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The guy in the article openly admits he's only interested in the monetary gain from spamming questions, rather than asking questions due to genuine curiosity.

The guy in the article openly admits he's only interested in the monetary gain from spamming questions, rather than asking questions due to genuine curiosity. So this spammer is complaining and labeling the whole program is a Scam? FFS Here's what's most likely really going on: - Quora is trying to incentivize searching for answers to genuine curiosities on Quora. To do so, they prod with money. - Quora has rules to identify spammers who are gaming the system. - This person was clearly a spammer who was only interested in making money at the bottom of the barrel and was banned. Sounds like everything is working fine.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
To me, the fact that Quora is offering money to people asking questions implies they WANT people to do it for monetary gain. If the system works right, Quora is sharing a portion of the income that they themselves gained from the question, which means that despite the intent of the partner, they still earned money off of it. Of course, it will attract malicious actors, if the entity asking questions sends a bunch of bots onto quora to perform ad fraud or however Quora earns money on the asked questions. But Quora will probably never be able to prove the partner was behind the bots. I'm sure there's plenty of companies that close their eyes to certain categories of specialized spambots or content farmers if they're earning money off of it and it's not malicious. It's only when the advertisers complain that they would start doing something against it.
brazzy 7y ago
Wait, so you think that people should not actually be incentivized by the money that Quora pays to incentivize writing questions, but should instead be motivated by "genuine curiosity", except uh, somehow more so when being paid money, they just mustn't ever admit that the money is also a motivation? That is beyond silly. The author does not in fact admit that he's only interested in the monetary gain, quite the opposite actually: he writes "asking questions became like a sport to me". Motivation isn't and cannot be a criterium to judge what makes someone a spammer, only the quality of the content. There's absolutely valid criticism of Quora here on the following points: - "prodding" people to work for them with promises of money (actually more than just promises, the money was represented as already belonging to them). - Then, when someone has provided a considerable amount of content for them over the course of a month, banning them without a warning and failing to pay out the promised money. - Being unwilling to give proof for or even specify what the user was banned for. It's really not much different from a company hiring someone and promising commission-based payments, and then one day before payday firing them without giving a warning or a reason, and refusing to pay out any commissions for the whole month the person worked for them. But hey, it's the "sharing economy" now, so that makes it OK!
- paulgb 7y ago
  Exactly. Quora has the same core business model as BuzzFeed: pay for content and serve ads next to it. Imagine if BuzzFeed let someone write thousands of pieces of content for them over a period of weeks on the promise of payment and then decided not to pay them. This doesn't feel intrinsically different to me.
- treyfitty 7y ago
  What I said was silly if you take the 0th approximation in logic. Companies run growth/marketing tests all the time. It's not unreasonable to assume this is one of them. If they can make the case that prodding with dollars will incite users to come back to the platform to get their genuine questions answered, then this is worth it. What the author is doing is gaming the system and taking away the full intent of the hypothetical test/growth strategy. He is doing the equivalent of opening up a merchant account to collect 5% credit card reward cash back and paying 3% in merchant fees to net a 2% difference. Obviously the intent of the credit card company wasn't to get their raw transaction numbers up- it was to incite new and genuine transactions onto their card. Similarly, Quora, while may want to get their raw numbers of questions up, they wanted to get this goal achieved while preserving the integrity of their platform via genuine content. What's silly about that?
  - brazzy 7y ago
    > What I said was silly if you take the 0th approximation in logic. No. What you said was completely nonsensical. > If they can make the case that prodding with dollars will incite users to come back to the platform to get their genuine questions answered, then this is worth it. The only case anyone who knows how humans work can make in good faith is that prodding with dollars will incite users to write more questions. They can install other mechanisms to allow only questions that fit some criteria, but "genuine" is a completely idiotic one when you're already paying money. > What the author is doing is gaming the system and taking away the full intent of the hypothetical test/growth strategy. No. There is exactly zero indication that he was doing that. He did exactly what their strategy incentivized: he wrote more questions. It's possible that they did not meet some crtieria they want met, but then they need to publish those criteria and tell people that not meeting those is the reason for a ban. > He is doing the equivalent of opening up a merchant account to collect 5% credit card reward cash back and paying 3% in merchant fees to net a 2% difference. Obviously the intent of the credit card company wasn't to get their raw transaction numbers up- it was to incite new and genuine transactions onto their card. That meaningless word "genuine" again. The example is also really bad because the credit card company would lose 2% on every transaction anyway - completely independant whether it's "genuine" or not. Not something they're going to do to begin with. > Similarly, Quora, while may want to get their raw numbers of questions up, they wanted to get this goal achieved while preserving the integrity of their platform via genuine content. Quora cares jack shit about "genuine", or about "integrity", for that matter. They want to make money via ads. So they're willing to essentially pay $X to get a question that will bring in $X+Y worth of ad views. And in fact the "partner program" UI looks like that is factored in - there is no fixed value of a question, it seems to vary strongly with the number of views - and that heavily implies that the payouts are actually based on generated ad revenue. And that makes it extremely scammy to tell someone they've "earned" (the actual wording they use) thousands of dollars for over a month, and then suddenly pull the rug and say "you've banned and we won't pay out the money you earned". There elephant in the room here is ad clicking fraud. I'm willing to bet that what really happened is that Quora is running some kind of click fraud detection system which determined that ad clicks for the author's questions had some kind of suspicious pattern and flagged him as fraudulent. Now it's possible that he was running some kind of bot net to click ads on his own questions, in which case he certainly deserves to get banned, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the "genuineness" of the questions, but rather that of the ad clicks. More likely, it was simply a false positive. And there Quora support really should be more helpful and transparent.
ratel 7y ago
The OP was invited to the partner program by Quora who actually thought a financial incentive was a good way to get quality answers. You seem to have moral objects to that, but both partners in this partner program were obviously okay with it. Nowhere it is claimed that his answers where spam or of low quality. As I understand the system, money is awarded on the quality answers the question receives. Maybe he is just good at asking the right questions. There are lots of people making a career out of asking the right questions. Now Quora would still be fine terminating the partner program with the OP for whatever reason they see fit. What is not okay is that he did not get paid for the questions he asked, because that was the nature of their partnership. It looks like Quora is trying to avoid paying for a service (questions) they received within a contract (the partner program) they themselves proposed. The term scam does not seem too far fetched.
- mcv 7y ago
  It's a bit of both, but you're absolutely right that Quora carries a significant chunk of the blame here. The guy may have been a spammer, but he only became so because of the incentives from Quora's partner program. Quora encourages people to become spammers, and then punishes them when they do. It sounds like a weird kind of test of whether you can resist their incentives. Ending the partner program when you fail that test might make sense, but quora not paying for the questions they asked for seems unfair, possibly fraudelent. But if Quora wants quality questions to come out of this partner program, they'd better take a good look at their incentives. Maybe reward people only for their 5 best questions every month or so.
- fortran77 7y ago
  They could have also paid him out, and then told him they didn't want his participation any more. That would have been much more ethical.
wpietri 7y ago
I agree it's working fine, but in a POSIWID sense. As a former Quora Top Writer [1], I'd say Quora's Partner Program is a bad idea. They're substituting an extrinsic reward, money, for intrinsic rewards (like wanting to know the answer to a question). That is proven to reduce quality, originality, and learning. [2] Like all affiliate programs, spam is not a side effect of the program; it's built in. In the POSIWID sense, it's the purpose. Assuming his screenshot is correct, Quora must have been making plenty of money from him if they were willing to pay him $2k for a month's work. And now they're making even more money, in that they're going to keep the $2k, and all the profitable questions he asked. Plus they also get the feeling of performative virtue that comes with banning the naughty spammer. In reality, it was always a double bind. They were paying people to do a thing, but not wanting them to act like they were paid to do a thing. And whichever side you fall on, Quora wins and you lose. But this sort of doublethink pervades Quora. From the get-go, it was supposed to be an elevated discussion, a coming-together of great minds and great writers. But they have been burning something like $20m/year for a decade. That bill was always going to come due. They were always going to have to act a lot more like the grubby, money-motivated properties from which they pretended to be different. Now that they're at the 10-year mark, presumably their many investors are eager for return, so I expect this is just the start of the shenanigans there. And given the number of good writers in the audience, I'm sure we'll hear about it in detail. [1] Specifically a top writer in 2013 and 2014: https://www.quora.com/profile/William-Pietri https://www.quora.com/profile/William-Pietri [2] See, e.g., Kohn's Punished by Rewards: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004MYFLDG/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004MYFLDG/
- edoceo 7y ago
  Definition POSIWID: The purpose of a system is what it does
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Thanks! I should have footnoted that too. I get it from the systems thinking world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

To me, the fact that Quora is offering money to people asking questions implies they WANT people to do it for monetary gain. If the system works right, Quora is sharing a portion of the income that they themselves gained from the question, which means that despite the intent of the partner, they still earned money off of it. Of course, it will attract malicious actors, if the entity asking questions sends a bunch of bots onto quora to perform ad fraud or however Quora earns money on the asked questions. But Quora will probably never be able to prove the partner was behind the bots. I'm sure there's plenty of companies that close their eyes to certain categories of specialized spambots or content farmers if they're earning money off of it and it's not malicious. It's only when the advertisers complain that they would start doing something against it.

brazzy 7y ago

Wait, so you think that people should not actually be incentivized by the money that Quora pays to incentivize writing questions, but should instead be motivated by "genuine curiosity", except uh, somehow more so when being paid money, they just mustn't ever admit that the money is also a motivation? That is beyond silly. The author does not in fact admit that he's only interested in the monetary gain, quite the opposite actually: he writes "asking questions became like a sport to me". Motivation isn't and cannot be a criterium to judge what makes someone a spammer, only the quality of the content. There's absolutely valid criticism of Quora here on the following points: - "prodding" people to work for them with promises of money (actually more than just promises, the money was represented as already belonging to them). - Then, when someone has provided a considerable amount of content for them over the course of a month, banning them without a warning and failing to pay out the promised money. - Being unwilling to give proof for or even specify what the user was banned for. It's really not much different from a company hiring someone and promising commission-based payments, and then one day before payday firing them without giving a warning or a reason, and refusing to pay out any commissions for the whole month the person worked for them. But hey, it's the "sharing economy" now, so that makes it OK!

paulgb 7y ago
Exactly. Quora has the same core business model as BuzzFeed: pay for content and serve ads next to it. Imagine if BuzzFeed let someone write thousands of pieces of content for them over a period of weeks on the promise of payment and then decided not to pay them. This doesn't feel intrinsically different to me.
treyfitty 7y ago
What I said was silly if you take the 0th approximation in logic. Companies run growth/marketing tests all the time. It's not unreasonable to assume this is one of them. If they can make the case that prodding with dollars will incite users to come back to the platform to get their genuine questions answered, then this is worth it. What the author is doing is gaming the system and taking away the full intent of the hypothetical test/growth strategy. He is doing the equivalent of opening up a merchant account to collect 5% credit card reward cash back and paying 3% in merchant fees to net a 2% difference. Obviously the intent of the credit card company wasn't to get their raw transaction numbers up- it was to incite new and genuine transactions onto their card. Similarly, Quora, while may want to get their raw numbers of questions up, they wanted to get this goal achieved while preserving the integrity of their platform via genuine content. What's silly about that?
- brazzy 7y ago
  > What I said was silly if you take the 0th approximation in logic. No. What you said was completely nonsensical. > If they can make the case that prodding with dollars will incite users to come back to the platform to get their genuine questions answered, then this is worth it. The only case anyone who knows how humans work can make in good faith is that prodding with dollars will incite users to write more questions. They can install other mechanisms to allow only questions that fit some criteria, but "genuine" is a completely idiotic one when you're already paying money. > What the author is doing is gaming the system and taking away the full intent of the hypothetical test/growth strategy. No. There is exactly zero indication that he was doing that. He did exactly what their strategy incentivized: he wrote more questions. It's possible that they did not meet some crtieria they want met, but then they need to publish those criteria and tell people that not meeting those is the reason for a ban. > He is doing the equivalent of opening up a merchant account to collect 5% credit card reward cash back and paying 3% in merchant fees to net a 2% difference. Obviously the intent of the credit card company wasn't to get their raw transaction numbers up- it was to incite new and genuine transactions onto their card. That meaningless word "genuine" again. The example is also really bad because the credit card company would lose 2% on every transaction anyway - completely independant whether it's "genuine" or not. Not something they're going to do to begin with. > Similarly, Quora, while may want to get their raw numbers of questions up, they wanted to get this goal achieved while preserving the integrity of their platform via genuine content. Quora cares jack shit about "genuine", or about "integrity", for that matter. They want to make money via ads. So they're willing to essentially pay $X to get a question that will bring in $X+Y worth of ad views. And in fact the "partner program" UI looks like that is factored in - there is no fixed value of a question, it seems to vary strongly with the number of views - and that heavily implies that the payouts are actually based on generated ad revenue. And that makes it extremely scammy to tell someone they've "earned" (the actual wording they use) thousands of dollars for over a month, and then suddenly pull the rug and say "you've banned and we won't pay out the money you earned". There elephant in the room here is ad clicking fraud. I'm willing to bet that what really happened is that Quora is running some kind of click fraud detection system which determined that ad clicks for the author's questions had some kind of suspicious pattern and flagged him as fraudulent. Now it's possible that he was running some kind of bot net to click ads on his own questions, in which case he certainly deserves to get banned, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the "genuineness" of the questions, but rather that of the ad clicks. More likely, it was simply a false positive. And there Quora support really should be more helpful and transparent.

ratel 7y ago

The OP was invited to the partner program by Quora who actually thought a financial incentive was a good way to get quality answers. You seem to have moral objects to that, but both partners in this partner program were obviously okay with it. Nowhere it is claimed that his answers where spam or of low quality. As I understand the system, money is awarded on the quality answers the question receives. Maybe he is just good at asking the right questions. There are lots of people making a career out of asking the right questions. Now Quora would still be fine terminating the partner program with the OP for whatever reason they see fit. What is not okay is that he did not get paid for the questions he asked, because that was the nature of their partnership. It looks like Quora is trying to avoid paying for a service (questions) they received within a contract (the partner program) they themselves proposed. The term scam does not seem too far fetched.

mcv 7y ago
It's a bit of both, but you're absolutely right that Quora carries a significant chunk of the blame here. The guy may have been a spammer, but he only became so because of the incentives from Quora's partner program. Quora encourages people to become spammers, and then punishes them when they do. It sounds like a weird kind of test of whether you can resist their incentives. Ending the partner program when you fail that test might make sense, but quora not paying for the questions they asked for seems unfair, possibly fraudelent. But if Quora wants quality questions to come out of this partner program, they'd better take a good look at their incentives. Maybe reward people only for their 5 best questions every month or so.
fortran77 7y ago
They could have also paid him out, and then told him they didn't want his participation any more. That would have been much more ethical.

wpietri 7y ago

I agree it's working fine, but in a POSIWID sense. As a former Quora Top Writer [1], I'd say Quora's Partner Program is a bad idea. They're substituting an extrinsic reward, money, for intrinsic rewards (like wanting to know the answer to a question). That is proven to reduce quality, originality, and learning. [2] Like all affiliate programs, spam is not a side effect of the program; it's built in. In the POSIWID sense, it's the purpose. Assuming his screenshot is correct, Quora must have been making plenty of money from him if they were willing to pay him $2k for a month's work. And now they're making even more money, in that they're going to keep the $2k, and all the profitable questions he asked. Plus they also get the feeling of performative virtue that comes with banning the naughty spammer. In reality, it was always a double bind. They were paying people to do a thing, but not wanting them to act like they were paid to do a thing. And whichever side you fall on, Quora wins and you lose. But this sort of doublethink pervades Quora. From the get-go, it was supposed to be an elevated discussion, a coming-together of great minds and great writers. But they have been burning something like $20m/year for a decade. That bill was always going to come due. They were always going to have to act a lot more like the grubby, money-motivated properties from which they pretended to be different. Now that they're at the 10-year mark, presumably their many investors are eager for return, so I expect this is just the start of the shenanigans there. And given the number of good writers in the audience, I'm sure we'll hear about it in detail. [1] Specifically a top writer in 2013 and 2014: https://www.quora.com/profile/William-Pietri https://www.quora.com/profile/William-Pietri [2] See, e.g., Kohn's Punished by Rewards: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004MYFLDG/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004MYFLDG/

edoceo 7y ago
Definition POSIWID: The purpose of a system is what it does
- wpietri 7y ago
  Thanks! I should have footnoted that too. I get it from the systems thinking world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...