29 ms·

Layoffs hit Quora

282 points by leothekim 7y ago

kyleomalley 7y ago
Is it time to revive fuckedcompany.com yet?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  Is it ever not?
whalesalad 7y ago
It's genuinely hard to believe that Quora is still running.
- hinkley 7y ago
  I find out Quora is still running every time I make a search query and get pages full of useless answers. Oh, here's a bunch of Quora links. I'm screwed.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    Quora: the Pinterest of text search. Or is Pinterest the Quora of image search?
    - preommr 7y ago
      Nah, Pintrest is somehow amazingly good at offering similar content. People must love making those boards because I get good enough results that there must be a lot of users doing good work in categorizing and organizing those images.
      - nottorp 7y ago
        Is it? I'll never know because they also require logging in :)
      - nineteen999 7y ago
        It's fantastic for artists since its really easy to generate large collections of reference images on just about any subject, inspiration sources etc. But to everyone else I'm sure it's really annoying.
  - kiba 7y ago
    Perhaps people shouldn't make startup with something as difficult to make profitable as question and answers type content, and instead leave it for an organization that is oriented to that mission. That way, something like quora would grow more valuable instead of becoming more useless as they attempt to make money out of a squeezed lemon.
    - davidw 7y ago
      Seems like a windmill people keep tilting at. A while back there was "Experts Exchange" AKA "Expert Sex Change dot com".
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        My understanding is that Stack Overflow started as a direct competitor to Experts Exchange and their SEO shenanigans, although based on recent goings on, Stack Exchange would’ve been served better as a non profit entity similar to Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210444
        hinkley 7y ago
        I wonder sometimes what Nietzsche would have made of VC culture. This is one of those times.
      - hinkley 7y ago
        Experts Exchange: The living embodiment of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      I want to be the person who is sympathetic to people being laid off, instead of making light of the situation. But Quora grinds my gears so hard that I can't separate the two.
- pbreit 7y ago
  I don’t get it either. They claim 300m MAUs and healthy answer growth. While it’s SEO is fantastic, the actual content is pretty marginal. I have no idea what the ultimate point is like I do with, say, Wkipedia.
  - bpodgursky 7y ago
    The odd thing about Quora is that there's actually a lot of good content, but it doesn't show up in search results because the questions that trigger it are of the format "Tell me something interesting about history / technology / whatever" The "hard fact" questions have answers that suck. Absolutely. SO is wildly better for that. It's really a place to go to follow certain people you can rely on to post interesting stuff (ex, there's a lot of really good ASOIAF content), follow niche topics and waste time. Like an entirely text-based reddit.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      You also have a huge amount of questions like “What’s the cheapest ticket I can get from A to B?” Or “Do I need travel insurance?” followed by answers with links to various spammy sites.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  For some reason there seem to several experts in my fields there who provide highly technical authoritative answers to questions there routinely. I don’t think there’s any better Q&A site?
- city41 7y ago
  I get where you're coming from. But I have to admit, I read my Quora digest email really often. I'm impressed how often I not only click through to read an answer, but enjoy the answer and find it valuable. Quora definitely does some questionable things nowadays, but I'd also argue they are still getting some key things right too.
  - solveit 7y ago
    The difference I'm seeing in the comments seems to be between actual Quora users and people who just keep stumbling on Quora via search. My impression is that Quora does well at tailoring content for its users while being obnoxiously aggressive about getting non-users to sign up.
    - htfu 7y ago
      Yup. Just when I finally gave in and made a user with a backup email it turns out they're also demanding I download their app? I definitely would've created an account long ago, with my regular Gmail, if they didn't demand it from me. And probably have their app too. But now I'm just determined to not give in further. And yes, I get they're doing it because it presumably works better on aggregate than not being assholes. That just makes me hate it even more. Quora just makes me irrationally pissed off. I realize my dislike is over the top, some of the content isn't terrible, I'd love for the basic format to somehow work out, but the package is somehow worse than Trump tweeting and I sincerely hope it fails as soon as possible.
    - rahidz 7y ago
      Sounds very similar to Pinterest; a spammy clickbait-ridden excuse for a website serving only to deceive you when you search for products or images for non-users, or an amazing tool you can use to categorize all the things, and find inspiration for similar items for users.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I agree. Some questions in my digest are interesting and often get very insightful answers from people with first hand knowledge.
- ausjke 7y ago
  Quora has been a resourceful site for me, though I do use google to find the info most of the time.
- busterarm 7y ago
  I've met more than one Quora engineer who were stone cold convinced that they hired the absolute best and brightest engineers _in the entire industry_ and that they were destined for greater things than Google, Amazon, etc. All I was left with was impression that Quora hires people that are batshit.
xenospn 7y ago
There used to be quite a few very interesting and insightful people who answered questions over there. These days it's all people trying to shamelessly self-promote with very low quality answers, something Quora should have banned a long time ago.
- rowathray 7y ago
  Half the answers are by people calling themselves the CEO of some dinky Saas thing with five bucks recurring revenue. I don't even click on it if it comes up.
- lkschubert8 7y ago
  I'd be surprised if that wasn't a decent chunk of their traffic.
m0zg 7y ago
Seems like a pretty solid wave of layoffs as of late. Harbinger of startup doom? Temporary correction?
arexxbifs 7y ago
> a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup Has the word "startup" simply replaced "company"? I'm thinking we should at least draw the line at a full decade.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  Startup seems to mean a company that still hasn't found a way to survive without ever more VC money.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    It’s a shame really that the meaning has been diluted; there are startups worth over $1 billion (not funny money, realistic multiples of ARR based on an arms length offer for shares) that are profitable, and startups that are a VC furnace and will never turn a profit.
- skissane 7y ago
  Often people use the word "startup" simply to mean "private company which plans on an IPO but hasn't had one yet" (as opposed to public companies, and private companies that have no plan to ever IPO) Sometimes a private company can take 10 or more years to reach the IPO stage. This is probably especially true for bootstrapped companies which can grow at a more steady pace than those VC-backed from very early on
  - jhrmnn 7y ago
    This definition seems to reflect usage. The question then is: what is the operational difference between a company aiming at an IPO, and one aiming to maximize the total expected profit (that is, every company)? Or is the difference just in intent?
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    Startup has been used at least somewhat frequently for public companies as well. I’ve seen it used with tech companies that have been public recently. I think I’ve only seen it used on public companies that are losing money. So at least that part seems to be consistent. Still though, makes the word diluted.
city41 7y ago
In the past few days, Quora, EBay, 23 and Me and TripAdvisor all announced layoffs. Coincidence or early sign of something bigger?
- Xcelerate 7y ago
  I was wondering this as well.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Two scenarios: - the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO, which is when they get paid, so lots of companies are now doing layoffs instead of just getting more VC money - or, the economy (which hasn't had a real recession in a long time, since not even 2011 was quite a recession) is just due for a recession and tech startups are the canary telling us this is so
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO, That's a polite way to put it. I'd say the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't was the public saying don't foist your shit on us. How many VC bagholders are now sitting on "billions of dollars" in meaningless paper gains based on nothing but SoftBank's and others nonsense valuations?
  - hilbertseries 7y ago
    > Quora, EBay, 23 and Me and TripAdvisor Ebay and TripAdvisor are public companies.
- damq 7y ago
  I'd be curious to know if there's any organization that tracks layoff rate over time. It seems like the US Bureau of Labor Statistics used to do it, but Obama cut their funding [1]. [1] https://www.bls.gov/bls/sequester_info.htm https://www.bls.gov/bls/sequester_info.htm
- 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mancerayder 7y ago
Can they accidentally delete the breadcrumbs of questions I read, which they appear to keep about me, on the way out? Initially I loved Quora and participated, but some magic default setting toggle changed and suddenly I'd get emailed about something I clicked on due to a Google search result which took me to a Quora question or answer - pre-authenticated of course. Most of that is my fault, but now that info is available someplace forever.
codingslave 7y ago
Any company that relies on SEO content is basically going to disapear. Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes. Not only that, other lower ranked content can be verified to be "true" using neural network based NLP, meaning that the value of content has gone down. Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content. Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets. This is theft! My guess is that Yelp is next. EDIT: I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now. The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?
- arielm 7y ago
  I don’t know if blaming google is the only solution here - it’s really Quora’s fault for not building a good way to monetize into their platform. Lots of startups do that and most of those don’t get far. Quora did and now they need to fix it. Just like code debt.
- rowathray 7y ago
  Poor Quora and Trip Advisor. Let us play our tiny violins on their behalf.
  - codingslave 7y ago
    I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now.
- asiachick 7y ago
  I haven't used Yelp in years. AFAIK it's a USA only thing. Most other countries I've visited there are far more reviews on Google than Yelp. No idea how I can trust either of them (the reviews, not the companies) Yelp, yes the writing is on the wall. An no, google didn't steal anything from yelp. They just let users review places and post pictures.
cletus 7y ago
Better title: Quora still inexplicably exists 8 years after its irrelevance became apparent. You know, good news story.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >You know, good news story. You're missing the forest for the trees. It's Quora. It's Softbank imploding. It's WeWork. It's Wag. It's Uber. It's Tesla. It's Doordash. It's Lyft. It's Casper. It's 23andme. It's Digital Ocean. It's Mozilla. Who knows what the financials of the giant private companies actually look like? This is classic late economic cycle: the companies still appear to be succesful, but the fundamentals are shifting.
  - greglindahl 7y ago
    Did you intend to include public companies on your list?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
haonipige 7y ago
It's surprising to me that they just started layoff this year. This "startup" will come to an end because of its arrogance.
rossdavidh 7y ago
Years ago, I would occasionally answer a question on Quora, which usually seemed like a real question from a person trying to figure something out (for example, software career questions). In recent years, oddly, even the questions seem fake, as if somebody somewhere is being paid to come up with questions. Why would I spend time to answer if not even the person asking seems to really care? Perhaps, I am not the only one to stop seeing the point in Quora a while ago.
- manigandham 7y ago
  That's because they started paying people to post questions, which is completely absurd since the real value is in the answers. Unfortunately, as predicted by pretty much everyone, it led to a massive influx of generic, repetitive, and trivial questions spammed endlessly to the top writers who have now stopped contributing. Most questions are just spam sinkholes in an endless battle by fake accounts for top position.
- stebann 7y ago
  I commented on that, about politics. I had a quora account for about one year and answer many questions, but then it became worst and I couldn't participate anymore.
pcurve 7y ago
is layoff announcement becoming more frequent recently?
zerkten 7y ago
Like others I'm amazed that Quora still exists. In my experience it's accessible to people outside the programming bubble, but eschewed a lot of deliberate choices that StackOverflow made back in the early days. The result is that it's more of a question and opinion site, than a question and answer site. There isn't anything wrong with this differentiation in some ways, but it has driven the company further down the SEO path and they don't seem to have tried other things. It feels like SO has built up a recruiting business, tried many times to get their Q&A software into companies with varying success, really managed the costs of their business, and invited public scrutiny of their tech. I can only imagine how much Quora are hemorrhaging from running costs and bad tech choices.
irjustin 7y ago
I've said it in a few other posts but post WeWork, a lot of the big D, E, F companies are expected to hit profitability/break-even soon. Some other threads are talking about Google stealing a lot of the content. That's definitely true for weather, flights, but things like long form content is still long form. I would argue these layoffs aren't a function of the GMachine at work, but more generally all the big tech firms with lofted valuations are being 'called in'. Every week, I see at least 1 large name running lay offs here on HNews. The bubble at the 1B+ vals has started to correct. Firms are expecting people to prove their worth. Lots of times this means IPO and then trading on a multiple of earnings. Many of these guys aren't even near net positive so it's very scary. I expect 2020 to be the year startups have a lot of trouble at the Series C.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Was the WeWork failed IPO the RIP Good Times[1] of this boom? [1]: https://venturebeat.com/2008/10/10/the-sequoia-rip-good-times-presentation-get-your-copy-here/ https://venturebeat.com/2008/10/10/the-sequoia-rip-good-time...
- droopyEyelids 7y ago
  This feels insightful. I work for a big tech company (not faang) and we're doing a bunch of insane cost cutting bullshit and we've had a hiring freeze for maybe 10 months now. It's interesting to see the inside view but see that none of it hits the financial press, or even the analyst stuff like seeking alpha.
  - Balgair 7y ago
    Keep notes? I'm sure I'm not the only one on here that would love to compare/contrast what you are going through with what the rest of us have as well.
- claydavisss 7y ago
  This is just tech being reset to the rational expectations of any other industry. How many new businesses outside of tech can get a decade of runway to exit or show a profit? Quora et al are just the beginning and there is a lot of deadwood to be cleared out. The expectations of the last decade - that you could just get a company to a reasonable point of maturity and then just wait to be acquired - are no longer valid. Instead of bemoaning this reality check we should all be grateful that so much of the world's wealth was redirected into overcompensating us for unproductive work for so long. How many of us are paid over $200k to perform unprofitable work? Its crazy! But its been going on so long it has become accepted as the norm. Larger/profitable tech giants surely recognize there is no need to rush in an acquire startups for a premium...they will soon all be on the clearance rack...no one believes the valuations these companies and their VCs assign themselves anymore. Quora valued at $2 billion? I doubt they could get an offer for more than $100 million at this point. Interestingly since so much of the deadwood never made it to IPO, this culling could end up being a nonevent to investors. They'll stay invested in AAPL and MSFT and not miss Bay Area private startups imploding.
winkeyless 7y ago
So they overestimated what Quora really could be and burned way more money? Or is Google suffocating smaller tech companies? Content curation doesn’t scale as well as search algorithms. It reminds me of Yahoo and other portals who relies on editorial staffs (not meant it in a bad way).
manigandham 7y ago
Quora is a site that is somehow successful despite its product development decisions. They seem to constantly make the site and community worse with every update. There's still a decent amount of amazing valuable answers from real verified experts but the experience of using it is horrendous and I've completely stopped trying to write anything anymore.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I can't decide whether I hope that whoever decided that iOS Safari users on Quora would get a blocking "F you; use our mobile app" experience after scrolling a short distance is included in the layoffs or will be allowed to stay on and continue the destruction of the company.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    Yeah, do you want them to take that stratagem to their next company/product?
  - wiseleo 7y ago
    I get that, while logged in, as a Top Writer, with admin rights to some things, on a 10-year old account. Yeah, that’s wrong. There’s no check for isLoggenIn().
- codingslave 7y ago
  Yeah I think the downfall of quora is partly due to their product managers decision making and the machine learning recommendation engine. Both of which are abysmal even with all that Harvard and Stanford talent they have
  - rgoulter 7y ago
    My main interaction with Quota is its digest emails. I thought the recommendation is pretty good in terms of catching some attention. What's wrong with it?
    - 7y ago
tempsy 7y ago
Working at a company where the founder is so wealthy from a past exit can be really frustrating because they have little financial incentive to be running the company in a way that is in the best interest of the common shareholder (e.g. employees).
qrowaway 7y ago
The team at Quora is really strong. Many ex-Quorans have gone on to start their own really successful companies. If you or someone you know is affected, feel free to use this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hk4REpHkCCTS74MGGRNRHX1kQPEls4_vseUbul9dYW4/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hk4REpHkCCTS74MGGRNR...
svbolo 7y ago
Companies like Quora should provide at least three or six months of severance in cases of layoffs. There's no reason they can't. They surely knew three or six months in advance that they would likely be making this move. As startup workers, we should shame loudly and publicly companies that don't provide sufficient severance packages. It's the difference between causing a slight disturbance in worker's lives and potentially huge financial hardship. (Of course all employees should have a financial reserve. The fact is many people don't though. And even if they do, it hurts a lot to make them burn it down.) Someone should make a blacklist of startups that did layoffs without sufficient severance. Maybe I'll get around to it.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  You should should loudly at the state of California for still paying a max of $450 per week for unemployment. If you're playing the startup game, you're trading job security and pay for potential upside. I know people who've been burnt just as bad as a layoff because the company got sold for scraps. Don't expect big company benefits out of a startup; that's not how the game works.
yamrzou 7y ago
I used to enjoy Quora, but it lost its charm and I quit once my feed became mostly filled with questions such as: - As a software engineer, what makes you roll your eyes every time you hear it? - What did your mother say that made your jaw drop? - What can I learn in one minute that will be useful for the rest of my life? Those open questions just feel clickbait-y, with no real value added. I occasionally see questions similar to the last one on HN (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913129), it’s OK once in a while, but I hope it doesn’t become the norm. I think the HN userbase’s mindset and strong moderation guarantees that for now.
- TomVDB 7y ago
  These kind of questions where most likely generated by paid question askers who receive a cut of the ad revenue. I have first hand knowledge of somebody who made pretty good money doing exactly that. His rule of thumb was: the dumber the question, the more profitable it was for him.
  - omega3 7y ago
    What has always amazed me about Quora is that for every dumb one line question in the vein of "How do we know that the moon is not made of cheese?" there would be 500 word very well researched reply from an ex NASA chief of lunar mission. It always was baffling for me that such low effort questions would get such amazing answers.
    - wrinkl3 7y ago
      Some people just enjoy listening to themselves talk.
      - manigandham 7y ago
        It's more that some people genuinely love sharing their knowledge and investing their time to help others. These people generate the most value for Quora but unfortunately don't get anything out of it.
stebann 7y ago
I stopped using Quora because Latin-American Political Right never, absolutely never, were censored, but if I would post something favoring Peron's Government, Allende's or the first Chavez, they would censor me. I was talking about political and social advancements, while they would be claiming that the dictatorships never disappeared innocent people, they never stole to their victims and a long etc. Every year was becoming worse, it was like the US government explicitly put people to shape political comments against Latin-American governments. Community was getting worse. So many people like me just left.
kinkora 7y ago
Not sure if a bit of confirmation bias on my side but seems like there is a recent big uptick of layoffs at Silicon Valley companies? Popular ones like Quora, TripAvisor, Ebay, Mozilla, Uber, 23andMe, etc we hear about but among my own network, i am even hearing it from smaller startups & businesses. Just wondering if it is just me but I am surmising that it seems to indicate a wider systematic.. issue? Maybe issue is not the word for it. Symptom is probably a better description and it feels we are at the precipitous of an incoming storm/crunch/etc. Please tell me I am imagining things. Edit: I guess my question is more are all these layoffs an indicator of an incoming recession or is it something more nefarious like the big tech (FAANG) are taking steps to widen their positions while they are still in a "strong" position to do so (e.g. google).
- samantohermes 7y ago
  These are signs of the upcoming global economic crisis. Companies funded by the FED are simply not sustainable.
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    What does FED stand for in this context?
    - appleflaxen 7y ago
      Federal reserve; the central bank that keeps interest rates below natural market price in order to pump growth, thereby putting too much cash in investors hands to possibly use constructively. You end up with an investment bubble, which pops.
    - Doingmything123 7y ago
      I assume the Federal Reserve Board aka the central banking system of the US
  - thrower123 7y ago
    In general, these seem to be Softbank companies, more than anything else, and ultimately, those are funded by Saudi petrodollars.
cmpolis 7y ago
I used to be quite active on Quora, but have noticed a decline in content and ux quality - seems like they are trying to 'growth hack' in a way that is not benefiting users, e.g.: - Links to other questions open in new tabs - Most content is not shown unless you login, they are really trying to push being logged in and their mobile app - Answers with images seem to be ranked higher (even if poor quality) - Clickbait-y questions and answers I hope they can return to quality since in the beginning it was such a great resource - it was awesome to be able to get answers from domain experts, celebrities, etc... and the site was very usable.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  The ads are also very well-disguised, as if they were native content. I understand they’re trying to stay alive, but at some point you end up driving people away.
RickJWagner 7y ago
Quora layoffs just before peak election season? I did not see that one coming.
yalogin 7y ago
I used to be on the side of “why do we need Quora” camp but over the last few years I see that they have some really good content that no one else has, particularly content about obscure questions that wiki is not meant for. So I end up visiting often. The problem is they don’t have a way to monetize the content. They can only survive on cash so long.
hiram112 7y ago
According to the article, the number of layoffs is unknown (though I assume we'll know shortly since they're required by law to report it in California). They have approximately 200 employees, it also mentioned. According to a quick search, they were certified for 57 H1B visas. You read that right: 57 employees, in just 2019, of an approximate 200 person workforce, are foreigners that CEO D'Angelo claimed he was required to hire because he could not find US workers. It looks like another 50 or so in the previous two years. So half their employees are foreigners? How many US citizens are being laid off? Some of these jobs, according the Department of Labor's data, are paying as low as $60K... in Mountain View. Truly disgusting that this company is abusing the system like this. A fair punishment for these companies, along with all their visas being immediately revoked and a massive fine to discourage others, would be for the executive board to be forced to move their company to S. Asia, since apparently that's where their talent pool originates. If they aren't willing to hire US workers, they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the infrastructure, laws, capital markets, etc. that are provided by US taxpayers. * ReportH1BAbuse@uscis.dhs.gov * https://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Quora/1096469.htm https://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Quora/1096469.htm * https://h1bsalary.online/extended_lca_data.php?LCADataID=7815163 https://h1bsalary.online/extended_lca_data.php?LCADataID=781...
Proven 7y ago
Maybe they'll pollute search engines a bit less now.
davidtranjs 7y ago
Quora used to be my favorite place to find interesting answers. Now the site is filled with marketers. It's mystery for me how the site still show up on Google every time I need to search something.
blackrock 7y ago
Quora’s web page restrictions were always annoying. You can search for something from Google, and the site allows you to view the page. Then the page suggests other links, and when you click on it, it forces you to sign in. The trick is to copy that link, and open the page in a new incognito window. I don’t know why they did it this way, but it’s thoroughly annoying, and I try to avoid visiting the site if I can. And I roll my eyes whenever that site comes up in a search result.
- jaclaz 7y ago
  Or, add a question mark at the end of the Url and refresh.
Phanyxx 7y ago
I knew Quora’s time was up when they sent me a partner program email. It devolved into “yahoo answers” very quickly after that.
tima101 7y ago
We talked to Quora's CEO about 2 years ago about premium content and alternative business models, including subscription. There was no interest at the time and advertising was a sole focus for business model. CEO never followed up. Sad.
edoceo 7y ago
A few days ago a search about CNAMES landed me on a Quora page which I quickly left. Like a fool I wasn't incognito. And less than 24h later I got an email from Q to highlight other stale and incorrect information on their site. Creepy and bad. Unfortunate that layoffs don't start with upper management.
Priem19 7y ago
"Layoffs hit techcrunch" will be next: uMatrix has prevented the following page from loading: https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_a7ec9796-3f8a-4bd0-806a-953f55eac9f5 https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_...
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  They hijacked my back button, may be why.
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
Say what you want about how bad Quora content is, Quora has the most engaging email digest I ever knew. Every day they send me an email with some answers on topics I'm interested in, and I can't help but click on 6-8 of them from EACH email. The median CTR in any other of email digests recieved by me is zero.
- panorama 7y ago
  I had the same interaction but one day their algorithm flubbed and sent me a question that had very obvious Avengers: Endgame spoilers in the title. I had to unsubscribe after that.
  - rantwasp 7y ago
    a small price to pay for salvation
  - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    But you should have seen Endgame on the first weekend it was released! /s
- Alir3z4 7y ago
  OMG, YES! Exactly same to me as well!
jonplackett 7y ago
Why are Tech Crunch highjacking my back button?
bronz 7y ago
burn rate? so they are still running on vc? i guess it doesnt surprise me. they arent the worst thing to get massive vc. i will be very entertaining to see when the next recession hits and all these shitty companies dry up overnight. and it will be nice to have fewer arrogant tech peoples around who only have money because of misguided investors who have more money than sense.
cryptica 7y ago
IMO these types of companies never had a future. They only succeeded because of monetary inflation in the corporate sphere due to ultra-low interest rates. If the interest repayment on a bank loan is less than 2%, then it means that any business which can make more than 2% profit on their activities is profitable. But do such businesses deserve to exist? The Fed sets the interest rate so they decide what kind of business is profitable and is allowed to exist. It's obvious why the current economy has benefited tech companies that operate at high scale with ultra-low or close to 0 profit margins.
walkingolof 7y ago
This is an honest question, what is Quoras business model? It feels like a traditional forum.
mhh__ 7y ago
There is some really good content on Quora (by which I mean good writers, and even some war criminals...) but they need beating into shape.
rawoke083600 7y ago
Gheesh... First Uber, DigitalOcean, 23AndMe... and now Quora
cryptozeus 7y ago
Do we know how many ? News is useless unless its more than 10%
luhego 7y ago
Quora was a good product. I remember the first time I used it, I was amazed by the quality of their answers. Even Jordan Peterson betseller book was based on a Quora answer. Sadly, they decided to focus on questions instead. Now, it's filled with garbage questions and it is just slightly better than Yahoo answers.
njsubedi 7y ago
Personally I love reading some answers on Quora. But it's not because of Quora; the answer could be on any other site. I tried Quora Ads and lost some money only to discover that the returns are comparatively the worst among all the channels we tried, and off by several folds. That takes me and my money off of Quora Ads. If the company wants to monetize by selling ads, they should probably spend time making the advertisers' experience better. Because at the end of the day the advertisers are the people who are paying them. Disclaimer: I didn't write this to badmouth or (un)recommend them. I am only curious if other people's experience is the same.
seek3r00 7y ago
“We need to reduce our burn rate to a sustainable level from which we can focus on pursuing the mission and growing the business over the long term.”. The question is: what mission?
TruffleLabs 7y ago
“Quora, a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup” Companies that are ten years old are no longer startups. “IBM, a 109-year-old software & services startup, will enhance the red carpet livestream with Grammy Insights with Watson this Sunday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles." ;)
thr0w__4w4y 7y ago
Quora used to be OK, many years ago. I wrote a few detailed technical answers about C, C++ and embedded programming. Then it basically became GeoCities or MySpace or whatever. Garbage, filled with ads and posters shilling their services and goods, just yucky. Plus, as others have mentioned, doing a simple search, going over to quora, and then being forced to login.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  I stopped using it when they pulled the same “you can read this public user-provided comment, but if you want to read the NEXT one, you need to log in” shit that Facebook does.
celticmusic 7y ago
is it really a startup if it's been around 10 years?
cryptozeus 7y ago
California Employment Development Department said the company had not filed the type of notice that is required for mass layoffs, suggesting the cuts in the state involve fewer than 50 employees.
gumby 7y ago
I don't understand why Quora had so many employees. I don't intend to harsh on them: I literally don't understand their business. To my naïve understanding: they have an authentication system, a moderately high throughput CMS with a search engine, and...? + User-generated content. OK, some DevOps people, some people who negotiate with the CDNs. They seem pretty snappy so some serious work presumably went into the back end, but still. WhatsApp had only 50 people! What am I completely missing here? why did they have 200 people?
LZ_Khan 7y ago
I don't understand what's going on with Quora. It used to be full of insightful answers that improved the quality of my life. But now my feed is cluttered with clickbait's being recommended by random people saying "Good article." and -- just in general -- very low quality answers written by people without experience and who fail to back up their claims with evidence. It's become a big source of frustration reading these "verbal vomit" answers and trying to sort through the misinformation. Whoever the ML engineers on the recommendation stack were.. really fucked up imo.

Layoffs hit Quora

282 points by leothekim 7y ago

kyleomalley 7y ago

Is it time to revive fuckedcompany.com yet?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jacques_chester 7y ago
Is it ever not?

whalesalad 7y ago

It's genuinely hard to believe that Quora is still running.

hinkley 7y ago
I find out Quora is still running every time I make a search query and get pages full of useless answers. Oh, here's a bunch of Quora links. I'm screwed.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  Quora: the Pinterest of text search. Or is Pinterest the Quora of image search?
  - preommr 7y ago
    Nah, Pintrest is somehow amazingly good at offering similar content. People must love making those boards because I get good enough results that there must be a lot of users doing good work in categorizing and organizing those images.
    - nottorp 7y ago
      Is it? I'll never know because they also require logging in :)
    - nineteen999 7y ago
      It's fantastic for artists since its really easy to generate large collections of reference images on just about any subject, inspiration sources etc. But to everyone else I'm sure it's really annoying.
- kiba 7y ago
  Perhaps people shouldn't make startup with something as difficult to make profitable as question and answers type content, and instead leave it for an organization that is oriented to that mission. That way, something like quora would grow more valuable instead of becoming more useless as they attempt to make money out of a squeezed lemon.
  - davidw 7y ago
    Seems like a windmill people keep tilting at. A while back there was "Experts Exchange" AKA "Expert Sex Change dot com".
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      My understanding is that Stack Overflow started as a direct competitor to Experts Exchange and their SEO shenanigans, although based on recent goings on, Stack Exchange would’ve been served better as a non profit entity similar to Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210444
      - hinkley 7y ago
        I wonder sometimes what Nietzsche would have made of VC culture. This is one of those times.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      Experts Exchange: The living embodiment of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    I want to be the person who is sympathetic to people being laid off, instead of making light of the situation. But Quora grinds my gears so hard that I can't separate the two.
pbreit 7y ago
I don’t get it either. They claim 300m MAUs and healthy answer growth. While it’s SEO is fantastic, the actual content is pretty marginal. I have no idea what the ultimate point is like I do with, say, Wkipedia.
- bpodgursky 7y ago
  The odd thing about Quora is that there's actually a lot of good content, but it doesn't show up in search results because the questions that trigger it are of the format "Tell me something interesting about history / technology / whatever" The "hard fact" questions have answers that suck. Absolutely. SO is wildly better for that. It's really a place to go to follow certain people you can rely on to post interesting stuff (ex, there's a lot of really good ASOIAF content), follow niche topics and waste time. Like an entirely text-based reddit.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    You also have a huge amount of questions like “What’s the cheapest ticket I can get from A to B?” Or “Do I need travel insurance?” followed by answers with links to various spammy sites.
chrisseaton 7y ago
For some reason there seem to several experts in my fields there who provide highly technical authoritative answers to questions there routinely. I don’t think there’s any better Q&A site?
city41 7y ago
I get where you're coming from. But I have to admit, I read my Quora digest email really often. I'm impressed how often I not only click through to read an answer, but enjoy the answer and find it valuable. Quora definitely does some questionable things nowadays, but I'd also argue they are still getting some key things right too.
- solveit 7y ago
  The difference I'm seeing in the comments seems to be between actual Quora users and people who just keep stumbling on Quora via search. My impression is that Quora does well at tailoring content for its users while being obnoxiously aggressive about getting non-users to sign up.
  - htfu 7y ago
    Yup. Just when I finally gave in and made a user with a backup email it turns out they're also demanding I download their app? I definitely would've created an account long ago, with my regular Gmail, if they didn't demand it from me. And probably have their app too. But now I'm just determined to not give in further. And yes, I get they're doing it because it presumably works better on aggregate than not being assholes. That just makes me hate it even more. Quora just makes me irrationally pissed off. I realize my dislike is over the top, some of the content isn't terrible, I'd love for the basic format to somehow work out, but the package is somehow worse than Trump tweeting and I sincerely hope it fails as soon as possible.
  - rahidz 7y ago
    Sounds very similar to Pinterest; a spammy clickbait-ridden excuse for a website serving only to deceive you when you search for products or images for non-users, or an amazing tool you can use to categorize all the things, and find inspiration for similar items for users.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I agree. Some questions in my digest are interesting and often get very insightful answers from people with first hand knowledge.
ausjke 7y ago
Quora has been a resourceful site for me, though I do use google to find the info most of the time.
busterarm 7y ago
I've met more than one Quora engineer who were stone cold convinced that they hired the absolute best and brightest engineers _in the entire industry_ and that they were destined for greater things than Google, Amazon, etc. All I was left with was impression that Quora hires people that are batshit.

xenospn 7y ago

There used to be quite a few very interesting and insightful people who answered questions over there. These days it's all people trying to shamelessly self-promote with very low quality answers, something Quora should have banned a long time ago.

rowathray 7y ago
Half the answers are by people calling themselves the CEO of some dinky Saas thing with five bucks recurring revenue. I don't even click on it if it comes up.
lkschubert8 7y ago
I'd be surprised if that wasn't a decent chunk of their traffic.

m0zg 7y ago

Seems like a pretty solid wave of layoffs as of late. Harbinger of startup doom? Temporary correction?

arexxbifs 7y ago

> a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup Has the word "startup" simply replaced "company"? I'm thinking we should at least draw the line at a full decade.

marcinzm 7y ago
Startup seems to mean a company that still hasn't found a way to survive without ever more VC money.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  It’s a shame really that the meaning has been diluted; there are startups worth over $1 billion (not funny money, realistic multiples of ARR based on an arms length offer for shares) that are profitable, and startups that are a VC furnace and will never turn a profit.
skissane 7y ago
Often people use the word "startup" simply to mean "private company which plans on an IPO but hasn't had one yet" (as opposed to public companies, and private companies that have no plan to ever IPO) Sometimes a private company can take 10 or more years to reach the IPO stage. This is probably especially true for bootstrapped companies which can grow at a more steady pace than those VC-backed from very early on
- jhrmnn 7y ago
  This definition seems to reflect usage. The question then is: what is the operational difference between a company aiming at an IPO, and one aiming to maximize the total expected profit (that is, every company)? Or is the difference just in intent?
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Startup has been used at least somewhat frequently for public companies as well. I’ve seen it used with tech companies that have been public recently. I think I’ve only seen it used on public companies that are losing money. So at least that part seems to be consistent. Still though, makes the word diluted.

city41 7y ago

In the past few days, Quora, EBay, 23 and Me and TripAdvisor all announced layoffs. Coincidence or early sign of something bigger?

Xcelerate 7y ago
I was wondering this as well.
rossdavidh 7y ago
My thoughts exactly. Two scenarios: - the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO, which is when they get paid, so lots of companies are now doing layoffs instead of just getting more VC money - or, the economy (which hasn't had a real recession in a long time, since not even 2011 was quite a recession) is just due for a recession and tech startups are the canary telling us this is so
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO, That's a polite way to put it. I'd say the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't was the public saying don't foist your shit on us. How many VC bagholders are now sitting on "billions of dollars" in meaningless paper gains based on nothing but SoftBank's and others nonsense valuations?
- hilbertseries 7y ago
  > Quora, EBay, 23 and Me and TripAdvisor Ebay and TripAdvisor are public companies.
damq 7y ago
I'd be curious to know if there's any organization that tracks layoff rate over time. It seems like the US Bureau of Labor Statistics used to do it, but Obama cut their funding [1]. [1] https://www.bls.gov/bls/sequester_info.htm https://www.bls.gov/bls/sequester_info.htm
7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mancerayder 7y ago

Can they accidentally delete the breadcrumbs of questions I read, which they appear to keep about me, on the way out? Initially I loved Quora and participated, but some magic default setting toggle changed and suddenly I'd get emailed about something I clicked on due to a Google search result which took me to a Quora question or answer - pre-authenticated of course. Most of that is my fault, but now that info is available someplace forever.

codingslave 7y ago

Any company that relies on SEO content is basically going to disapear. Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes. Not only that, other lower ranked content can be verified to be "true" using neural network based NLP, meaning that the value of content has gone down. Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content. Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets. This is theft! My guess is that Yelp is next. EDIT: I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now. The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?

arielm 7y ago
I don’t know if blaming google is the only solution here - it’s really Quora’s fault for not building a good way to monetize into their platform. Lots of startups do that and most of those don’t get far. Quora did and now they need to fix it. Just like code debt.
rowathray 7y ago
Poor Quora and Trip Advisor. Let us play our tiny violins on their behalf.
- codingslave 7y ago
  I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now.
asiachick 7y ago
I haven't used Yelp in years. AFAIK it's a USA only thing. Most other countries I've visited there are far more reviews on Google than Yelp. No idea how I can trust either of them (the reviews, not the companies) Yelp, yes the writing is on the wall. An no, google didn't steal anything from yelp. They just let users review places and post pictures.

cletus 7y ago

Better title: Quora still inexplicably exists 8 years after its irrelevance became apparent. You know, good news story.

aguyfromnb 7y ago
>You know, good news story. You're missing the forest for the trees. It's Quora. It's Softbank imploding. It's WeWork. It's Wag. It's Uber. It's Tesla. It's Doordash. It's Lyft. It's Casper. It's 23andme. It's Digital Ocean. It's Mozilla. Who knows what the financials of the giant private companies actually look like? This is classic late economic cycle: the companies still appear to be succesful, but the fundamentals are shifting.
- greglindahl 7y ago
  Did you intend to include public companies on your list?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

haonipige 7y ago

It's surprising to me that they just started layoff this year. This "startup" will come to an end because of its arrogance.

rossdavidh 7y ago

Years ago, I would occasionally answer a question on Quora, which usually seemed like a real question from a person trying to figure something out (for example, software career questions). In recent years, oddly, even the questions seem fake, as if somebody somewhere is being paid to come up with questions. Why would I spend time to answer if not even the person asking seems to really care? Perhaps, I am not the only one to stop seeing the point in Quora a while ago.

manigandham 7y ago
That's because they started paying people to post questions, which is completely absurd since the real value is in the answers. Unfortunately, as predicted by pretty much everyone, it led to a massive influx of generic, repetitive, and trivial questions spammed endlessly to the top writers who have now stopped contributing. Most questions are just spam sinkholes in an endless battle by fake accounts for top position.
stebann 7y ago
I commented on that, about politics. I had a quora account for about one year and answer many questions, but then it became worst and I couldn't participate anymore.

pcurve 7y ago

is layoff announcement becoming more frequent recently?

zerkten 7y ago

Like others I'm amazed that Quora still exists. In my experience it's accessible to people outside the programming bubble, but eschewed a lot of deliberate choices that StackOverflow made back in the early days. The result is that it's more of a question and opinion site, than a question and answer site. There isn't anything wrong with this differentiation in some ways, but it has driven the company further down the SEO path and they don't seem to have tried other things. It feels like SO has built up a recruiting business, tried many times to get their Q&A software into companies with varying success, really managed the costs of their business, and invited public scrutiny of their tech. I can only imagine how much Quora are hemorrhaging from running costs and bad tech choices.

irjustin 7y ago

I've said it in a few other posts but post WeWork, a lot of the big D, E, F companies are expected to hit profitability/break-even soon. Some other threads are talking about Google stealing a lot of the content. That's definitely true for weather, flights, but things like long form content is still long form. I would argue these layoffs aren't a function of the GMachine at work, but more generally all the big tech firms with lofted valuations are being 'called in'. Every week, I see at least 1 large name running lay offs here on HNews. The bubble at the 1B+ vals has started to correct. Firms are expecting people to prove their worth. Lots of times this means IPO and then trading on a multiple of earnings. Many of these guys aren't even near net positive so it's very scary. I expect 2020 to be the year startups have a lot of trouble at the Series C.

dehrmann 7y ago
Was the WeWork failed IPO the RIP Good Times[1] of this boom? [1]: https://venturebeat.com/2008/10/10/the-sequoia-rip-good-times-presentation-get-your-copy-here/ https://venturebeat.com/2008/10/10/the-sequoia-rip-good-time...
droopyEyelids 7y ago
This feels insightful. I work for a big tech company (not faang) and we're doing a bunch of insane cost cutting bullshit and we've had a hiring freeze for maybe 10 months now. It's interesting to see the inside view but see that none of it hits the financial press, or even the analyst stuff like seeking alpha.
- Balgair 7y ago
  Keep notes? I'm sure I'm not the only one on here that would love to compare/contrast what you are going through with what the rest of us have as well.
claydavisss 7y ago
This is just tech being reset to the rational expectations of any other industry. How many new businesses outside of tech can get a decade of runway to exit or show a profit? Quora et al are just the beginning and there is a lot of deadwood to be cleared out. The expectations of the last decade - that you could just get a company to a reasonable point of maturity and then just wait to be acquired - are no longer valid. Instead of bemoaning this reality check we should all be grateful that so much of the world's wealth was redirected into overcompensating us for unproductive work for so long. How many of us are paid over $200k to perform unprofitable work? Its crazy! But its been going on so long it has become accepted as the norm. Larger/profitable tech giants surely recognize there is no need to rush in an acquire startups for a premium...they will soon all be on the clearance rack...no one believes the valuations these companies and their VCs assign themselves anymore. Quora valued at $2 billion? I doubt they could get an offer for more than $100 million at this point. Interestingly since so much of the deadwood never made it to IPO, this culling could end up being a nonevent to investors. They'll stay invested in AAPL and MSFT and not miss Bay Area private startups imploding.

winkeyless 7y ago

So they overestimated what Quora really could be and burned way more money? Or is Google suffocating smaller tech companies? Content curation doesn’t scale as well as search algorithms. It reminds me of Yahoo and other portals who relies on editorial staffs (not meant it in a bad way).

manigandham 7y ago

Quora is a site that is somehow successful despite its product development decisions. They seem to constantly make the site and community worse with every update. There's still a decent amount of amazing valuable answers from real verified experts but the experience of using it is horrendous and I've completely stopped trying to write anything anymore.

sokoloff 7y ago
I can't decide whether I hope that whoever decided that iOS Safari users on Quora would get a blocking "F you; use our mobile app" experience after scrolling a short distance is included in the layoffs or will be allowed to stay on and continue the destruction of the company.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  Yeah, do you want them to take that stratagem to their next company/product?
- wiseleo 7y ago
  I get that, while logged in, as a Top Writer, with admin rights to some things, on a 10-year old account. Yeah, that’s wrong. There’s no check for isLoggenIn().
codingslave 7y ago
Yeah I think the downfall of quora is partly due to their product managers decision making and the machine learning recommendation engine. Both of which are abysmal even with all that Harvard and Stanford talent they have
- rgoulter 7y ago
  My main interaction with Quota is its digest emails. I thought the recommendation is pretty good in terms of catching some attention. What's wrong with it?
  - 7y ago

tempsy 7y ago

Working at a company where the founder is so wealthy from a past exit can be really frustrating because they have little financial incentive to be running the company in a way that is in the best interest of the common shareholder (e.g. employees).

qrowaway 7y ago

The team at Quora is really strong. Many ex-Quorans have gone on to start their own really successful companies. If you or someone you know is affected, feel free to use this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hk4REpHkCCTS74MGGRNRHX1kQPEls4_vseUbul9dYW4/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hk4REpHkCCTS74MGGRNR...

svbolo 7y ago

Companies like Quora should provide at least three or six months of severance in cases of layoffs. There's no reason they can't. They surely knew three or six months in advance that they would likely be making this move. As startup workers, we should shame loudly and publicly companies that don't provide sufficient severance packages. It's the difference between causing a slight disturbance in worker's lives and potentially huge financial hardship. (Of course all employees should have a financial reserve. The fact is many people don't though. And even if they do, it hurts a lot to make them burn it down.) Someone should make a blacklist of startups that did layoffs without sufficient severance. Maybe I'll get around to it.

dehrmann 7y ago
You should should loudly at the state of California for still paying a max of $450 per week for unemployment. If you're playing the startup game, you're trading job security and pay for potential upside. I know people who've been burnt just as bad as a layoff because the company got sold for scraps. Don't expect big company benefits out of a startup; that's not how the game works.

yamrzou 7y ago

I used to enjoy Quora, but it lost its charm and I quit once my feed became mostly filled with questions such as: - As a software engineer, what makes you roll your eyes every time you hear it? - What did your mother say that made your jaw drop? - What can I learn in one minute that will be useful for the rest of my life? Those open questions just feel clickbait-y, with no real value added. I occasionally see questions similar to the last one on HN (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913129), it’s OK once in a while, but I hope it doesn’t become the norm. I think the HN userbase’s mindset and strong moderation guarantees that for now.

TomVDB 7y ago
These kind of questions where most likely generated by paid question askers who receive a cut of the ad revenue. I have first hand knowledge of somebody who made pretty good money doing exactly that. His rule of thumb was: the dumber the question, the more profitable it was for him.
- omega3 7y ago
  What has always amazed me about Quora is that for every dumb one line question in the vein of "How do we know that the moon is not made of cheese?" there would be 500 word very well researched reply from an ex NASA chief of lunar mission. It always was baffling for me that such low effort questions would get such amazing answers.
  - wrinkl3 7y ago
    Some people just enjoy listening to themselves talk.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      It's more that some people genuinely love sharing their knowledge and investing their time to help others. These people generate the most value for Quora but unfortunately don't get anything out of it.

stebann 7y ago

I stopped using Quora because Latin-American Political Right never, absolutely never, were censored, but if I would post something favoring Peron's Government, Allende's or the first Chavez, they would censor me. I was talking about political and social advancements, while they would be claiming that the dictatorships never disappeared innocent people, they never stole to their victims and a long etc. Every year was becoming worse, it was like the US government explicitly put people to shape political comments against Latin-American governments. Community was getting worse. So many people like me just left.

kinkora 7y ago

Not sure if a bit of confirmation bias on my side but seems like there is a recent big uptick of layoffs at Silicon Valley companies? Popular ones like Quora, TripAvisor, Ebay, Mozilla, Uber, 23andMe, etc we hear about but among my own network, i am even hearing it from smaller startups & businesses. Just wondering if it is just me but I am surmising that it seems to indicate a wider systematic.. issue? Maybe issue is not the word for it. Symptom is probably a better description and it feels we are at the precipitous of an incoming storm/crunch/etc. Please tell me I am imagining things. Edit: I guess my question is more are all these layoffs an indicator of an incoming recession or is it something more nefarious like the big tech (FAANG) are taking steps to widen their positions while they are still in a "strong" position to do so (e.g. google).

samantohermes 7y ago
These are signs of the upcoming global economic crisis. Companies funded by the FED are simply not sustainable.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  What does FED stand for in this context?
  - appleflaxen 7y ago
    Federal reserve; the central bank that keeps interest rates below natural market price in order to pump growth, thereby putting too much cash in investors hands to possibly use constructively. You end up with an investment bubble, which pops.
  - Doingmything123 7y ago
    I assume the Federal Reserve Board aka the central banking system of the US
- thrower123 7y ago
  In general, these seem to be Softbank companies, more than anything else, and ultimately, those are funded by Saudi petrodollars.

cmpolis 7y ago

I used to be quite active on Quora, but have noticed a decline in content and ux quality - seems like they are trying to 'growth hack' in a way that is not benefiting users, e.g.: - Links to other questions open in new tabs - Most content is not shown unless you login, they are really trying to push being logged in and their mobile app - Answers with images seem to be ranked higher (even if poor quality) - Clickbait-y questions and answers I hope they can return to quality since in the beginning it was such a great resource - it was awesome to be able to get answers from domain experts, celebrities, etc... and the site was very usable.

gnicholas 7y ago
The ads are also very well-disguised, as if they were native content. I understand they’re trying to stay alive, but at some point you end up driving people away.

RickJWagner 7y ago

Quora layoffs just before peak election season? I did not see that one coming.

yalogin 7y ago

I used to be on the side of “why do we need Quora” camp but over the last few years I see that they have some really good content that no one else has, particularly content about obscure questions that wiki is not meant for. So I end up visiting often. The problem is they don’t have a way to monetize the content. They can only survive on cash so long.

hiram112 7y ago

According to the article, the number of layoffs is unknown (though I assume we'll know shortly since they're required by law to report it in California). They have approximately 200 employees, it also mentioned. According to a quick search, they were certified for 57 H1B visas. You read that right: 57 employees, in just 2019, of an approximate 200 person workforce, are foreigners that CEO D'Angelo claimed he was required to hire because he could not find US workers. It looks like another 50 or so in the previous two years. So half their employees are foreigners? How many US citizens are being laid off? Some of these jobs, according the Department of Labor's data, are paying as low as $60K... in Mountain View. Truly disgusting that this company is abusing the system like this. A fair punishment for these companies, along with all their visas being immediately revoked and a massive fine to discourage others, would be for the executive board to be forced to move their company to S. Asia, since apparently that's where their talent pool originates. If they aren't willing to hire US workers, they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the infrastructure, laws, capital markets, etc. that are provided by US taxpayers. * ReportH1BAbuse@uscis.dhs.gov * https://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Quora/1096469.htm https://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Quora/1096469.htm * https://h1bsalary.online/extended_lca_data.php?LCADataID=7815163 https://h1bsalary.online/extended_lca_data.php?LCADataID=781...

Proven 7y ago

Maybe they'll pollute search engines a bit less now.

davidtranjs 7y ago

Quora used to be my favorite place to find interesting answers. Now the site is filled with marketers. It's mystery for me how the site still show up on Google every time I need to search something.

blackrock 7y ago

Quora’s web page restrictions were always annoying. You can search for something from Google, and the site allows you to view the page. Then the page suggests other links, and when you click on it, it forces you to sign in. The trick is to copy that link, and open the page in a new incognito window. I don’t know why they did it this way, but it’s thoroughly annoying, and I try to avoid visiting the site if I can. And I roll my eyes whenever that site comes up in a search result.

jaclaz 7y ago
Or, add a question mark at the end of the Url and refresh.

Phanyxx 7y ago

I knew Quora’s time was up when they sent me a partner program email. It devolved into “yahoo answers” very quickly after that.

tima101 7y ago

We talked to Quora's CEO about 2 years ago about premium content and alternative business models, including subscription. There was no interest at the time and advertising was a sole focus for business model. CEO never followed up. Sad.

edoceo 7y ago

A few days ago a search about CNAMES landed me on a Quora page which I quickly left. Like a fool I wasn't incognito. And less than 24h later I got an email from Q to highlight other stale and incorrect information on their site. Creepy and bad. Unfortunate that layoffs don't start with upper management.

Priem19 7y ago

"Layoffs hit techcrunch" will be next: uMatrix has prevented the following page from loading: https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_a7ec9796-3f8a-4bd0-806a-953f55eac9f5 https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_...

commandlinefan 7y ago
They hijacked my back button, may be why.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

Say what you want about how bad Quora content is, Quora has the most engaging email digest I ever knew. Every day they send me an email with some answers on topics I'm interested in, and I can't help but click on 6-8 of them from EACH email. The median CTR in any other of email digests recieved by me is zero.

panorama 7y ago
I had the same interaction but one day their algorithm flubbed and sent me a question that had very obvious Avengers: Endgame spoilers in the title. I had to unsubscribe after that.
- rantwasp 7y ago
  a small price to pay for salvation
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  But you should have seen Endgame on the first weekend it was released! /s
Alir3z4 7y ago
OMG, YES! Exactly same to me as well!

jonplackett 7y ago

Why are Tech Crunch highjacking my back button?

bronz 7y ago

burn rate? so they are still running on vc? i guess it doesnt surprise me. they arent the worst thing to get massive vc. i will be very entertaining to see when the next recession hits and all these shitty companies dry up overnight. and it will be nice to have fewer arrogant tech peoples around who only have money because of misguided investors who have more money than sense.

cryptica 7y ago

IMO these types of companies never had a future. They only succeeded because of monetary inflation in the corporate sphere due to ultra-low interest rates. If the interest repayment on a bank loan is less than 2%, then it means that any business which can make more than 2% profit on their activities is profitable. But do such businesses deserve to exist? The Fed sets the interest rate so they decide what kind of business is profitable and is allowed to exist. It's obvious why the current economy has benefited tech companies that operate at high scale with ultra-low or close to 0 profit margins.

walkingolof 7y ago

This is an honest question, what is Quoras business model? It feels like a traditional forum.

mhh__ 7y ago

There is some really good content on Quora (by which I mean good writers, and even some war criminals...) but they need beating into shape.

rawoke083600 7y ago

Gheesh... First Uber, DigitalOcean, 23AndMe... and now Quora

cryptozeus 7y ago

Do we know how many ? News is useless unless its more than 10%

luhego 7y ago

Quora was a good product. I remember the first time I used it, I was amazed by the quality of their answers. Even Jordan Peterson betseller book was based on a Quora answer. Sadly, they decided to focus on questions instead. Now, it's filled with garbage questions and it is just slightly better than Yahoo answers.

njsubedi 7y ago

Personally I love reading some answers on Quora. But it's not because of Quora; the answer could be on any other site. I tried Quora Ads and lost some money only to discover that the returns are comparatively the worst among all the channels we tried, and off by several folds. That takes me and my money off of Quora Ads. If the company wants to monetize by selling ads, they should probably spend time making the advertisers' experience better. Because at the end of the day the advertisers are the people who are paying them. Disclaimer: I didn't write this to badmouth or (un)recommend them. I am only curious if other people's experience is the same.

seek3r00 7y ago

“We need to reduce our burn rate to a sustainable level from which we can focus on pursuing the mission and growing the business over the long term.”. The question is: what mission?

TruffleLabs 7y ago

“Quora, a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup” Companies that are ten years old are no longer startups. “IBM, a 109-year-old software & services startup, will enhance the red carpet livestream with Grammy Insights with Watson this Sunday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles." ;)

thr0w__4w4y 7y ago

Quora used to be OK, many years ago. I wrote a few detailed technical answers about C, C++ and embedded programming. Then it basically became GeoCities or MySpace or whatever. Garbage, filled with ads and posters shilling their services and goods, just yucky. Plus, as others have mentioned, doing a simple search, going over to quora, and then being forced to login.

erikpukinskis 7y ago
I stopped using it when they pulled the same “you can read this public user-provided comment, but if you want to read the NEXT one, you need to log in” shit that Facebook does.

celticmusic 7y ago

is it really a startup if it's been around 10 years?

cryptozeus 7y ago

California Employment Development Department said the company had not filed the type of notice that is required for mass layoffs, suggesting the cuts in the state involve fewer than 50 employees.

gumby 7y ago

I don't understand why Quora had so many employees. I don't intend to harsh on them: I literally don't understand their business. To my naïve understanding: they have an authentication system, a moderately high throughput CMS with a search engine, and...? + User-generated content. OK, some DevOps people, some people who negotiate with the CDNs. They seem pretty snappy so some serious work presumably went into the back end, but still. WhatsApp had only 50 people! What am I completely missing here? why did they have 200 people?

LZ_Khan 7y ago

I don't understand what's going on with Quora. It used to be full of insightful answers that improved the quality of my life. But now my feed is cluttered with clickbait's being recommended by random people saying "Good article." and -- just in general -- very low quality answers written by people without experience and who fail to back up their claims with evidence. It's become a big source of frustration reading these "verbal vomit" answers and trying to sort through the misinformation. Whoever the ML engineers on the recommendation stack were.. really fucked up imo.