4 ms·

Is quora so bad? I usually use it for little questions before I ask something on stackexchange and it seems to work fine enough...

ghaff 5y ago
There's a lot of dross on there. Every now and then a search will lead me to a useful answer but it was a much more interesting site when it started out. More active interesting people and fewer worthless or scammy questions and answers.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  And for some reason they seem to actively merge only tangentially-related questions and answers. I often see answers that have nothing to do with the question.
TNorthover 5y ago
It’s a pretty notorious hideout for cranks, both benign and weird nationalist ones.
tzs 5y ago
They email me a daily digest of maybe a dozen questions and answers they think I might find interesting. Typically, at least half of them each day are interesting enough that I'll click to read the full question and the full answer that they picked to highlight. Most of the rest are usually decent questions, but I'm just not interested enough to click. Of those I do click, maybe half of those turn out to be sufficiently interesting that after reading the featured answer I'll click to see the other answers too. Like many sites based on user provided content, Quora tries to show you what they think you will be interested in, but "interested in" really means what you'll click on. I see enough stupid stuff (especially stupid political stuff) elsewhere, so don't click on it on Quora. I seem to be consistent enough with this that their algorithms have figured out there is better stuff to show me to get my click. I also do not use "sign in with Facebook" or "sign in with Google" there, and am not really active on any social media that exposes user email addresses or that exposes contact lists (or even has contact lists). I don't know if I have any friends who also read Quora, but if I do there is a decent chance that Quora does not know that I do, and so won't be using their interests to try to guess mine. I don't know why do many others have bad Quora experiences, but for whatever reason it works great for me.

ghaff 5y ago

There's a lot of dross on there. Every now and then a search will lead me to a useful answer but it was a much more interesting site when it started out. More active interesting people and fewer worthless or scammy questions and answers.

frosted-flakes 5y ago
And for some reason they seem to actively merge only tangentially-related questions and answers. I often see answers that have nothing to do with the question.

TNorthover 5y ago

It’s a pretty notorious hideout for cranks, both benign and weird nationalist ones.

tzs 5y ago

They email me a daily digest of maybe a dozen questions and answers they think I might find interesting. Typically, at least half of them each day are interesting enough that I'll click to read the full question and the full answer that they picked to highlight. Most of the rest are usually decent questions, but I'm just not interested enough to click. Of those I do click, maybe half of those turn out to be sufficiently interesting that after reading the featured answer I'll click to see the other answers too. Like many sites based on user provided content, Quora tries to show you what they think you will be interested in, but "interested in" really means what you'll click on. I see enough stupid stuff (especially stupid political stuff) elsewhere, so don't click on it on Quora. I seem to be consistent enough with this that their algorithms have figured out there is better stuff to show me to get my click. I also do not use "sign in with Facebook" or "sign in with Google" there, and am not really active on any social media that exposes user email addresses or that exposes contact lists (or even has contact lists). I don't know if I have any friends who also read Quora, but if I do there is a decent chance that Quora does not know that I do, and so won't be using their interests to try to guess mine. I don't know why do many others have bad Quora experiences, but for whatever reason it works great for me.