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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 motivate

by 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.

by brazzy 7y ago

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.