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I'd argue that Quora by itself is nothing more than a search engine optimization scam. I'd also have argued the same about Medium half a decade ago. It still i
by inetknght 7y ago
I'd argue that Quora by itself is nothing more than a search engine optimization scam.
I'd also have argued the same about Medium half a decade ago. It still is, in my opinion, but the people putting content on it have significantly improved.
- kossae 7y agoI agree fully. I feel like Quora has degraded more and more over time. A while back, it was actually useful for specific questions in different disciplines (a la StackExchange), but now every answer I find on there contains a small blurb related to the question followed by "Why you should choose X for this solution!", with X being someone's product or service they are pushing.
- bananamerica 7y agoI frequently find lots of good content on quora. It may be a bad company, service, whatever. But it's definitely more than just "a search engine optimization scam". I could apply similar reasoning to Medium. I don't like Medium at all, but it obviously houses a bunch of quality content.
- wpietri 7y agoThe two things aren't opposed. Having written a bunch of stuff there, I can't argue that it doesn't have some good content. And I could imagine it being quite profitable eventually, because it is very much built as bait for long-tail search. But the reason I'd call it a scam is that the people who wrote that content are not going to get paid in proportion to the work. Of course, giving the way quality has dropped over the years, it may also end up being a viewer-side scam the way many other search-focused content companies end up being.
- bananamerica 7y agoI didn't mean to reduce it to a false dichotomy. OP used the expression "nothing more". I just wanted to point out that, while Quora and Medium are probably scams, but they clearly are more than mere scams.
- tonystubblebine 7y agoFWIW, with regards to Medium, they changed their payment terms so that SEO is almost not rewarded at all.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- notacoward 7y agoFormer two-time Top Writer here. I agree. I quit when I realized that Quora were routinely manipulating answer rankings and selectively enforcing their community rules to maximize clicks. Now it's full of stupid questions and clickbaity non-answers, with any real information pushed far down the page if it's visible at all.
- codingslave 7y agoYup, they did this to themselves. They put metrics above the quality of the product
- ackbar03 7y agoYou could argue they had to because the product was a non product aka not profitable.
- wpietri 7y agowaves in former Top Writer Yeah, Quora was useful to me in dark times; it was nice to be able to feel like I could sincerely help a single person. And sometimes those answers helped a lot more than one person. I wrote some things I'm really proud of there. But eventually I felt used and a bit addicted, so I got out. In retrospect, I'm glad I did. Every time I look it seems sadder, farther from what drew me to it.
- behnamoh 7y agoI literally had to block parts of Quora's website using AdBlock to stop it from bothering me. Whenever I want to just read an answer it keeps pushing these notifications and asks me to answer questions. It was this aggressive behavior by Quora that made me quit contributing. I wonder if there is something inherently wrong with online business models that doesn't allow good old sites like Quora to sustain their quality. GP: I agree. Although I don't accept how Medium forces readers to sign up and subscribe, sometimes there is good content on it.
- 7y ago
- nazca 7y agoI agree, and Quora is also my top of mind reference for creepy personalization. Click on one click-baity article and then get spammed continually about related questions.
- gadders 7y agoIt is the new Experts Exchange.
- inetknght 7y agoExperts Exchange and Quora combined are the reason I stopped using Google as a primary source of technical searches.
- luord 7y agoIf you don't mind me asking, what are you using now? I'm getting increasingly fed up with google dropping words from my searches. It gets ridiculous when it even drops the damn programming language or the database, as if knowing how hibernate works was going to help me with the go mongo driver.
- inetknght 7y agoStraight to stackoverflow, serverfault, superuser, or unix.stackexchange.com and search using keywords and tags. Added bonus: sometimes I find an unanswered related question to which I do know the answer and can help someone else out. Then I search DuckDuckGo. Its SEO garbage isn't nearly as bad as Google is... yet... If I don't find anything there then I'll ask real humans: coworkers, slack or discord chats on the topics of the tags, friends, some technical-smart family.
- sofaofthedamned 7y agoYup. I have an adblocker, but after the first answer (which was crap) I got a link to the question "What is jam made from?" and then got prompted with a modal to prompt me to make an account. Never again.
- fergie 7y agoIts weird because it used to be full of really high quality content, and then all of a sudden it got really spammy.
- distances 7y agoI think I somehow missed the quality content phase. Always felt like glorified Yahoo Answers, to be honest.
- ckocagil 7y agoI don't understand why Quora and Pinterest still aren't unlisted by Google. My only guess is that their executives personally know each other.
- liveoneggs 7y agoyou think? https://twitter.com/methode/status/1166643751659429888 https://twitter.com/methode/status/1166643751659429888 when is the last time you got a "heads up" before an algo change?