7 ms·

>What happened to Quora anyway? It became marketing. Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup. Same with Med

>What happened to Quora anyway? It became marketing. Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup. Same with Medium. Once the startup bros say a site is good for "native marketing", that's when the begins to die.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
notacoward 8y ago
> Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup. They break all of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high-quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they started getting on my case for not having topic bios, even though other people's were blatantly false, for not responding nicely when their favorites were being dicks in comments, etc. So I just quit cold turkey and haven't posted since. I only go back to read sometimes when I'm super bored, and that's about it.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Exactly this. I used to love writing long-form answers but they would get shoved out of the way with either meme-filled images, copy/pasted nonsense from the web, or a few writers who have no idea on the subject but have a large following that upvotes everything including joke answers. There's also seemingly no effort spent on stopping spam even with blatant examples reported many times. It's crazy to see questions get paid thousands while being a Top Writer means I get the opportunity to buy their merchandise.
  - halfjew22 8y ago
    --- COPY / PASTE FROM ABOVE --- Gonna copy and paste this below, but it's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency. On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person. I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks. knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function. If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
- halfjew22 8y ago
  Gonna copy and paste this below, but it's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency. On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person. I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks. knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function. If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
  - rtisdale 8y ago
    I hope you see the irony in this.
    - stallmanite 8y ago
      It has to be a joke.
- mroche 8y ago
  Thank you for your time there. I end up on Quora quite a bit, at least when searching camparison based queries and the really long answers that cover a subject in (sometimes extreme) depth have been fantastic to read. I have read some answers that outperform StackOverflow, StackExchange, and UnixExchange in terms of quality and detail. I love reading answers from people that have intimate knowledge about a subject and don’t just post sourced images or links to documentation that the question asker didn’t understand the first time they read it (which is usually stated up front). Granted, most of these posts are early 2017 and earlier.
- CPLX 8y ago
  Yup I was also a top writer. The site had a lot of potential early on but I had the same experience as you eventually.
- dmoy 8y ago
  Do you know of any good replacement sites? (If you were to answer longform somewhere now, where would it be?)
  - hyperpallium 8y ago
    well... http://stackoverflow.com http://stackoverflow.com for programming, and the family of http://stackexchange.com http://stackexchange.com websites for many other fields.
    - sharken 8y ago
      Exactly this, for the past many years, when ever i have needed a good answer to a not-so-common problem, Stack Overflow cuts right to the chase and delivers a useful answer.
    - hopler 8y ago
      Quora's whole model is "like Stack Exchange, but with venture capital for a big IPO". Everything after the comma explains why Quora is junk.
      - Fire-Dragon-DoL 8y ago
        Quora is (was) open ended and allowed discussions. Most tech questions I have can't be written on stackoverflow. The most stupid one is "what book can I read to learn xxx". Now they removed descriptions from questions, hide comments by default, so they are heading the same direction. Stackoverflow is helpful as documentation with examples, but for engineering problems is of no help anymore. I usually have to ask in some dev chats and discuss there
  - polpo 8y ago
    Ask MetaFilter: https://ask.metafilter.com/ https://ask.metafilter.com/ It costs $5 to get an account that lets you ask or answer, and they have paid moderation staff that keep answers on-topic and high quality. The signal-to-noise ratio is quite high.
- codezero 8y ago
  I helped write a bunch of Quora's rules and policies, and I also helped create the Top Writer's program. I probably hand selected you in the first two years. I left Quora in 2014, but your first statement feels very true to me. I can't say what they did after I left, but I saw a clear willingness to have a fuzzy interpretation of the rules for power users. There was a time when Quora would bend over backwards to have one person from NASA write answers. I felt that wasn't really a great strategy. I always felt it would be much more valuable to have 1000 NASA employees write their best answer, and to find a way to make that happen. This clearly didn't happen, as the one person from NASA who wrote thousands of answers is still a very active. Full disclosure: I deleted my entire account, questions (>100), answers (>1000), and edits (>100,000) in rage in around 2015, mainly because I'm immature, but partly because I didn't want Quora to have what I made after I left. Also, I created a new account, because I wanted to feel it out to see how it was now, in case someone comes looking :P
  - manigandham 8y ago
    I think it's what they're breaking rules for that makes all the difference. Helping a few writers that pump out amazing content seems to benefit everyone and is worth it if there are tight controls on exactly what's allowed. Right now the system seems to be breaking rules that hurt writers and readers alike, with no discernible benefit other than creating tons of ad inventory and SEO inbound traffic.
    - codezero 8y ago
      Monetization definitely complicates things. When I was there, there wasn’t any.
- thewhitetulip 8y ago
  Same story. I quit when it became Facebook style with zero useful answers.
- snr 8y ago
  This. I reported a "famous" author multiple times for violating a bunch of rules and I was retaliated against and my write/update 'privileges' suspended. Well, flunk you too, Quora. Not to mention, the abundance of dirt quality content and insincere questions (and answers)
karlmcguire 8y ago
> Once the startup bros say a site is good for "native marketing", that's when the begins to die. That's a good point. Though it certainly isn't the case for Instagram...
- erichurkman 8y ago
  Instagram is good for marketing visual products and ideas. It's visual discovery. Quora pushed a blend between Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. It was text-based discovery. I do miss the well-researched, cited, frequently updated answers of yesteryear.
  - halfjew22 8y ago
    Copy and paste from comment above. Knophy.com is going to have no ads and is going to promote the usage of competency and evidence of content. More details will be posted on SHOWHN in about 3 - 4 weeks when I can get my prototype live. >It's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency. On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person. I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks. knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function. If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- josteink 8y ago
  I dunno. I’ve noticed my feed now contains more and more ads. And posts out of order. And posts on repeat. It’s clearly no longer the simple service which simply shows me the latest images posted by those I follow. It’s now a site I can tell is trying to game me, and that’s such a turn off. Facebook had that moment where they crossed a line and that was when I stopped posting. Instagram too is getting close. They shouldn’t push their luck.
wnevets 8y ago
Seems like "marketing" is how a lot of things die and/or become garbage.
- qznc 8y ago
  Is it cause or effect though? The actual reason could be that your business model is not sustainable. Eventually you will then be pressured into ever more desperate ways to get income. Inevitably that will include ads on the web.
  - int0x80 8y ago
    It's not profitable /or/ you are just going for the short-term and easy way out of the problem.
anigbrowl 8y ago
Advertising seems to be toxic to free communication. It pretty much killed Usenet.
- manigandham 8y ago
  You can definitely have ads like Reddit or StackOverflow that work fine though. Messing with the content itself is the problem.
  - zerkten 8y ago
    My impression was that the folks at Quora never got community and content the way that those two did. Stack Overflow's founders effectively provided an audio playbook in their podcast (before Jeff left) and anyone could have followed it to create a great Q&A site. This is just one demonstration of their attention to detail. They experimented with business models, and got growth on a technical platform that turns out to have been very efficient. Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. Looking at Crunchbase they had $226M funding compared to Stack Overflow's $68M. I know it's more complicated than those numbers, but I feel like that funding is squandered on Quora.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      > Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. I think that pretty much sums up how I feel about Silicon Valley and what it's come to stand for. Earlier, it was about building something cool that people used (and make a good living doing it). Then some of those cool things ended up making so much money, that now it's not about making creating, it's about making money. The same thing happened with the mobile app stores. First it was about people making cool stuff that was useful, and then a few stories came out about how insanely lucrative some apps ended up being, and everyone wanted to make the next app and get rich. Since this seems to be a natural emergent phenomenon with how our culture and technology interact, I guess I'm just hoping that somewhere along the lifecycle of the phenomenon it settles into a more sane paradigm where everyone isn't constantly on step X of what is essentially a get rich quick scheme.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
So economics eventually kills anything that's free to consume. Well... I can't say that surprises me.
- richardbdrowley 8y ago
  Wikipedia is still alive
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    So is Khan academy. The key there is non-profit.
sh87 8y ago
makes me wonder how HN manages to maintain sanity in such a world
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  By allowing only the following forms of advertising: YC startups looking for employees, companies looking for employees. Show HN threads are meant for "hey look I made this, I'd like feedback / this may be useful to some". Beyond that, everything that looks like an attempt to advertise (as opposed to honest suggestions) gets downvoted and/or banned directly. HN has indirect benefits to YC, so it gets hosted and maintained. In that model, ensuring authenticity and freedom from advertising cancer works for the benefit of both the community and YC.
  - sh87 8y ago
    > ... everything that looks like an attempt to advertise (as opposed to honest suggestions) gets downvoted and/or banned directly. That is so easy to game for a startup - Post something related, get friends/ pay for upvotes, repeat. What applies to quora's fall also applies to HN. How could HN (or any other niche community for that matter) survive that downward spiral?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      HN tries to actively counter that - including by employing algorithmic voting ring detectors, and trigger-happy community willing to downvote and flag anything that smells of astroturfing :). But I guess a big part of the reason is that HN generally doesn't want to have this kind of content here, whereas people running Quora embraced and encouraged thinly-veiled ads.
sh87 8y ago
makes me wonder how HN manages to maintain sanity
hopler 8y ago
What is a "bro"? Is advertising a male business?
- beatgammit 8y ago
  It seems advertising on crap sites with annoying blog spam is dominated by males, and I say that as a male who has considered doing that for my startup. I don't know if it's unique to men or if it's just because there seems to be more men than women founders, but that's the impression I get. When I see a startup with a woman at the helm, it seems that advertising is a bit less aggressive, but again, that may be selection bias.
- astura 8y ago
  It refers to the (unfortunately named) "Bro" subculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(subculture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(subculture) >Bro is a subculture of young men who spend time partying with others like themselves.[1] Although the popular image of bro lifestyle is associated with sports apparel and fraternities, it lacks a consistent definition. Most aspects vary regionally such as in California where it overlaps with surf culture.[2] Oxford Dictionaries have noted that bros frequently self-identify with neologisms containing the word "bro" as a prefix or suffix.[1] In a New York Magazine article in September 2013, Ann Friedman wrote: "Bro once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men."[3]
cyberpunk0 8y ago
Then ProductHunt came along and did the same thing with everyone immediately hopping on the thread and patting themselves on the back for their <insert_terrible_app_here>

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

notacoward 8y ago

> Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup. They break all of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high-quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they started getting on my case for not having topic bios, even though other people's were blatantly false, for not responding nicely when their favorites were being dicks in comments, etc. So I just quit cold turkey and haven't posted since. I only go back to read sometimes when I'm super bored, and that's about it.

manigandham 8y ago
Exactly this. I used to love writing long-form answers but they would get shoved out of the way with either meme-filled images, copy/pasted nonsense from the web, or a few writers who have no idea on the subject but have a large following that upvotes everything including joke answers. There's also seemingly no effort spent on stopping spam even with blatant examples reported many times. It's crazy to see questions get paid thousands while being a Top Writer means I get the opportunity to buy their merchandise.
- halfjew22 8y ago
  --- COPY / PASTE FROM ABOVE --- Gonna copy and paste this below, but it's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency. On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person. I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks. knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function. If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
halfjew22 8y ago
Gonna copy and paste this below, but it's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency. On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person. I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks. knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function. If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
- rtisdale 8y ago
  I hope you see the irony in this.
  - stallmanite 8y ago
    It has to be a joke.
mroche 8y ago
Thank you for your time there. I end up on Quora quite a bit, at least when searching camparison based queries and the really long answers that cover a subject in (sometimes extreme) depth have been fantastic to read. I have read some answers that outperform StackOverflow, StackExchange, and UnixExchange in terms of quality and detail. I love reading answers from people that have intimate knowledge about a subject and don’t just post sourced images or links to documentation that the question asker didn’t understand the first time they read it (which is usually stated up front). Granted, most of these posts are early 2017 and earlier.
CPLX 8y ago
Yup I was also a top writer. The site had a lot of potential early on but I had the same experience as you eventually.
dmoy 8y ago
Do you know of any good replacement sites? (If you were to answer longform somewhere now, where would it be?)
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  well... http://stackoverflow.com http://stackoverflow.com for programming, and the family of http://stackexchange.com http://stackexchange.com websites for many other fields.
  - sharken 8y ago
    Exactly this, for the past many years, when ever i have needed a good answer to a not-so-common problem, Stack Overflow cuts right to the chase and delivers a useful answer.
  - hopler 8y ago
    Quora's whole model is "like Stack Exchange, but with venture capital for a big IPO". Everything after the comma explains why Quora is junk.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 8y ago
      Quora is (was) open ended and allowed discussions. Most tech questions I have can't be written on stackoverflow. The most stupid one is "what book can I read to learn xxx". Now they removed descriptions from questions, hide comments by default, so they are heading the same direction. Stackoverflow is helpful as documentation with examples, but for engineering problems is of no help anymore. I usually have to ask in some dev chats and discuss there
- polpo 8y ago
  Ask MetaFilter: https://ask.metafilter.com/ https://ask.metafilter.com/ It costs $5 to get an account that lets you ask or answer, and they have paid moderation staff that keep answers on-topic and high quality. The signal-to-noise ratio is quite high.
codezero 8y ago
I helped write a bunch of Quora's rules and policies, and I also helped create the Top Writer's program. I probably hand selected you in the first two years. I left Quora in 2014, but your first statement feels very true to me. I can't say what they did after I left, but I saw a clear willingness to have a fuzzy interpretation of the rules for power users. There was a time when Quora would bend over backwards to have one person from NASA write answers. I felt that wasn't really a great strategy. I always felt it would be much more valuable to have 1000 NASA employees write their best answer, and to find a way to make that happen. This clearly didn't happen, as the one person from NASA who wrote thousands of answers is still a very active. Full disclosure: I deleted my entire account, questions (>100), answers (>1000), and edits (>100,000) in rage in around 2015, mainly because I'm immature, but partly because I didn't want Quora to have what I made after I left. Also, I created a new account, because I wanted to feel it out to see how it was now, in case someone comes looking :P
- manigandham 8y ago
  I think it's what they're breaking rules for that makes all the difference. Helping a few writers that pump out amazing content seems to benefit everyone and is worth it if there are tight controls on exactly what's allowed. Right now the system seems to be breaking rules that hurt writers and readers alike, with no discernible benefit other than creating tons of ad inventory and SEO inbound traffic.
  - codezero 8y ago
    Monetization definitely complicates things. When I was there, there wasn’t any.
thewhitetulip 8y ago
Same story. I quit when it became Facebook style with zero useful answers.
snr 8y ago
This. I reported a "famous" author multiple times for violating a bunch of rules and I was retaliated against and my write/update 'privileges' suspended. Well, flunk you too, Quora. Not to mention, the abundance of dirt quality content and insincere questions (and answers)

karlmcguire 8y ago

> Once the startup bros say a site is good for "native marketing", that's when the begins to die. That's a good point. Though it certainly isn't the case for Instagram...

erichurkman 8y ago
Instagram is good for marketing visual products and ideas. It's visual discovery. Quora pushed a blend between Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. It was text-based discovery. I do miss the well-researched, cited, frequently updated answers of yesteryear.
- halfjew22 8y ago
  Copy and paste from comment above. Knophy.com is going to have no ads and is going to promote the usage of competency and evidence of content. More details will be posted on SHOWHN in about 3 - 4 weeks when I can get my prototype live. >It's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency. On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person. I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks. knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function. If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
josteink 8y ago
I dunno. I’ve noticed my feed now contains more and more ads. And posts out of order. And posts on repeat. It’s clearly no longer the simple service which simply shows me the latest images posted by those I follow. It’s now a site I can tell is trying to game me, and that’s such a turn off. Facebook had that moment where they crossed a line and that was when I stopped posting. Instagram too is getting close. They shouldn’t push their luck.

wnevets 8y ago

Seems like "marketing" is how a lot of things die and/or become garbage.

qznc 8y ago
Is it cause or effect though? The actual reason could be that your business model is not sustainable. Eventually you will then be pressured into ever more desperate ways to get income. Inevitably that will include ads on the web.
- int0x80 8y ago
  It's not profitable /or/ you are just going for the short-term and easy way out of the problem.

anigbrowl 8y ago

Advertising seems to be toxic to free communication. It pretty much killed Usenet.

manigandham 8y ago
You can definitely have ads like Reddit or StackOverflow that work fine though. Messing with the content itself is the problem.
- zerkten 8y ago
  My impression was that the folks at Quora never got community and content the way that those two did. Stack Overflow's founders effectively provided an audio playbook in their podcast (before Jeff left) and anyone could have followed it to create a great Q&A site. This is just one demonstration of their attention to detail. They experimented with business models, and got growth on a technical platform that turns out to have been very efficient. Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. Looking at Crunchbase they had $226M funding compared to Stack Overflow's $68M. I know it's more complicated than those numbers, but I feel like that funding is squandered on Quora.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    > Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. I think that pretty much sums up how I feel about Silicon Valley and what it's come to stand for. Earlier, it was about building something cool that people used (and make a good living doing it). Then some of those cool things ended up making so much money, that now it's not about making creating, it's about making money. The same thing happened with the mobile app stores. First it was about people making cool stuff that was useful, and then a few stories came out about how insanely lucrative some apps ended up being, and everyone wanted to make the next app and get rich. Since this seems to be a natural emergent phenomenon with how our culture and technology interact, I guess I'm just hoping that somewhere along the lifecycle of the phenomenon it settles into a more sane paradigm where everyone isn't constantly on step X of what is essentially a get rich quick scheme.

james_s_tayler 8y ago

So economics eventually kills anything that's free to consume. Well... I can't say that surprises me.

richardbdrowley 8y ago
Wikipedia is still alive
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  So is Khan academy. The key there is non-profit.

sh87 8y ago

makes me wonder how HN manages to maintain sanity in such a world

TeMPOraL 8y ago
By allowing only the following forms of advertising: YC startups looking for employees, companies looking for employees. Show HN threads are meant for "hey look I made this, I'd like feedback / this may be useful to some". Beyond that, everything that looks like an attempt to advertise (as opposed to honest suggestions) gets downvoted and/or banned directly. HN has indirect benefits to YC, so it gets hosted and maintained. In that model, ensuring authenticity and freedom from advertising cancer works for the benefit of both the community and YC.
- sh87 8y ago
  > ... everything that looks like an attempt to advertise (as opposed to honest suggestions) gets downvoted and/or banned directly. That is so easy to game for a startup - Post something related, get friends/ pay for upvotes, repeat. What applies to quora's fall also applies to HN. How could HN (or any other niche community for that matter) survive that downward spiral?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    HN tries to actively counter that - including by employing algorithmic voting ring detectors, and trigger-happy community willing to downvote and flag anything that smells of astroturfing :). But I guess a big part of the reason is that HN generally doesn't want to have this kind of content here, whereas people running Quora embraced and encouraged thinly-veiled ads.

sh87 8y ago

makes me wonder how HN manages to maintain sanity

hopler 8y ago

What is a "bro"? Is advertising a male business?

beatgammit 8y ago
It seems advertising on crap sites with annoying blog spam is dominated by males, and I say that as a male who has considered doing that for my startup. I don't know if it's unique to men or if it's just because there seems to be more men than women founders, but that's the impression I get. When I see a startup with a woman at the helm, it seems that advertising is a bit less aggressive, but again, that may be selection bias.
astura 8y ago
It refers to the (unfortunately named) "Bro" subculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(subculture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(subculture) >Bro is a subculture of young men who spend time partying with others like themselves.[1] Although the popular image of bro lifestyle is associated with sports apparel and fraternities, it lacks a consistent definition. Most aspects vary regionally such as in California where it overlaps with surf culture.[2] Oxford Dictionaries have noted that bros frequently self-identify with neologisms containing the word "bro" as a prefix or suffix.[1] In a New York Magazine article in September 2013, Ann Friedman wrote: "Bro once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men."[3]

cyberpunk0 8y ago

Then ProductHunt came along and did the same thing with everyone immediately hopping on the thread and patting themselves on the back for their <insert_terrible_app_here>