5 ms·

Ask HN: Why did Quora fail so bad?

14 points by hidden-spyder 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
Fail in what way?
phtrivier 5y ago
I don't know if it's intentional, but I noticed a "fashion" on Quora that consists in attracting readers (and good old trolling) by making completely bogus claims in the form of questions. So you'll see questions like "Why is the government hiding the fact that the Earth is both flat and hollow and that 27% of its crust is made of Swiss cheese ?" The "response" sections of such questions have almost wasted enough of human time to qualify as a crime.
- nzmsv 5y ago
  Interestingly, this very question follows the same mold: it presupposes that Quora has failed :)
  - jfengel 5y ago
    Given the amount of money and effort poured in, an awful lot of people seem to have thought that they had a unicorn on their hands. It definitely appears to have failed at that, given the way they keep shifting their business model. They were clear in the early days that they were following the model of "build a huge audience, then monetize in some way we'll figure out later". They succeeded at the former, and they're still floundering at the latter. I'd accept the OP's premise that it failed at making a ton of money. As for whether it failed at its user's goals ... that's harder to say.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      Back in the day they would post a question like "What did Jack Welsh do about ... at GE?" and Jack Welsh would butt in with an answer. That's not scalable. Asking the crowd for answers and having the crowd vote on the answers is not epistemologically sound. That is, it doesn't produce correct answers. It's fine if you want to express yourself on a topic like "Did Tom Brady win all those Superbowls or did Bill Belichick win them?" (what answer could be better than watching the Patriots play the Buccaneers?) or "What IDE do you like for Javascript?" but you can't get to Heaven or even The Truth that way.
      - jfengel 5y ago
        The initial flood of celebrities were a way to get people to pay attention. That actually seems to have worked. Especially since a lot of those celebrities were Silicon Valley luminaries/friends of theirs -- people who got rich doing tech stuff. There was a lot of draw in users thinking that they were about to get the secret of unicorn success. After that, there were a lot of people willing to write informative and entertaining content. (Caveat: I am one of those people who was reasonably popular at that time, so take that perspective into account.) That helped them do a lot of good SEO. Unfortunately, that was as far as their plan took them. They had the eyeballs, and surely it was going to be Facebook all over again. But FB has the draw of a constant stream of your friends, and they weren't going to muscle in on that. Twitter has -- honestly, I have zero idea what it is people see in Twitter, but whatever it is, Quora didn't have it. Maybe it's what you said. You can't Q&A with celebrities, but you can listen to them spew a constant stream of inanities. They certainly didn't care about The Truth. They hoped for entertainment. And they got it; they actually did, a lot of the time. But it turns out that there just wasn't a lot of money in it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tuyguntn 5y ago
IMHO, biggest reason it failed is due to SEO and marketers. Smaller reason for requiring Sign Up after seeing one answer. Lots of people started abusing answers section advertising their products, they called it novel way of getting traffic at the beginning, then they called it everyone must have answers on Quora for questions related to their product, then they just started added bunch of non-sense just to link their product at the end or in the middle. They also made difficult to read answers, making my sympathy towards platform decline day by day, whenever I need answer to something and want to give my attention to this website, they tell me: "Did you see first answer? Now fuck off from here"
- Aditya_Garg 5y ago
  If you refresh the page, the prompt goes away and you can see the answers to other questions
p0d 5y ago
I think of reddit in the same way as quora. They are making it too difficult to access content. So I am starting to ignore search links that bring me to either site.

14 points by hidden-spyder 5y ago

Fail in what way?

I don't know if it's intentional, but I noticed a "fashion" on Quora that consists in attracting readers (and good old trolling) by making completely bogus claims in the form of questions. So you'll see questions like "Why is the government hiding the fact that the Earth is both flat and hollow and that 27% of its crust is made of Swiss cheese ?" The "response" sections of such questions have almost wasted enough of human time to qualify as a crime.

nzmsv 5y ago
Interestingly, this very question follows the same mold: it presupposes that Quora has failed :)
- jfengel 5y ago
  Given the amount of money and effort poured in, an awful lot of people seem to have thought that they had a unicorn on their hands. It definitely appears to have failed at that, given the way they keep shifting their business model. They were clear in the early days that they were following the model of "build a huge audience, then monetize in some way we'll figure out later". They succeeded at the former, and they're still floundering at the latter. I'd accept the OP's premise that it failed at making a ton of money. As for whether it failed at its user's goals ... that's harder to say.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Back in the day they would post a question like "What did Jack Welsh do about ... at GE?" and Jack Welsh would butt in with an answer. That's not scalable. Asking the crowd for answers and having the crowd vote on the answers is not epistemologically sound. That is, it doesn't produce correct answers. It's fine if you want to express yourself on a topic like "Did Tom Brady win all those Superbowls or did Bill Belichick win them?" (what answer could be better than watching the Patriots play the Buccaneers?) or "What IDE do you like for Javascript?" but you can't get to Heaven or even The Truth that way.
    - jfengel 5y ago
      The initial flood of celebrities were a way to get people to pay attention. That actually seems to have worked. Especially since a lot of those celebrities were Silicon Valley luminaries/friends of theirs -- people who got rich doing tech stuff. There was a lot of draw in users thinking that they were about to get the secret of unicorn success. After that, there were a lot of people willing to write informative and entertaining content. (Caveat: I am one of those people who was reasonably popular at that time, so take that perspective into account.) That helped them do a lot of good SEO. Unfortunately, that was as far as their plan took them. They had the eyeballs, and surely it was going to be Facebook all over again. But FB has the draw of a constant stream of your friends, and they weren't going to muscle in on that. Twitter has -- honestly, I have zero idea what it is people see in Twitter, but whatever it is, Quora didn't have it. Maybe it's what you said. You can't Q&A with celebrities, but you can listen to them spew a constant stream of inanities. They certainly didn't care about The Truth. They hoped for entertainment. And they got it; they actually did, a lot of the time. But it turns out that there just wasn't a lot of money in it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tuyguntn 5y ago

IMHO, biggest reason it failed is due to SEO and marketers. Smaller reason for requiring Sign Up after seeing one answer. Lots of people started abusing answers section advertising their products, they called it novel way of getting traffic at the beginning, then they called it everyone must have answers on Quora for questions related to their product, then they just started added bunch of non-sense just to link their product at the end or in the middle. They also made difficult to read answers, making my sympathy towards platform decline day by day, whenever I need answer to something and want to give my attention to this website, they tell me: "Did you see first answer? Now fuck off from here"

Aditya_Garg 5y ago
If you refresh the page, the prompt goes away and you can see the answers to other questions

p0d 5y ago

I think of reddit in the same way as quora. They are making it too difficult to access content. So I am starting to ignore search links that bring me to either site.