Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

I was a top writer for two years (and got a pretty sweet jacket out of it). I was a multiple knowledge prize winner for my answers (which paid out enough for me to report it on my taxes!). Here's the nugget from the article that's the core reason:

> 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.

>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.

I wouldn't call it horrific (though I guess others might). I'm inclined to think it wasn't intentional. It certainly doesn't keep me up at night, and it's not like I regret anything that I posted on the account. I just find it disrespectful that I'm prevented from expressing my dissent around the company's reversal of its original premise.

exactly lol. quora is shit, poe is shit. it's like everything he builds and touches eventually evolves into a cancer to the society.

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.

Ads ruin everything. No respect for power users, plain greed.

Is there any parallel to Medium?

I think medium had the right idea but I don't think the business model was really solid. Substack got it right: people want to pay creators to write, not a company to broker access to creators. Instead of pivoting, they seemed to double down.

Why aren't science journals the same? Why do I still have to pay some middle man?

I don't know. I'm not in academia or doing research, but from the outside looking it, it seems like a racket.

I'm in academia and doing research.

It's a racket.

Because academics care more about which journal a paper is published in, rather than the content of the paper.

My high level speculation is curation. There actually is (or should be?) some sort of peer review system by people for that journal. That labor is valuable.

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.

There was a time when it made sense to have both done by the same entity. Time for a devorce. One does the work the other collects the reward??

It is actually very rare to pay the reviewers. The standard is that peer review process is done by senior scientists as volunteers.

As someone else mentioned, the labor is typically free. It's done by volunteers for various reasons (including, but not limited to, prestige ... literally working for exposure).

Also note that publishing to a particular high-profile comp sci journal tends to cost on the order of 1000 EUR (last I checked, a few years ago), more if you want it to be open/public access.

In other words, journals will:

- Charge hundreds to thousands of EUR to authors (typ. indirectly, by charging their university) in order to publish papers.

- Charge hundreds of EUR (at best) per year to readers for access to said papers.

- Not pay reviewers for the work in reviewing the papers.

It's literally just glorified super-expensive webhosting.

While I was never prominent or award-winning there, I used to contribute a lot of answers. I always hated the “Real name policy” though, because it meant you had to carefully censor yourself. You could only say things you’d be unconcerned to have printed and stapled to your resume for every job interview you ever went to.

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.

Given you now live in the EU you could try exercising your right to account deletion.

I do not live in the EU.

How long does one need to be in the EU to have/exercise that right?

E.g., could an American issue a deletion order during a layover in a European airport?

I believe you just need to be a European resident, although how you define that is the crux. Realistically if you have a way to prove an address you reside at in Europe, that should be sufficient.

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