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Can 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 t

Can 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 ago
Once upon a time one didn't need to login to read Quora stuff.
- artursapek 8y ago
  Can you imagine if Stackoverflow did this? The tech world would grind to a halt.
  - Reedx 8y ago
    I 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 ago
      Don't give them any ideas!
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    So 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 ago
      I actually am signed in, but I know a lot of their traffic is anonymous users.
      - NicoJuicy 8y ago
        Which is better for caching, so it has advantages
  - goobynight 8y ago
    Naw. 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 ago
User-generated content. It's basically a crapshoot as to whether the person is a blowhard or knows what they're talking about.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  My 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    Honestly, 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 ago
    Im curious, can you give an example?
borplk 8y ago
Many 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 ago
  Dead on, though I can't remember when experts-exchange wasn't garbage, even before they added the hyphen (haha).
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  Long 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    Around 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 ago
Knowledge 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 ago
They 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 ago
India happened to it.

Can 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 ago

Once upon a time one didn't need to login to read Quora stuff.

artursapek 8y ago
Can you imagine if Stackoverflow did this? The tech world would grind to a halt.
- Reedx 8y ago
  I 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 ago
    Don't give them any ideas!
- wongarsu 8y ago
  So 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 ago
    I actually am signed in, but I know a lot of their traffic is anonymous users.
    - NicoJuicy 8y ago
      Which is better for caching, so it has advantages
- goobynight 8y ago
  Naw. 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 ago

User-generated content. It's basically a crapshoot as to whether the person is a blowhard or knows what they're talking about.

PaulHoule 8y ago
My 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Honestly, 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 ago
  Im curious, can you give an example?

borplk 8y ago

Many 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 ago
Dead on, though I can't remember when experts-exchange wasn't garbage, even before they added the hyphen (haha).
patrickg_zill 8y ago
Long 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Around 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 ago

Knowledge 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 ago

They 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 ago

India happened to it.