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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

Quora was already ruined and pretty much worthless for a very long time. When a query on google has quora, I hardly ever click on it as I know a) it won’t answer the question most likely b) I walk into this incredibly confusing ux experience.

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Same. I really dislike how you open one question and it sort of mixes in answers to different questions. New reddit UI does something similar.

Because sometimes no one actually answered that question, quora just publishes many titles to index to google.

Engagement optimization. 5% of users might happen to see something that will keep them on the site, but 95% are confused and waste their time. Sites only optimize for engagement these days.

This has been one of my biggest gripes with Quora, even if user answers are useful, I’m not seeing them, which defeats the whole purpose of the site.

I actually blacklist the entire domain from kagi search results.

Quora was doomed from the start. When StackOverflow started the founders and the early community put a lot of thought and energy into not becoming one of the niche expert exchanges that already existed at that time. Now, Stackoverflow failed, but not by repeating the mistakes that already had been made. That's not something that could be said about Quora.

Why do you say SO failed? I thought it was quite successful.

It was quite successful.

(past tense)

I fear you might be true. I do worry though that a big reason LLMs are good and answering tech questions is that they’ve read SO

Maybe I am too harsh, and measured by its usefulness[1] it is not really a failure. I was involved in the early SO community and I think it is failure compared to what it could have been.

[1] However small that may be, even I would have a hard time to argue that it is useless or irrelevant.

I used to be an active Quora contributor and that platform is not worth saving. It kept getting worse and worse to the point where it's entire existance is just confusing.

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