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.
Seems bad any way you look at it.
something something "all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way"
In some places, the "vision" is sufficiently vague that all sorts of dumb decisions can be justified by it.
Or the CEO is so stupid that he only listens to his direct reports, who all tell him everything is under control. And when they tell him not to "micromanage" he listens and backs off.
You can't make any universal statements about this.
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?
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.
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.
Anymore that’s not the case. Answer quality has gone down drastically and the percent of Google searches that end up there has gone up.
Google really ought to de-index them. And don’t even get me started on Pinterest.
If you switch the toggle to "answers", you only get answers to the question.
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.
I was recently involved in a decision of whether or not to make a nascent community SEO-friendly, which meant significant changes to the UI and reduced UX. In the end the conclusion was "f... SEO, let's build something good instead and have users come back because of that".
Yes if the LLMs are designed to give you the best results. Right now, it’s a honey moon phase for consumers, when there’s a fierce competitive race. But just like any other tech its deployment and realization is governed by incentives. If we get an entrenched LLM monopolist I don’t think it’ll be any different from a search monopolist. Perhaps worse.
I can think of a thousand ways that they could get that convenience edge against open models. For instance, when LLMs are personalized based on your own history, chats etc people won’t give those conveniences up. And that data would not be accessible to the open models, at least not seamlessly.
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"
I was intrigued by the idea of such a page, but unfortunately your comment is apparently the only mention of that phrase on the internet.
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.
The link upthread isn't a good example, because the question is so basic it's easy for them to have a lot of related (duplicate) questions and answers. When the topic requires more nuance or is more specific, then the related questions and answers really aren't related at all, and they just add a bunch of useless noise.
hackere news isn't a question / answer site. I don't come here with the same expectations that I do when I go to something like stack overflow or quora.
Ironically, if I do a google search for something and ycombinator comes up in the results, the link is directly to the comment that is relevant- not to the top level of the article with all of the related sibling comments. If anything, from that perspective hacker news is actually a better question and answer site than quora.
So you look for a question, and all the answers are not even relevant, and often completely off topic or wrong.
I can understand the rabbit hole thing. Never thought about that. That they think of themselves as TikTok and not stack overflow or Reddit.
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.
Probably also email harvesting and any associated segmentation they get with your reading history, since it's required to sign up to read anything.
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.?