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Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. T
by new_here 8y ago
Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns.
Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.
- PaulHoule 8y agoIt's not just "morals", it is "brand equity." If people believe in your brand, you have something. If they don't believe in your brand, you have nothing.
- richardhod 8y agoCan you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.
- joelhaasnoot 8y agoOnce upon a time one didn't need to login to read Quora stuff.
- artursapek 8y agoCan you imagine if Stackoverflow did this? The tech world would grind to a halt.
- Reedx 8y agoI don't know, in the case of StackOverflow I think it's worth the registration vs going back to pounding your head against the desk.
- reading-at-work 8y agoDon't give them any ideas!
- wongarsu 8y agoSo you're saying you're not upvoting useful answers on StackOverflow? Upvoting alone is enough to make me sign in to SO when I'm mysteriously logged out. SO saves me enough hours to justify that small curtesy.
- artursapek 8y agoI actually am signed in, but I know a lot of their traffic is anonymous users.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoWhich is better for caching, so it has advantages
- goobynight 8y agoNaw. Not signing up for Quora means you won't get to essentially entertain yourself. People would immediately sign up for SO if it were tied to their productivity. That is, unless answer providers have no interest in using the site for anything else. That's true in some cases.
- bena 8y agoUser-generated content. It's basically a crapshoot as to whether the person is a blowhard or knows what they're talking about.
- PaulHoule 8y agoMy 16-year old son has a classmate who has made about $50 or so writing spam questions for Quora. Some of these questions were astonishingly stupid, the kind of writing that I would have fired a spam writer back in the day that I hired spam writers. It wasn't clear if he was working for Quora or working for somebody who wanted to spam Quora, but the damage is done.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoI always wonder who's doing that and why. Quora does pay people to write questions, but the pay is supposed to be tied somehow to the quality of the answers. Maybe it's more a quantity thing, as dozens of people jump in to give answers to the basic arithmetic questions in my feed.
- CM30 8y agoHonestly, if you 'incentivise' someone to post on a community site (whether via money, exchanges or free stuff in general), the quality of their work will usually be terrible. What do you expect when you ask non experts to post reams of topics about things they haven't got the slightest clue about?
- astura 8y agoIm curious, can you give an example?
- borplk 8y agoMany dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content. Now it's a "modern" ExpertSexChange where "online marketing specialists" ask questions with one account and answer their own questions with another account. "Disclaimer haha I work for Bullshit.ly as a growth ninja but here's my response..." "In conclusion I'm not saying you should totally checkout our stuff ... but you totally should. just my 2 cents." And they are getting more sophisticated so it's not always so easy to spot.
- RankingMember 8y agoDead on, though I can't remember when experts-exchange wasn't garbage, even before they added the hyphen (haha).
- patrickg_zill 8y agoLong ago I was a consultant for a large church. One of their IT guys got a call from the pastor, who was worried about being hacked... The IT guy had been working on the desktop and had left up a browser window. The pastor read the URL as ExpertSexChange...
- RankingMember 8y agoI mean, if I was going to have that kind of surgery I'd definitely be looking for an expert. You put a regular cosmetic surgeon in there and you risk having no wrinkles on things that should have wrinkles and other such catastrophes. All this to say maybe they missed an opportunity when they ditched that domain. ;)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- briffle 8y agoAround 1997 or so, I got called into a meeting with my boss, director, and head of IT security. I worked night shift in a wafer fab, and someone was accessing the computers in the office, and visiting inappropriate sites at night (that their new sophisticated monitor found). I was young, and into computers, I guess they assumed it was me. I pointed out that I didn't have a keycard that gave me access to the office area, so it couldn't be me, asked if they checked it. While they were quickly apologizing, I asked what site they accessed. www.excite.com The look on their faces when I suggested they actually verify the site before firing whoever it was.....
- adventured 8y agoKnowledge services make for horrible VC businesses. The exception to that rule is Stack Exchange, because they have a business model that is unique to the space and impossible to replicate for a site like Quora (Genius, Answers.com, wikiHow, et al.). Quora has to allow low quality content on their service in order to keep the volume up, to drive traffic & clicks, to drive ad potential, to avoid the dreaded down rounds and eventual drift toward forced sale. There's only so much legitimate high quality content for a site like Quora and it's nowhere near enough to validate a $2 billion valuation (much less higher). Consider for a moment that Yelp - which is a real business in a highly monetizable segment, that is also profitable and will hit an annual billion dollars in sales soon - is worth $3 billion. So if you get a $2 billion valuation as Quora, where are you going from there? It's obvious. Genius is facing the same exact fundamental problem that Quora is. Take a lot of money from VCs, get a big valuation, find it impossible to live up to it. Turns out normal people don't want to annotate everything and could mostly care less unless it's a more narrow passion segment (music). There are only two paths for knowledge services. Stay small and very lean, aggressively limit costs, and use an ad model - that's wikiHow. Or go the Wikipedia route. Anything involving VCs will end in disaster and or forced sales. Knowledge services properly have to think very, very long-term (if they're actually trying to fulfill a knowledge mission and aren't just traffic fronts), they need a decade outlook or more. VCs think short-term, they look at ~5-10 year type exit outcomes. High quality, long-lived knowledge services are fundamentally opposed to a focus on exits in any manner, as they have a higher calling than looking for an exit for a VC - and any deviation from that must inherently destroy the community.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago> Quora has to allow low quality content on their service in order to keep the volume up, to drive traffic & clicks, to drive ad potential How does flooding my feed with dozens of questions about what the probabilities of different subsets of the faces are when rolling a die (e.g. what's the probability of getting an even number or greater than 5 when rolling a die?) help drive traffic, clicks, and ad potential?
- rhizome 8y ago
- neerkumar 8y agoThey also changed their answer ranking algorithm. It started giving much higher weight to answers from users who answered many other questions on the site. I guess the goal was to incentivize users to answer more questions. But Quora was nice because you would find for almost each question an answer from a real expert in that specific question. And that's pretty unique by definition. Result was that the best answers were often not the top 1 despite having way more upvotes -> bad user experience. True experts almost stopped answering because what was the point if it was going to be hard for users to find their answer, and certainly they wouldn't bother to start answering a bunch of questions on the site just to increase their ranking. Low level/high volume content took over Quora.
- tzjmetron 8y agoIndia happened to it.
- rjain15 8y agoThere is nothing wrong in making money, if you want to attract good content writers and curate content, provide additional services like digital magazine, you have to make money to pay your writers, curators and staff. I don't write for Medium, but I think rather than trashing Medium, maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers. There is enough garbage out in the internet, maybe Medium can help clean it up.
- cujo 8y ago> maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers Or maybe that's their mission and they should do that? I'm not sure why any of us as writer or readers should or could do this.
- taude 8y agoI'm sure there's other like me here, but I don't even click on articles published in Medium anymore because I don't want to deal with their gigantic popup that interferes with me getting to the content. I think we're eventually going to see a resurgence in open platforms where content creators better control their content. I don't think the discoverability of these content hubs is worth it, I personally do more discovery other ways and usually only end up on the site after a recommendation, etc...
- habeebtc 8y agoI legitimately want to read the articles--they have a lot of interesting ones. The curious thing is that often enough you can't even click through--they insist that it's "Medium Exclusive" content and you can only view 3 a month. (Browser Private mode helps, but is not a panacea) But... If I search the 'net for the title of the supposed Exclusive article, I can frequently find it elsewhere with no nagging or paywall. I don't really believe Medium has the exclusive content that gives it an advantage over anything else, but it's useful as curated, indexed content that you can find elsewhere. This is probably not what they are going for, though.
- dhimes 8y ago
- stochastic_monk 8y agoAll the extra features interfering with my reading experience didn’t help, either. I just don’t read articles on Medium.
- bogomipz 8y agoIndeed, when your reading experienced is interrupted immediately on page load by asking you to sign up I think you can argue its not a good experience at all. I stopped reading articles on Medium as well.
- tzs 8y agoI don't understand the level of complaints on HN about that sign up overlay. Are they testing multiple nag screens and I got lucky and always get the minimally intrusive one, and the rest of you getting the terrible ones? Yes, it is slightly annoying, but it is extremely easy to dismiss. Unlike the nag screens at many sites you don't have to find and click an 'x' in some weird location. It goes away if you click anywhere on the page outside the nag screen. It also goes away if you hit ESC on the keyboard. (I don't know if other keys also dismiss it too. I've only tried ESC). Furthermore, also unlike many other sites, it comes up right away rather than waiting for you to get into the article and then interrupting you. So it is click on a Medium link, get shown the nag screen immediately if it is going to be shown at all, and then hit ESC or click somewhere and it goes away.
- colemickens 8y agoI really don't want to live in a dystopia where basic text content from random companies, startups, blogs, etc can't be read without being subjected to a startup's conversion flow. I can't believe that I could get free cPanel/PHP/wordpress hosting when I was a teenager, and people will live with a fullscreen nag ad for their company blog 17 years later.
- colemickens 8y agoAs always, silent downvotes for pointing out illogical group-think behavior. Never change. Heh, maybe it's startup hustler types that think intentionally-delayed, fullscreen ads are the pinnacle of innovation and hacker culture. Anything to make a buck.
- Reedx 8y ago> Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though... That's the pure growth first strategy. At first it's all roses. Completely free, even ad-free. So there's none of the friction that comes with monetization. But eventually it comes into the picture. Either a service is monetized from the start or it comes later.
- baxtr 8y agoYeah, I really wonder if there is a “non-evil” example for: Don’t worry how this will monetize. We’ll figure this out later once we have the scale.
- JasonSage 8y agoTrello, perhaps?
- jopsen 8y agoGithub
- wlesieutre 8y agoEasy to say that right now, but Microsoft hasn't owned it long enough to have any negative impact on the service. For all we know 5 years from now they'll pull a Sourceforge and start bundling malware into your downloads.
- jahewson 8y agoI know: they won’t.
- wlesieutre 8y agoA few years ago I'd have told you "Surely Microsoft won't start automatically installing Candy Crush games on my licensed copy of Windows Professional" but here we are. A few years from now, some brilliant manager realizes they can "add value for customers" by helpfully including third party software offers with github release downloads, just like Sourceforge did. Who knows?
- chipotle_coyote 8y agoI know there's an awful lot of legacy hatred for Microsoft around HN, and I'm not claiming they'll never be a bad actor in any regard ever again -- but I'd expect if that happens for it to be a lot more subtle than "hey, let's make desperate deals with sleazy third-party companies to stuff shady crap in your downloads until we're inevitably caught at it."
- brightball 8y agoI work for one of those fully bootstrapped successful companies now and it really is fantastic how we can have real business conversations around ecosystem improvement that don’t revolve around money. Money is good, but not having everything dictated by it is good for the mission. EDIT: Sure there's still a financial incentive there but it's framed more in the "we need to turn a profit so that we can afford to continue doing these things". We still have salespeople who still have commissions and we still have salaries to pay.
- MarsAscendant 8y agoIs there still a concern about the profit? I'm assuming you're working for a for-profit company, where one of the goals – if not the goal, ultimately – is to make cash. (I don't mean to insinuate any sharply-materialistic outlook on your company: I sincerely don't know how a company thinks about money.)
- amenod 8y agoNot GP, but in a similar position. No, no concern whatsoever. The owners are not greedy which makes all the difference in the world. Not that the profit is low - it is probably much higher this way, when the whole company pulls toward the goals. I have never worked in an environment with so low amount of office politics. With the way things look right now for high-tech (or any software development) companies the margins are quite high. But of course, if you are a VC who invests in hundreds of businesses, and expect only a few of them to fly, then those few must fly pretty high to make it worth your while. Which means that being just very profitable is not enough - you need to be extremely profitable. And that comes with compromises (mostly for the workers at such startups).
- zrobotics 8y agoThat will always be a concern, even for a nonprofit. You need to keep the lights on, and people need to be paid. However, the trouble with VC funding is the expectation of scale. A VC won't be happy with a small organization that makes enough to pay its employees and sustain a small amount of growth. Unfortunately, that business requires large successes. So the founders and the investors can easily have very different goals. VC funding is required if you want to build something massive, but isn't a great idea if the founders just want to build a sustainable but small business.
- nvr219 8y agoIf I have to read a medium article the first thing I do is hide/block the elements for the annoying bottom bar (with ublock)
- dgellow 8y agoIs there an easy way to find out these non-VC companies when looking for a new job? That’s quite specific but could be an interesting criteria
- dabockster 8y agoNot really. Even being bootstrapped, they'll still act like a startup (long hours, missing paychecks, etc) if they don't have their stuff together.
- puranjay 8y agoQuora is extremely awful now. I'd say its worse than Yahoo Answers of old. At least YA could be unintentionally funny. Quora is nothing but spammers self marketing. There is no moderation whatsoever.
- IshKebab 8y agoI don't recall Quora ever being good. What decade was this?
- manigandham 8y agoIt was fantastic before 2012 when it had a small focused audience (similar to HN) and simple site before all the spam started.