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.
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.
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.