside the company.
Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way.
Management begins to take contributions for granted. Stops caring about attracting contributors. Then focuses on revenue. Then makes changes to the platform that kill contributions, in pursuit of revenue.
And they miss so many obvious ways to placate and delight their contributors. "It'd be nice to have a mod tool that does X" shouldn't be a 3-year back burner ask.
Maybe make it harder for your company to footgun your golden goose?
Quora had been going downhill for quite some time before that, as they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content and were grasping at straws. But that was the point where they appear to have pivoted entirely towards AI and continued the human generated content side on minimum life support.
This sort of thing should be a nonprofit. When it was good, it was literally making the world a better place.
Possibly the Library of Congress would be a good steward for such a platform. Something to make it resistant to enshittification.
I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception.
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[0]: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/
Their sister Wikicities / Wikia / Fandom (also relying on MediaWiki), and now owned by Texas Pacific Group, is however, another example of a platform getting enshittified.
Early users are a different band of the population, on every successful platform from StackOverflow to Uber they create a particular culture which is impossible to maintain as the general public arrives in large numbers.
All the mods’ accounts were years younger than both the question and answer. Even weirder, the mod who initiated the deletion first tried to answer the question. He only voted to delete it after I commented that the question already had had an accepted answer for 13 years.
Fortunately it's so terrible I was easily dissuaded from ever answering anything.
I've run huge forums and they have mostly enshittified because I didn't put the work into moderating them correctly. I would promote good users to moderators, and six months later they would all literally become Hitler and I would have to fire them, and then they become weaponized and the destruction of the site becomes circular.
Fine, Facebook , TikTok , Reddit and myriad others have found how to moderate and monetize user generated content if you need better examples
Do you think Wikipedia has jumped the shark? Obviously not perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than Quora in terms of accuracy. It's been around for a very long time and it doesn't seem to me like quality has decreased.
Edit: to be clear and re-iterate, I never said Wikipedia was perfect, just that it has a certain baseline, generally above where Quora is, and hasn't seemed to decline over the years.
Granted, it might be the best possible way for an open-source encyclopedia to work. It is after all an incredible success. It's just pretty bad in some parts.
This is typically done in under the guise of notability ("GPL/copyleft is notable, other alternatives aren't").
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974614
But to expand a bit, for example I'm annoyed at many of the entries calling their subject "conspiracy theory/ theorist". Not that conspiracy theories and their believers don't exist, but at this point it has become a highly pejorative and judgemental term to frame ideas and narratives that need to be stigmatized rather than explained. Passing judgements should not, in my view, be the primary focus of an encyclopedia entry.
One major problem is that you need to submit references to back up any claim. PR companies can easily buy an article in a fringe news site and them modify Wikipedia with a reference to that article. It is almost impossible to roll back.
I once tried to update a company page to state they were going through redundancies. I was personally affected by this, and had internal emails to back this up. However, lacking a public reference it was rolled back.
So now you have this bizarro world where English language pages on Portuguese politicians have corruption scandals but Portuguese language do not.
However, having been a long time contributor to [Current Events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) (fought over because of news relevancy), there have been waves of sock puppeting and attempts to constantly revoke all edits from certain users, that often make you not want to contribute.
There is also this editorial talking about spending that makes some arguments about current issues with Wikipedia. Namely, that there's a lot of money going in, and not a lot of requested feature development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
> Every for-profit contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark
An amusing discussion where the OP says Wikipedia is here to stay, and every answer is downvoted, most of them flagged. All of them voicing concerns of some validity.
This is super representative of that happens on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is notorious for excluding ordinary contributors from the process. Anybody can revert your change and that takes precedence over what you did, and there is no obvious appeal process for you, but de facto there is for the well-connected long-time editors. They can always gather some cavalry and run you over.
So they should probably do what Stack Overflow tried to do, and explicitly say that new users / infrequent contributors have to receive more care, that needs to be provided by veterans / frequent contributors, as well as provide mechanisms to do so.
Otherwise it is not a wikipedia that everyone can edit, rather a wikipedia written by a cabal who is also contains a large number of biased people, often getting direct or indirect funding from maintaining that bias.
The one exception would be Craigslist
As someone who has started a "content contributed by users" website recently (golfcourse.wiki), I've thought long and hard about why the enshitification creep happens. I really think it happens because most of the people who start these businesses either need to take venture capital to survive, or are looking for a way to sell the business to retire rich af.
I thought long and hard about a monetization strategy, and I've got a few in my mind that don't suck. However, to achieve those goals, the project has to stay a side project and it has to run on a shoe string budget.
Call me an optimist, but in the long run, I think we will replace our enshitified websites with more open ones, the slow but steady growth fediverse shows this is happening, it's just that it won't happen fast enough for most of us to be satisfied consumers.
I just think we are looking at this through the lens of consumers, not generous creators. I occasionally help edit Wikipedia, and it looks like about 10,000-to-1, at best, people who contribute to my dumb little site. If we're all willing to waste a bit of time we can build some pretty cool sites, but there always needs to be a way for users to capture that good if the company turns evil instead of the company trying to capture the users for profit.
I see it as, well, a sort of mexican-standoff relationship that Wikipedia has built for itself (for lack of a better term). Basically, we won't enshitify the website because you'll just copy-paste it, but you won't copy-paste it because you know it's a waste of time right now. If you don't need to squeeze revenues, that's a very good relationship for long-term success.
That's a good idea though. The main idea, since it is a golf wiki, is to provide tournament services to clubs. My understanding is that most of the cost of operating tournament services is due to licensing agreements with the the governing bodies, but if clubs are willing to provide their data themselves, that's not necessary, and I can charge orders of magnitude less than the competition.
Streaming services (you mean 5he likes of Netflix ?) are arguably not platforms, because they are much closer to distributors or even publishers (rather than just editors, sometimes), with all the extra legal issues and contract-signing that come with that.
*"content" is really corporate-speak, I would hate my works to be called that :
https://craphound.com/content/Cory_Doctorow_-_Content.html#1
Reddit is a cluster that manages to ONLY keep going because of how agressive mods can be about their positions, but as we have seen time in, time out, MODs positions get molested by ADMINs and ADMINs posing as MODs. MODs on the take.
The point being that when Reddit IPOs - there are undoubtedly mods who have/are/will-be compensated/profit when IPO hits.
Reddit seems to be the exception to the rule. I and millions of others still spend a ton of time there. People have loudly griped about ads and API pricing, meanwhile I'm still finding new interesting subreddits. They seem to have monetized without destroying the UX.
I hope the forthcoming IPO doesn't ruin this comment!
> that “was all about trying to come up with questions that would draw in more views and more people,” she said—not about incentivizing high-quality answers. It was all about adding webpages of individual questions, for SEO purposes.
I remember the day they announced to the top writer forum that they were killing incentives for good answers and starting to incentivize engaged question askers. Overnight, you got bots posting questions about trivial math problems (literally just multiplication in most cases). The top writers disappeared.
What hurts the most: I deleted my account. At some point it became undeleted. I don't have the ability, as far as I'm aware, to kill it. My profile lives on to enrich the people who betrayed the writers. Kind of sad, but it was all about engagement. Ad dollars.
This sounds horrific and ironic when Quora's founder is on the OpenAI board with a role to supposedly oversee ethics. But, after all he was the CTO of a company that pioneered putting tracking pixels everywhere, so this is just typical silicon valley stuff.
if you'll put drug cartels on one end of a spectrum, he'll be on the opposite end where everything he did sure is legal but definitely monetized and ruined the same amount of lives.
Is there any parallel to Medium?
Also, simple grandfathering. I imagine once upon a time Science journals was a literal term. Easier to keep the same hook if your users were used to it in another medium.
But after having posted a lot of content in spite of that, something made me so irritated with the site and the community that I literally deleted each thing I had ever posted and walked away. What you describe is even more lame though, for sure.
E.g., could an American issue a deletion order during a layover in a European airport?
You can see the same issues cropping up on Medium with its partner program, on Twitter thanks to Twitter Blue and revenue sharing, and even to some degree on the likes of YouTube and Twitch (though they're so massive that the scammers don't really stand out/do as well). Put money on the table, and the scammers will come out of the woodwork to try and get as much of it as they can, quality content be damned.
Edit: I also suspect part of the issue with revenue sharing programs is that they don't offer enough to incentive genuine experts, but offer enough that if you're utterly desperate and local costs of living are low, you're incentivised to spam for it.
One of those links shows a UI that's fairly obviously Reddit! [1] Another is to genius.com's lyrics to some song[2] which don't seem to have anything to do with anything the author's complaining about.
Of the links actually relevant to Quora, one is about an obvious joke[3], which the author either doesn't understand or pretends not to.
What's left is a case of spam[4], that the article links twice. I'd suppose because it's the only evidence the author has of low quality questions on Quora.
While Quora is a horrible website, I'd say the evidence shows Slate is worse. Their reporters can't even find genuine evidence of Quora's low quality. They show us Reddit instead.
[1] https://twitter.com/3DrakaiNa/status/1743993622737863056 [2] https://genius.com/23826656 [3] https://twitter.com/Zeronelite/status/1743449094360596802 [4] https://hollywoodactress02.quora.com/OMG-KING-CHARLES-SHOCK-...
Also, for a while I just hit a login wall, which of course makes you not click a link there the next time.
For example, I found this random question just now:
https://www.quora.com/How-does-blockchain-technology-work-11
About half the answers there are actually to that question. The rest are to questions that are about the same thing but with different wording:
* 'How does block chain technology work?' * 'How blockchain technology works?' * etc
or to related but not quite identical ones:
* 'What is blockchain technology and how does it work?' * 'What is blockchain technology, could you explain it in an easy way?' * 'What is a blockchain?'
So you'll see a lot of answers... which may or may not actually be for the question you were interested in. Or which may explain it in a weird way, since the actual question they answered was worded very differently.
At least with StackOverflow you know that the answers are all related to the same question.
I don't know, most StackOverflow answers I run into are "closed as duplicate of <not my question>" or "closed as duplicate of <how would I have solved my problem 8 years ago with only the tools available then>"
Product of too much VC, probably.
This is the reality. Not just in Quora but all tech companies. A/B testing is used to determine how to squeeze more and more engagement, in small parts of the app. And over time the app becomes an ad factory with unrelated posts because apparently people are more engaged when they are lost and unable to find any information.
Either it’s a series of unchallenged false positives, or there’s a lot about web interface that neither I nor they understand, but I would challenge the idea that is the result of a well-informed A/B testing culture. It’s the output of a thousand monkeys running a thousand tests a day for three years, and releasing anything that hits the green line.
Considering I rarely understand what I'm even looking at with the mish mosh of answers, and I'm not willing to create an account, I've outright blocked Quora in my browser.
As an aside, I think the extreme enshittification of Quora basically highlights every single problem with VC-driven, growth-at-all costs, "metrics and data driven" tech platforms (as an aside, the reason I put square quotes there is not that I think metrics and data are bad, but I think most companies are not honest that they're optimizing for metrics and data that are easy to gather, while the fuzzier but actually more critical concepts of user trust and sentiment get ignored over time). I mean honestly, is there any single employee at Quora that thinks that what the site became is anything but a total shit show?
If you visit Amazon often enough you kinda get used to it. But a new vistor imho would be shellshocked.
> Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
* Shortsighted metrics that don't contribute to the holistic quality of the product. Ad-supported products are especially prone to this.
* Treating a mature product just like a new one, and adding too many features instead of maintaining it and doing less.
Absolutely insane.
I’d bet they just tested it and found that’s how they make money.
If you switch the toggle to "answers", you only get answers to the question.
I literally cannot understand how anyone thought intermixing related questions and answers together is in any way useful or beneficial to their users, especially when the default is set to ON.
Even Reddit has linkability to detect the URL and show you an 'other discussions' lens (for Old Reddit).
Granted, this is a slight taxonomy difference of 'other discussions' of the same exact topic, vs other discussions related to your topic. But I think it's a useful and helpful feature.
And that's "How Quora died".
Basically the same reason as recipes that start with a long life story: Google prefers pages with lots of content, even if 10% of it is actually useful to anyone. So a page with 50+ "answers" is preferable to a page with two actual answers.
And that’s how Google search will be overtaken by GPT with ease. People want answers, not an ad-driven algorithm’s desire for content that is long enough to support more ads.
But the best results are those where the user uses the back button and clicks something else. They must not click back within n seconds of course. The user has to spend a minimum amount of time on the almost useless page.
I got this feeling looking for many things. I know there are pages but get many results very very close to what I was looking for.
Dubious reversal of key words where "how to turn a car into an airplane" becomes "how to turn an airplane into a car"
Then people start making perfect SEO pages like "how to style css with html"
It has to be the worse site on the internet.
Quora can and will pop up for nearly every search query and I've never been satisfied with the answers I peek at, ever.
You know those pages you find on google that are just SO/Wikipedia articles copied? That’s what Quora looks like lol
I just logged in out of curiosity, and I have an avalanche of “notifications” that are just pathetic — “Dark Psychology Facts posted in a space you might like: ‘Can a human win in a battle with a hyena?’”
It seems like such a missed opportunity. Even when I compare to my stack exchange usage, I’m not a registered user, I’m only ever consuming information, but I click around and they benefit through ads.
I agree with StackExchange, sometimes the random things on the sidebar grab my attention, whether it's some random travel question, workplace, about writing/sci-fi, etc.
Pinterest is another spammy site. Same with Quora. Like what is the model here? Spam SEO, drive ad revenue? In my experience Yahoo Answers was 10x more interesting than anything Quora offers, but maybe I and others like me are the exception and companies like Quora are actually getting eyeballs with their UX and business model and that's why Yahoo Answers isn't a thing anymore.?
Probably also email harvesting and any associated segmentation they get with your reading history, since it's required to sign up to read anything.
They're a bit screwed because they rely so much on volunteer mods but the volunteer mods are crazy...
And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework or doing very little effort themselves before asking. Why do these people deserve others spending their time helping them if they can't even bother to search or formulate something coherent?
I don't think anyone objects to closing those questions. That's not really what this is about. My questions are very clearly not asking for help with homework and trivial "how do I write a for loop" or "it doesn't work" questions. Still get downvoted/closed frequently. Most often:
* It gets closed as duplicate because there's a vaguely similar - but different - question. Or sometimes there's a completely different question with an answer that incidentally also answers my question.
* It gets closed as too vague or not clear because it's simply outside the domain of expertise of the voter. It's clear to people that know what I'm talking about.
To be clear when I say "mods" I don't exclusively mean people with official mod power. It's also people that moderate for fun - those that trawl the new questions. Let me know if you have a better name for those people.
You can tell it's them because you very often get a couple of downvotes immediately and then if you check back a month or two later it will have been upvoted by many more people that actually had the same question and arrived there via Google.
Fact is, nobody wants to go to Stack overflow anymore for answers because the experience sucks. And they don’t mind using ChatGPT. Thanks for all the training data, Stack!
But just like with antibiotics, bugs were trained on it and they got stronger finding the exploit until spam, scam and greed destroyed it once again. Sigh!
X/Twitter has a million other problems, but I do like their new Community Notes of fact-checking claims. It's essentially anonymous and somewhat immune to self-promotion.
Going forward, a better path for FAQ-type sites is probably something similar to that model. The hard part is how you get users to answer questions while removing the self-promotion and gamification/scoreboard incentives.
It's possible that AI might just destroy this space entirely, but I still think you need some form of human fact-checking in order to avoid hallucinations.
This is why the bump model that 4chan uses is superior. You can sort threads by activity, but all posters display with equal weight, and you must utilize critical thinking to evaluate each and every post (unless it is from a trip user whose authority you trust in a particular domain), not some little number that pushes them to the top or sinks them to the bottom. There are (You)'s, but that can indicate consensus, disagreement, controversy, or something else, and you need to sus that our for yourself.
Consensus-based truth models are frankly shit for most types of topics. Heck, even for scientific topics, the peer review model has been shown to be completely bankrupt.
The elephant in the room is that 4chan's average quality of content is by far the worst of any major forum platform. The "bump" model is also used iirc by most bbs or older-style internet forums. In the modern age, incel forums are probably the most popular of these older-style forums (and surprisingly they probably have only slightly better average quality than 4chan).
So, correct me if I am wrong, but the bump model usually results in shitty average quality of information.
As the bump model needs heavy moderation as the upvote/downvote system is a form of self-moderation/censorship. However, the entire appeal of most sites that use the bump model is to shitpost or be edgy...
Honestly, the bump model does sound intriguing from a utopian, critical-thinking first, free speech first-principles perspective, but I'd like to see an example of a successful popular forum that implements such in reality.
The bump model allows chaos wherein you, the reader, must critically evaluate everything with no preconceived notions or pre-filtering. This is how you question, re-evaluate, and sharpen your knowledge through productive debates. There are diamonds and gems in "flat", bump-structured fora, that do not exist in other group-think, mass-consensus-based sites.
Why does the average quality of information matter? You are making a trade-off for convenience. It is indeed convenient to accept common group-think. If you are critical enough to recognize low quality posts on bump model sites, why are you concerned with low quality posts? Read on to the next post.
Insert the meme here of Cypher stating that he doesn't even see the code anymore, but the remixed version of "I don't even see the shitposts and shills anymore."
>I'd like to see an example of a successful popular forum that implements such in reality.
You know what they are, but I will elect to avoid an instaban by posting them here.
You cannot list them, because I already have and I have not been instabanned.
There is not actually much chaos in these supposed "bastions of free speech". Because in practice, threads are often created by highly motivated users and can be brigaded by coordinated groups (IRC/Discord groups). Even without so, culture and groupthink emerges simply because people mimic each other.
This is the problem with all utopian first-principles liberty thinking, in practice, they fall prey to the same easily observable defects in human nature. Thus, forums like hackernews thrive because of competent moderation in their stead.
High average information quality is a top 3 important metric for browsing any content on the internet, and quality does not "emerge" effectively through this supposed "diamond in the rough" system.
The up/down feature tends to create echo chambers that eventually exclude half the population. Reddit is worse at this because of excessive moderation combined with doomscrollong incentives.
> His position on the [OpenAI] board has also raised eyebrows because Quora has been in increasingly direct competition with OpenAI’s best-known service: ChatGPT ... Shortly after OpenAI launched ChatGPT a year ago, Quora introduced Poe, a platform that allows people to ask questions from various AI chatbots, including ChatGPT.
It was always touted as some better, savvier alternative to the StackExchange network but it was just clogged up with crummy answers to bad questions. They made it extremely difficult to see the actual content and would make it near impossible to follow threads/discussions without making an account (which would in turn spam you)
The fact that it was SEO-optimized up the wazoo and always clogged up search results didn't make it any better. For that reason I have "-site:quora.com" seared into my muscle memory when searching.
Fast forward 10 years from then. I am a 40 year old middle aged guy. Still working in tech albeit at a Senior level; with one school going kid and have a mortgage. I still visit Quora occasionally but am hard pressed to find any content that is interesting and appropriate for my age. It seems that they are still showing me questions which were mostly relevant to my younger self 10 years back and not now. There is practically no content or discussion in that forum that can attract and keep a 40 year old middle aged guy. Its just that I evolved but they didn't. Not to mention the fact that they also became more annoying with all these "promoted", "relevant" questions intermixed within the same page. I think their lack of ability to evolve over time absolutely finished the product. My two cents.
Q: why is running so good for you
A: it actually isn’t good for you. <insert justification>
Q: why do so many people run when it’s so bad for you
A: it actually is really good for you. <insert justification>
Every single question seemed to be this way. It probably reveals a lot about human nature, but it really turned me off to know I was just reading knee jerk reactions to questions rather than anything accurate.
All this to say, yes, ragebait is the lifeblood of Quora.
Quora has long been a world leader of SEO and dark UX patterns — it was never as valuable to users as its Google ranking would indicate — so it’s hard to mourn its demise. But yes, it does stink to see the quality of information going down while the quantity grows at an ever-increasing exponential rate.
This is one of the kinds of product that people will skip if they can't evaluate it frictionless.
I've a simple but strict set of security rules for whether I'll use a website.
- it does not want to run javascript
- that I can access it over Tor without being blocked
- that it will work in a text based browser like elinks
Despite the protestations by idealogues that no such sites exist, HN meets all those requirements, as do dozens of useful sites I regularly use.
If and only if I get to evaluate the quality of a site based on those requirements, I may eventually register, with nothing more than an email, in order to post replies.
Quora fell off that list long ago. More recently so did StackExchange.
Often I find that things break as soon as Cloudflare proxies are involved.
Designers and product managers may completely ignore people like me, trample all over our needs and ignore us. Why would they care about the one percent. All good luck power to them and their values.
But I am also not the least bit concerned with whether their products are a success or not. Why would I care if they do not?
Yet I cannot concur that "almost every" site does. No, there are some that do. Moreover, those sites seem to self curate as being of very good quality. So I am happy that there are thoughtful, intelligent people out there who "get it". When they stop, so do I, and just move on. It's not personal and I'm not invested in them.
It is a bit worrying that both freedom and security are thought 'fanatical' by some.
It's hard to me to see how a site with a vision like Quora (had) can continue existing for long after they start ignoring accessibility issues.
Sounds like I should be looking for a Stack Overflow alternative too.
(I'm suspecting that this might be related to the recent issue of better accessibility also making it easier to abuse for neural network based abusers, and it certainly looks like a hard problem to solve for the most popular websites.)
"They're also driving away contributors with more altruistic motivations"
Now, I can agree with that, because I see a very strong alignment between the set of people who strongly uphold their own values and have self-respect, and those who stand up for the rights of others and have something to give.
The "walled garden" internet basically drives away people who give a fuck.
Why did the Beatles use a Stratocaster for electric guitars?
What is the best essay writing service?
What are the major challenges of writing an essay?
What is a poem for you?
Should I sell my Squier CV 50s Strat for an Ibanez S521?
Do you count time spent thinking about what you are going to write as time spent writing?
Is it important for a writer to write what he feels?
What is the process of writing a book without having anything written down beforehand?
Do guitar players prefer single coil pickups or humbuckers?
Do guitar players prefer single coil pickups or humbuckers?
Which rock musicians do you think could've been better than they actually were?
New Quora insult: "Quora exists to make NextDoor users look smart"
If you publish a well written article and adding all the SEO capabilities that you can, you will almost never appear before Quora.
The problem I have is, the content I usually see is essentially the regurigation of youtube videos stealing from imdb's trivia section: "Top 10 things you didn't know about $film!"
Quora does the same thing for clicks in a way, and it ends up being misleading.
Perhaps in an alternative timeline we might be regularly typing "[some query] quora" into search engines, but Reddit seems to have filled that much-needed gap more successfully.
Communities, once they reach a certain size and collective history, gain a kind of self-reflectiveness. They get meta. And right around then, you will find someone at the helm who will not remember the earliest days and fail to grasp what brought everyone together. They've forgotten the face of their father and left the riddle of steel on the battlefield. What they'll decide is, well, it's me. I, or rather what I represent, make it great. The moderation team, the steering committee, the management. This is never true in any community I have seen. It's always the individuals, maybe some interesting weirdos, or the ones with a lot of time on their hands, the lonesome lusers. They will ultimately be regarded with disregard, viewed as churnable units, cogs of cognition, replaceable. This is always wrong, and it is always a lesson learned in slow motion, after the egomaniacs have fled toward their next call to greatness.
I recently had an interaction w/ OpenAI's community that left a sour taste in my mouth. Asked one question, some smarty guy tried to "XY problem" me, I clarified this is not an "XY problem" and my question is quite clear and specific and eventually one mod was involved, other mods ganged up on me and removed all my posts because "they were violating guidelines". I complained about that sort of abuse, but guess what? The same mods that run the forum run the "forum about the forum" section, lol, so they had their fun again. Left a note there, in case some actual OpenAI employee/investor cares, telling them "this is how StackOverflow died".
I'm sharing this here because if they are taking a page from Quora's playbook, well ... good luck? I'll never bother myself again with the OpenAI community and that's exactly why I stopped being involved with Quora and StackOverflow in the past. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about the forum's demise in a couple months from now.
Now it is clear there is a new thing in our world (LLMs), and turns out repositories of well crafted words will be irrelevant.
Almost no one saw this change coming (or at least, not how quickly this change would come).
There is nothing Quora could have done to change this fate.
From an SEO standpoint, Quora is currently at one of its peak levels.
- It has reached 267 million organic visitors per month: https://i.imgur.com/899g3Jm.png
- Quora's organic traffic is quite diverse https://i.imgur.com/JfbYKH1.png
Google's helpful content update has increased traffic for sites like Quora, Stack Overflow, and Reddit. In many instances, I believe this boost lacks justification.
Quora's user experience is not intuitive. Although they removed the signup wall, which impacted their bounce rate and caused millions of organic visitors to leave their site shortly after clicking on a Quora result in a search engine, reading an answer on Quora now feels overwhelmingly disorganized.
Nonprofits may not be looking for the mega-exit, but they still need to pay the bills somehow, so most of the same forces still apply. They are also more likely to draw partisan ideologues who are naturally more enthusiastic about having a way to put their thumbs on the scales of the discourse despite lower pay and no chance of that lucrative mega-exit.
Government-funded things have too many of their own issues. Practically impossible to start, execute, or pivot fast enough to compete with startups, and subject to political turf wars and overhead. Naturally, nothing much comparable to such sites has sprung out of that.
Where have I come across the surname D'Angelo before? Oh yes - he's on the board of OpenAI, and was the only board member at the time Altman was sacked (according to WP).
It went downhill as it got gamified and you saw the rise of powerusers. I remember there was a guy who'd answer a question within 2 minutes of it being posted. Mostly based on first page Google results and he was the #1 poweruser.
And people assigned him an authority based on the fact that to up that point most quality users were also important in real life. But this dude seems like he was just a Quora addict with no outside credentials.
These guys quickly gathered what kind of answer gets you the most upvotes and so Quora became a pretty ugly biased place. There were still small micro topics with high quality.
Then couple of VCs/Entrepreneurs started using it for content marketing. And after that you've only had marketing interns from companies doing content post there. Add to it lack of monetization.
I've had millions of reads and answers, it was a good source of credibility I would think but I deleted my entire profile some year ago with all my some very in-depth answers.
I owe a lot to Quora though, it was a goldmine in the early days. It got me on the track of learning to code and advanced my education. also writing answers itself makes you research and double check and lookup sources. If anyone from Quora reads it thank you.
Edit: oh yeah, the person mentioned in the article was one of those early powerusers that made people like me leave the site. How funny. Seems like it worked out for her though. I just hope the same thing won't happen to substack.
But this article goes into the details of what makes this feel different. Quora is aesthetically much worse than it ever was.
I don't know if Quora is doing well or not. Maybe it is dying. Maybe it is flourishing. What I am sure of it that this article didn't help me any in understanding which of those is true, despite the length of the piece.
A commentator made the point elsewhere - this type of platform should be a non-profit, maybe a community owned platform.
Remember StackOverflow...
Most shocking of all is that anyone would dump more and $1 or two on Quora at this point.
And Stackoverflow works. But it needs a new owner which has a clue what it is about. Even better - the old owners and creators buy it back :)
SO lost a little through the initial AI-Hype but probably most people know already the AI is feed with SO. And SO needs humans with new knowledge. So the main problem are the new owners. Why they did even removed the job adds linked to the questions. That made sense :(
You need a low barrier to entry to get free content, but then that makes it easy to pump full of crap. But you need that content to get users and monetization <shrug>.
Quora has handled that much worse than, say, reddit. But reddit doesn't allow their users to monetize their content, which keeps the spammers at bay.
Then the email spams started happening pushing digests of irrelevant and in some cases harmful recommendations.
Then the increasingly asshole-oriented designs around serving up search results and blocking the content unless you signed in or registered.
Then the Q/A quality digressed massively to the point where it became less and less useful. There were also changes to the design that merged questions, answers, and recommendations into a largely incoherent mess where I was never really sure what I was looking at or why.
Not wanting any further association with the dumpster fire Quora was becoming, I ended up deleting every one of my answers and comments before deleting my account entirely.
Now I take pains to block Quora results from my searches and never click on a Quora link if I come across it. It seems like I’m not missing much based on the terribly awful “innovations” mentioned in this article.
(yes I'm aware they're spending some resources on displaying an AI answer at the top).
Of course never really liked quora's forced login thing and how it seems to have removed parts of questions that answers are still referring to and how it mixes answers to different questions in front of the current one
The key to using Quora couldn't be easier: don't search for or read topics that you don't want to see. Human inquiry will always be delightfully messy except in the view of those who have pathological control complexes.
I just opened the front page and the 3rd item was a space called "True Love Conquers All" with relatable-Facebook-meme-style writing and an image of a woman giving birth in the backseat of a car.
I guess that’s probably the only way they could really monetize but it sure is annoying.
Quota is synonym of internet junk spam in the same vein as pinterest or yelp (a little less for yelp maybe)
The amount of questions being asked and answered is drastically reduced after GPT. So as a platform, it has died but still has the same amount of reach. They integrated AI. We have to see where this heads.
And there are now constant "Edit:" updates on answers addressing the trolls and hateful responses, further dampening my interest in answering questions.
Where have all the internet forums gone?
[ Question ]
[ads]
[ads]
[ads]
[related questions]
[related questions]
....scroll farther...
[related questions]
[related questions]
[actual answers]
Like WTF?! Whose decision was this?
It is a sad thing to me to see such a great resource just end up trash.
Thanks to ublacklist for hiding the damned thing.
Imagine if your local library was run by entrepreneurs.
It’s insane how much people can put up with if it scratches their itch enough
People in this thread speaking fondly of Quora has come to a complete shock to me to be honest. I thought everyone else also considered it just a spam site. Today I learned.
It's optimised to keep you reading. But you don't want to keep reading, you just want your original question answered.
Unfortunately, they style all the page components the same, and you are forced to read to see if it's an answer to your question, a 'related question', or something irrelevant (like the ChatGPT example given).
On top of that, it cuts off most of the answer(s) anyway 'below the fold' of the fragment it's contained in.
Example where I googled 'quora van dimensions': https://www.quora.com/Is-there-much-of-a-height-difference-b...
1. AI component
2. Relevant answer, but arguably a lazy one that assumes that it's a post 2020 model (instead of 2013-9). Also does not address the person's question for 'in the UK' (people answering should advise if model differs between the UK & US). Also assumes that the asker has not already looked at that spec sheet.
3. Fairly related / useful context, I suppose.
4. A 'related' question's answer, for "What is the height of a standard 53ft. semi trailer?". (Seriously?!)
5. A 'related' question's answer, for "How tall can your load be above the cab on a flatbed 2016 Ford F550?" (Seriously?!)
6. 'Related questions'
7. Answers to completely different questions.
The UI is hostile to the readers' needs.
So that, along with the poor quality responses mentioned (usually some business consultant giving vague pointless lists or pointing to some SaaS offering) means that "Site:old.reddit.com" or niche related websites is usually a more direct path to an answer to me.
I believe Q&A sites will inevitably degrade as the low-hanging fruit is picked early. ("How do I lose weight?" "Explain relativity" "Is God real?") It can start with great answers, but it quickly becomes repetitious. Y!A probably also had a similar phase, but by the time most people heard about it, it was already famously dumb.
Quora followed a similar path. It actually lasted longer than one might expect, in part because they threw a lot of money at it. But it is now much worse because it's better known and a more visible target to trolls and spammers. Plus it's reputation for paying people, which attracts vast amounts of minimum effort, much of it automated. (And not paying any more, but that doesn't stop people.)
I find that most of social media went south around the time of Trump's election and the heavy partisan moderation that followed it.
Quora further seems to have been taken over by Chinese paid writers.
You think you're helping a real human, with a real human need, and then you see he's asked not only what museums you recommend in your hometown, but also what museums you recommend in 400 other small towns from all over the world, and what restaurants you recommend for 400 other random small towns, and then what local radio channels you recommend for 400 more etc.
Would need more than just Poe to justify than billion dollar valuation.
I avoid Quora.
"Smart" is very much a function of the work you put in, though of course not the only factor. I don't feel the need to have to explain this more than I have.
Edit: I have to ask... what about the smart people that don't oppose them? What's their deal?
100% of the smart people I know oppose Nazism. It seems there are too many politicians around who are objectively intelligent but are a bit comfortable with at least some of the Nazi Party’s ideas.
Granted, many of the Nazi ideas revolve pretty obsessively around the concept of race, but looks like at least in one case they were even explicitly not racists: "We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race." And that's another idea I basically fully agree with. IMO death penalty should be reserved only for the most serious cases, but society needs to be extremely harsh to career criminals and their ilk, they laugh at lenient punishments.
Make an app get VC money and jump ship to cool new tech.
Had great potential but sadly went tits up.
I wonder why no good CRUDs come from europe. But then i remember they are busy moping.
AI might have driven the final nail in the coffin but the one decision which was truly an inflection point was starting a program that would pay for asking X amount of questions. The platform was cool because of people who wrote ANSWERS -- to the point where the original question sometimes became even tangential to the actual answer but you'd learn so much nevertheless. Quora not only ended the top-writer program for those people it started offering monetary incentives for asking the most inane bullshit questions as long as they got the views. It is truly baffling to me how something that holds so much genuine value can be driven into the ground while making decisions left, right and center (and the whole community trying to tell you exactly what you're doing) that destroyed everything of value in the Quora process. The older answers are still there, but the community magic has utterly evaporated.
I guess it's pretty normal for folks who have seen this happening in BBS/Usenet era but regardless of all of Quora's faults (the tone-moderation of the language was always a bit overboard in IMHO but I don't think it led to the downfall -- it was always there and writers worked around it) it is genuinely disappointing to see every successive platform try to build something of value only to falter and disappear because we just can't seem to keep anything good around.
As a result, the site is now "welcoming" to new users asking low-quality questions, but actively hostile to what the answerers and mods would like. While they're the ones left to clean up the spam.
And when the low-effort questions are closed that then drives away the question askers too, because all the "nice" onboarding didn't tell them their question should actually be well-researched. Their expectations of getting help now clash with reality and they end up hating the experience.
But all this drives views and "questions" in the short-term and management is so clueless it's hopeless. See e.g. the recent mod strike due to the AI policy issues, where they initially wanted to prevent/ban mods from deleting low-quality AI content from serial ChatGPT spammers.
For that reason, I learned to bite my tongue, when they sneered, and appreciated the answer, which was often quite good.
I haven't really done much there, in years. I still get upvotes for my questions, years after I wrote them. At some point, people just stopped answering my questions, and I usually ended up posting my solution, when I figured it out on my own.
I feel that Quora has turned into the same thing that LinkedIn Groups have become: A haven for ad-scammers and "SEO" people.
One of the things that happens on both platforms, is that someone asks a specific question, and ignores sincere, legitimate answers, but rewards the "shill" "answers," where a particular product is recommended as the "solution."
I dumped every LI group, after encountering these folks, and I never really warmed to Quora, because, I guess, I came late to the party, after these people had started their games. I realized the platforms were worthless to me.
I won't go, where I'm not wanted.
I can't imagine getting paid for either answers or questions. They both take so much time and brainpower, that I can't believe that the income would be at all worthy of the effort. I think that SO actually did a good job on "gamifying" the Q&A process. I may have issue with the inevitable status games, but I learned to just keep my peace, and appreciate the help.
It's crazy that the operators of a website like this could understand so little about what made it special, but I guess all they understood was engagement metrics.
StackOverflow fell into a similar trap with reputation on controversial or highly upvoted question farms. The problem was further compounded by a ridiculous Triage queue system that could issue account suspensions and bans for honest opinions and feedback if your answers did not align with the prevailing groupthink of a few elite arbiters there.
Not that different from what happened somewhat to HN. Read my name backwards.
I hope he expands his worldview by reading or experiencing more of the world.
It was quite a while back, but I have never really gone to quora since, especially since its basically a paywall (I also never go to NYT unfortunately because their paywall is so BFY;TW I cant stand it.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFYTW
Somehow having an acronym with a semicolon actually makes a vulgar rage explosion seem controlled and even educated.
Where did we all go so Wrong?