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CancelQuora

75 points by WhowasFired 3y ago

commandlinefan 3y ago
No worse than reddit.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
I was into Quora 10+ years ago. In fact in 2012 I made their Top Writers list. It was fun. It was exciting. It was interesting. As they added features I lost interest. I go back from time to time. I don't recognize it. Not sure if it's good or bad. Maybe I'm not longer their target market? I just feels overwhelming and less quality driven. Just me?
- WhowasFired 3y ago
  It has become an echo-chamber just like other sites....
- notacoward 3y ago
  Same here. I was a Top Writer twice. I know one year was 2014 because they sent me a nice fleece, but can't remember whether the other was before or after. Some people here might even know me from those days. Not long after that I got tired of them breaking their own rules to promote vapid (and sometimes factually incorrect) answers over actually-good ones. I remember one guy who always posted these long meme-filled pieces of absolute garbage that would get placed above other answers with 10x as many upvotes. Because "engagement" I guess. Should have been removed per the rules, but got highlighted instead. Due to that and other issues (e.g. incessant nagging about topic-specific bios) I loudly quit in 2016 or '17 and never looked back. What a trash fire.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Similarly I was pretty active on it ~2014. I checked back recently and it looks like it's become very common to have mostly useless answers that are nothing but a ton of images with a bit of text in between. IIRC I had quit when at some point they tried to make it mandatory to install the app to access on phone.
sparcpile 3y ago
Before Stackoverflow, they were pretty good. Once they started the anti-pattern of requiring registration to view answers, the quality went down hill pretty quick. In the last few years, my workplace added them to their blocklist. I didn't realize that one of the reasons was Quora is very spammy with emails.
- vasili111 3y ago
  Adding the requirement to register in order to see the answers I think was major mistake. I remember multiple times coming to quora from google and after just closing the page because of it.
  - brookst 3y ago
    This. It’s a short term strategy that blew up the long term. I submitted a bunch of answers to Quora way back when, but learned to avoid clicking links to the site because of sign in hassle. Which meant I was never on the site, so I stopped writing new answers. Classic case of a company not understanding their value prop and accidentally destroying it.
    - shauryamanu 3y ago
      Just like what Meta is doing currently whether with Whatsapp channels and trying to add similar features to all its apps.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > Before Stackoverflow, they were pretty good. Stack Overflow was publicly available two years before Quora was.
  - scbrg 3y ago
    Perhaps non existence was Quora's peak. After that, it was founded and everything went downhill from there :-)
chollida1 3y ago
Oh, wow I dind't know Quora was still around. My experience with quora is probably like most peoples. - You find out about quora - read some interesting questions and get some answers that provide new insight and mental models that update how you think - find some interesting and famous people replying to questions taht you read. - Day 2 find out that there are just only so many interesting questions that can be asked and the site doesn't have alot to bring you back. - after a week, realize that this is a site that you'd want just a monthly summary of interesting questions and answers to read. - after a few months realize that even that is too much as there just isn't enough interesting content being generated to keep you interested. You start to realize that most questions aren't really that interesting. one of the typical ones was "what's something that's cool for rich people to do but trashy for poor people to do?" and you realize very quickly that the answer is a very basic, everything. And all the answers boil down to, the poor person does these things because they have to but the rich person can do these things and then go back to being rich. "Wear teh same clothes for a week". If you're rich, you're toughening up and becoming stoic, if you're poor its because you have no choice. The difference is always the rich person has a choice and can always just revert back to being rich at any time. It's not a bad site, but its the perfect example of a site that should be 4-5 people maintaining and running from an add supported boot strapped model. If that site ever takes venture capital they'd be in trouble as there isn't a revenue model that makes sense for such a small and niche site that I can see. They'd have to start locking answers behind a paywall or making certain "luminaries" answers pay only which would break the site.
- cj 3y ago
  > If that site ever takes venture capital they'd be in trouble They were in the 2014 YC batch [0] (after already raised $100m). After YC their total funding jumped to $220 million. [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch
  - chollida1 3y ago
    Oh, wow, ouch.
- 3y ago
m1r 3y ago
The site has ZERO moderation. Everyday I find open calls of violence against specific groups and blatant misinformation.
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  Why do you return to it every day then?
  - wussboy 3y ago
    Those calls to violence don’t write themselves!
  - brookst 3y ago
    “This food is terrible, and such small portions!”
  - jfengel 3y ago
    There is still some very good content in and among the racist trolling and political mudslinging. Aggressive use of their self-moderation tools can keep the horrors to a dull roar. There is enough good content to enable one to believe that there's still some merit to the site, if only they could get a handle on the abuse. Unfortunately, they've given up trying. It largely reflects American culture wars (though other cultures are also there, and bring their own culture wars).
jfengel 3y ago
Huh. Interesting perspective. Quora has tried to reinvent itself several times, and coming to it during the pandemic has missed most of them. Quora was founded by a bunch of Facebook refugees hoping to replicate the model of attracting a lot of users, [magic], profit. They were particularly intent that [magic] was not going to be "show ads to eyeballs", and they tried lots of other things. Turns out there was a reason none of those other models were in use by anybody else. Some of them were truly horrifically bad (like paying people to ask questions, which produced exactly the crapflood you'd expect.) So it's in a funny position. They spent a ton of time attracting really good writers, some of who actually hang on. But monetization turned out to be exactly the same thing as every other social media site because that's what works. They don't think of themselves as social media... but they're not really anything else. Personally, I think the Q&A format is fundamentally limited in that the low-hanging fruit gets picked early and what's left is too specific to be answered meaningfully. StackOverflow manages it, by running itself on a shoestring, and being the definitive site for a specifically lucrative market (computer techies). As it is, Quora's next turn is towards AI, and they may end up ditching the human beings altogether. I see no sign that they've got any particular secret sauce for AI, but they've tried everything else.
- pyeri 3y ago
  Sans the monetization debacle, it's an extremely good platform for authors. It also has some unique content value. It's like a twitter but for those who want to read more detailed and rigorous content in the form of answer posts. Such platforms work best when they're left on their own to work organically with a little bit of moderation for obscenities, hate speech, etc. In general, the platform takes care of itself as the best quality answers typically command the most upvotes/views (though I've seen a great bias towards political content relative to technical and other non-political topics in this regard). The makers absolutely ruined it though when they introduced that paywall, they should have explored other monetization options, there are plenty of them.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    Quora requires a lot of moderation. It has become a popular site for white supremacists, child pornographers, and others. They've fired almost all of their human moderators and appear to be doing it exclusively with automation. They do almost no moderation within the spaces, and many of them are devoted explicitly to racism. There is also a ton of explicit hate-speech trolling, much of it apparently coming from 4chan.
skilled 3y ago
> Quora is a hunk of shit to be avoided. Hopefully it will go under soon. Unlikely. Google recently added more than 100M search traffic to Quora[0] (and Reddit, and LinkedIn and other garbage UGC sites) because they don't know how to address the "people appending reddit" problem. They literally threw legitimate content creators under the bus and are now _forcing_ searchers to go to Quora and all these are low-quality sites that, in the the majority of the cases, do nothing but link out to answers that are found in actual blogs/articles. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/vZXHgBO.png https://i.imgur.com/vZXHgBO.png
- wayfinder 3y ago
  People add reddit to searches because it gives high quality answers. That’s not a Google problem. That’s a problem with the Internet. Your average independent website or blog puts up some heavily biased answer that is just limited to that one writer’s perspective.
  - reisse 3y ago
    Google problem is that appending reddit is the only reliable way to get something different from shitty copywrited SEO trash sites. I don't know when I last saw real independent websites and blogs in the search results, probably ten years ago?..
    - mrbeast6001 3y ago
      I agree to this one. Google is often pointing to websites that haven’t been updated in years, or reused their content from 2008 by adding 2023 at the end of the headline
      - noblecreator 3y ago
        The clear example of quality vs. quantity. Quora definitely wins in terms of quantity.
      - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
booleandilemma 3y ago
Do people actually use Quora?
- mrbeast6001 3y ago
  A hell of a lot of people, mostly in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh). The public perception there about Quora is that it’s a great and informative community. It’s from my experience not regarded as spam.
  - ashu1461 3y ago
    It used to be there in India, not anymore. It had its peak 7-8 years ago, now it just a place with low quality content and dozens of paywalls.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    At the beginning, Quora was heavily focused on Silicon Valley. It had a bunch of Silicon Valley VCs and other notables providing content, as friends of the founders. As far as I could tell, that made it much prized among that set of South Asians who were either in Silicon Valley or desperately wanted to be. It led to some very unfortunate culture clashes. Its appeal to India seems to have broadened from there, and it still seems very popular.
jasonlotito 3y ago
For those of you who have been here long enough, it is indeed 2023, and we are still talking about Quora. I just wanted to post this here because I know someone is going to completely wonder if it's not a decade ago or more. Has anything changed? No, not really. You aren't missing anything. Maybe something has changed? Younger people who were only recently made aware of Quora are being roped in, and they are learning things we've taken for granted. But you aren't crazy, it's 2023, and you can just ignore this. You already know the story.
philihp 3y ago
The design of Quora is awful. It's like Yahoo Answers, but instead of an inane unqualified answer, you get a dubious answer surrounded and camouflaged by answers to sponsored questions you didn't ask.
- shauryamanu 3y ago
  Sponsored questions are really spammy.
theodric 3y ago
Somehow I ended up on Quora's spam list, and despite my many requests, they refuse to unsubscribe me. What I see come through as the subject of those daily e-mails is a constant trickle of inflammatory pseudo-questions, and not infrequently paedo-/incest-adjacent ragebait, intended to provoke engagement. Someone or some algo that someone owns is curating this crap and believes that it's OK that it goes out as the "face of the company" to whoever is on their spam list. Examples: - 3 Sept: "I caught my 13 year old daughter using pads for her period without my permission. What do I do now?" - 24 August: "My 15-year-old son punched his pregnant baby sitter’s belly and she punched him back. She now has a miscarriage and my son has a bruise. Is she wrong for this?" - 23 August: "My 15-year-old step daughter told me to wash her back in the shower. What should I do?" - 21 August: "I caught my 14-year-old son and his friend’s 41 year old dad holding hands. Should I be concerned?" This site is garbage, and some of its users clearly are, as well. Go ahead and cancel it, for all I care.
- WhowasFired 3y ago
  > inflammatory pseudo-questions, and not infrequently paedo-/incest-adjacent ragebait, intended to provoke engagement This exactly
- jfengel 3y ago
  Those are all from the same person, or a small cadre using the same pattern. They brag about it to each other on a subreddit. Such questions get a huge amount of attention, and Quora's algorithm mistakes that for users wanting to see more of it. There is nobody curating it. It's all automated.
  - theodric 3y ago
    But if the admins of the site cared more about integrity than pure profit, they'd put in a simple heuristic to filter this shit. So one way or another, they're culpable; and more so if this is a known phenomenon.
    - jfengel 3y ago
fortran77 3y ago
In the early days of Quora, it was a lot of fun. I remember asking questions and getting answers from Olympic athletes, college professors, and other true experts. I actually made friends on Quora. Then they tried to monetize it in various ways (and I don't mind paying for things!) and it went downhill fast. Just junk questions and answers, and a lot of fringe political ideas and topics, and people promoting their MLM businesses.
- braza 3y ago
  > other true experts For me this was the biggest moat for Quora. Back in the day, you could have someone who has a legitimate background in geopolitics chiming in a question and answering it with politeness and bringing sources for further in-depth reading. And this was about in most of the categories of the site. Looking at Quora now, I can see the same level of questions and answers as Yahoo Answers, but with the aggravation that you have "power responders" that use LLMs and lazy Wikipedia copy-pasting to chase clout in the platform. I do not know the context of replacing content moderation, but I believe that was a not-so-good decision for the platform. If Quora was a fountain service that serves water from several clean/reliable sources, the _only job_ that the platform should do is to ensure that people do not take a piss in the upstream water.
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  The interesting thing to me is I didn't really notice the monetization thing. I think it probably happened later than when I stopped using the site, because I notice now hitting it from web search you can't view anything without logging in, but that wasn't the case when I was still using it. What you say here was definitely the draw, but that was true as an answerer, too. I don't exactly consider myself an "expert" on anything, but I was a fairly senior budget officer in the 1st CAV division headquarters before getting into software and both details of military operations and the federal budgeting process are things I had an insider view that I also see being discussed both in web forums and news media with a lot of naivete and wrong information. I was happy to answer questions about these topics, and it was nice to have the setup with your real name, official qualifications, and specific people vouching for you. It worked for a while and high-quality answers drifted to the top. But that all changed in 2016. The US presidential election between Trump and Hillary ruined the Internet. For over a year, every top answer and most of the top-ranked members giving answers were purely partisan. The only way to get noticed and rewarded was to say something flattering to one political party and insulting to another. Nobody cared about the quality of information any more. This just didn't hit Quora. It hit the entire Internet. It probably helped ruin Twitter and Facebook as well, though I didn't care as much because I didn't really use them anyway. Really, it ruined the entire global information ecosystem. As much as news media had been going downhill ever since CNN kicked off the 24 hours permanent news cycle in the early 90s, I feel like a threshold was crossed in 2016 that made it no longer tolerable and no longer worth even bothering to consume news. Maybe some of Quora was insulated from this and wasn't ruined until a later monetization push, to the extent they somewhat cordoned you by interest, if you managed to only follow questions on purely tech or business topics and ignore civics and world affairs. Certainly, I think this is largely what has saved Hacker News. Being the only place on the Internet I still read anything, it's interesting to observe that apparently Israel is at war and I didn't even know about it until watching football last night.
initramfs 3y ago
I tend to find more answers on stack Exchange & Overflow.
hdarshane 3y ago
Quora probably had the most beautiful mechanism of all these Web 2.0 Social apps. you ask a question, and then there's a good chance it reaches an authority in that particular subject and is subsequently answered. that's incredible. it's not even about the monetisation part. imo it all went downhill when they started to allow incredibly low-quality content onto the site. I open my feed and it's filled with stuff like "what's your favorite food" "what scares you" "what are some common tech hacks etc. etc" it's incredibly annoying. I'm still pretty hopeful about Quora and I think they can still turn this around as there's a sizeable population of subject experts on the website who keenly answer questions and share insights. Quora's one of these counter-intuitive cases when a product could've been better off with a dozen or so people working on a shoestring budget instead of raising venture capital and trying to do 10 things at once as they in fact did.
- jfengel 3y ago
  A lot of the lowest-quality questions came from a period when they were paying people to ask questions. People of course flooded it with questions designed to attract that kind answer, which is precisely what Quora wanted because it drives engagement. They replaced it with a bot which actually does a better job, in my opinion, despite also having a ton of howlers.
ericflo 3y ago
Whenever I think of Quora, I think of their giant party in SF around a decade ago, which stands out in my mind as the height of that era of tech.
- mikhailfranco 3y ago
  That reminds me of the Palantir Xmas party (2011), at some huge museum in Golden Gate Park (de Young or Asian Art, I forget :)
spamizbad 3y ago
I can remember when both Quora and Stackoverflow (Stackexchange) were first on the scene, and it was interesting to see that battle unfold. For me, it was the first time I noticed a cultural division between capital and labor. If you spoke to builders, Quora was a non-entity or seen as a joke; whereas Stackoverflow was a productivity supertool. However, when talking to VCs, influencers, and people "up the food chain" they saw far more potential in Quora. They didn't look down on Stackoverflow, but they just saw it as another tool, like a screwdriver: very useful, but it was nothing more than a better mousetrap. I suppose ultimately the Quora crowd was both right and wrong. Right in recognizing Stackexchange's influence ceiling but wrong in recognizing Quora's reach and impact. And I think, in part, it's because Quora needed something that Stackoverflow had in spades: Quality content and a less hostile interface. Quora truly inherited the crown of Yahoo Answers, but unfortunately took all of its warts (low quality content) with it.
shauryamanu 3y ago
Used Quora long back. Their feed is very hard to navigate.
vpastore 3y ago
[dead]
catlover76 3y ago
Most of us don't use Quora for anything anyways, even if we did so in the past. It's bad--what's the big deal? Why does this merit a ranty blog post like this? The post comes across as kind of unhinged.

75 points by WhowasFired 3y ago

No worse than reddit.

I was into Quora 10+ years ago. In fact in 2012 I made their Top Writers list. It was fun. It was exciting. It was interesting. As they added features I lost interest. I go back from time to time. I don't recognize it. Not sure if it's good or bad. Maybe I'm not longer their target market? I just feels overwhelming and less quality driven. Just me?

WhowasFired 3y ago
It has become an echo-chamber just like other sites....
notacoward 3y ago
Same here. I was a Top Writer twice. I know one year was 2014 because they sent me a nice fleece, but can't remember whether the other was before or after. Some people here might even know me from those days. Not long after that I got tired of them breaking their own rules to promote vapid (and sometimes factually incorrect) answers over actually-good ones. I remember one guy who always posted these long meme-filled pieces of absolute garbage that would get placed above other answers with 10x as many upvotes. Because "engagement" I guess. Should have been removed per the rules, but got highlighted instead. Due to that and other issues (e.g. incessant nagging about topic-specific bios) I loudly quit in 2016 or '17 and never looked back. What a trash fire.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Similarly I was pretty active on it ~2014. I checked back recently and it looks like it's become very common to have mostly useless answers that are nothing but a ton of images with a bit of text in between. IIRC I had quit when at some point they tried to make it mandatory to install the app to access on phone.

sparcpile 3y ago

Before Stackoverflow, they were pretty good. Once they started the anti-pattern of requiring registration to view answers, the quality went down hill pretty quick. In the last few years, my workplace added them to their blocklist. I didn't realize that one of the reasons was Quora is very spammy with emails.

vasili111 3y ago
Adding the requirement to register in order to see the answers I think was major mistake. I remember multiple times coming to quora from google and after just closing the page because of it.
- brookst 3y ago
  This. It’s a short term strategy that blew up the long term. I submitted a bunch of answers to Quora way back when, but learned to avoid clicking links to the site because of sign in hassle. Which meant I was never on the site, so I stopped writing new answers. Classic case of a company not understanding their value prop and accidentally destroying it.
  - shauryamanu 3y ago
    Just like what Meta is doing currently whether with Whatsapp channels and trying to add similar features to all its apps.
lolinder 3y ago
> Before Stackoverflow, they were pretty good. Stack Overflow was publicly available two years before Quora was.
- scbrg 3y ago
  Perhaps non existence was Quora's peak. After that, it was founded and everything went downhill from there :-)

chollida1 3y ago

Oh, wow I dind't know Quora was still around. My experience with quora is probably like most peoples. - You find out about quora - read some interesting questions and get some answers that provide new insight and mental models that update how you think - find some interesting and famous people replying to questions taht you read. - Day 2 find out that there are just only so many interesting questions that can be asked and the site doesn't have alot to bring you back. - after a week, realize that this is a site that you'd want just a monthly summary of interesting questions and answers to read. - after a few months realize that even that is too much as there just isn't enough interesting content being generated to keep you interested. You start to realize that most questions aren't really that interesting. one of the typical ones was "what's something that's cool for rich people to do but trashy for poor people to do?" and you realize very quickly that the answer is a very basic, everything. And all the answers boil down to, the poor person does these things because they have to but the rich person can do these things and then go back to being rich. "Wear teh same clothes for a week". If you're rich, you're toughening up and becoming stoic, if you're poor its because you have no choice. The difference is always the rich person has a choice and can always just revert back to being rich at any time. It's not a bad site, but its the perfect example of a site that should be 4-5 people maintaining and running from an add supported boot strapped model. If that site ever takes venture capital they'd be in trouble as there isn't a revenue model that makes sense for such a small and niche site that I can see. They'd have to start locking answers behind a paywall or making certain "luminaries" answers pay only which would break the site.

cj 3y ago
> If that site ever takes venture capital they'd be in trouble They were in the 2014 YC batch [0] (after already raised $100m). After YC their total funding jumped to $220 million. [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch
- chollida1 3y ago
  Oh, wow, ouch.
3y ago

m1r 3y ago

The site has ZERO moderation. Everyday I find open calls of violence against specific groups and blatant misinformation.

_Algernon_ 3y ago
Why do you return to it every day then?
- wussboy 3y ago
  Those calls to violence don’t write themselves!
- brookst 3y ago
  “This food is terrible, and such small portions!”
- jfengel 3y ago
  There is still some very good content in and among the racist trolling and political mudslinging. Aggressive use of their self-moderation tools can keep the horrors to a dull roar. There is enough good content to enable one to believe that there's still some merit to the site, if only they could get a handle on the abuse. Unfortunately, they've given up trying. It largely reflects American culture wars (though other cultures are also there, and bring their own culture wars).

jfengel 3y ago

Huh. Interesting perspective. Quora has tried to reinvent itself several times, and coming to it during the pandemic has missed most of them. Quora was founded by a bunch of Facebook refugees hoping to replicate the model of attracting a lot of users, [magic], profit. They were particularly intent that [magic] was not going to be "show ads to eyeballs", and they tried lots of other things. Turns out there was a reason none of those other models were in use by anybody else. Some of them were truly horrifically bad (like paying people to ask questions, which produced exactly the crapflood you'd expect.) So it's in a funny position. They spent a ton of time attracting really good writers, some of who actually hang on. But monetization turned out to be exactly the same thing as every other social media site because that's what works. They don't think of themselves as social media... but they're not really anything else. Personally, I think the Q&A format is fundamentally limited in that the low-hanging fruit gets picked early and what's left is too specific to be answered meaningfully. StackOverflow manages it, by running itself on a shoestring, and being the definitive site for a specifically lucrative market (computer techies). As it is, Quora's next turn is towards AI, and they may end up ditching the human beings altogether. I see no sign that they've got any particular secret sauce for AI, but they've tried everything else.

pyeri 3y ago
Sans the monetization debacle, it's an extremely good platform for authors. It also has some unique content value. It's like a twitter but for those who want to read more detailed and rigorous content in the form of answer posts. Such platforms work best when they're left on their own to work organically with a little bit of moderation for obscenities, hate speech, etc. In general, the platform takes care of itself as the best quality answers typically command the most upvotes/views (though I've seen a great bias towards political content relative to technical and other non-political topics in this regard). The makers absolutely ruined it though when they introduced that paywall, they should have explored other monetization options, there are plenty of them.
- jfengel 3y ago
  Quora requires a lot of moderation. It has become a popular site for white supremacists, child pornographers, and others. They've fired almost all of their human moderators and appear to be doing it exclusively with automation. They do almost no moderation within the spaces, and many of them are devoted explicitly to racism. There is also a ton of explicit hate-speech trolling, much of it apparently coming from 4chan.

skilled 3y ago

> Quora is a hunk of shit to be avoided. Hopefully it will go under soon. Unlikely. Google recently added more than 100M search traffic to Quora[0] (and Reddit, and LinkedIn and other garbage UGC sites) because they don't know how to address the "people appending reddit" problem. They literally threw legitimate content creators under the bus and are now _forcing_ searchers to go to Quora and all these are low-quality sites that, in the the majority of the cases, do nothing but link out to answers that are found in actual blogs/articles. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/vZXHgBO.png https://i.imgur.com/vZXHgBO.png

wayfinder 3y ago
People add reddit to searches because it gives high quality answers. That’s not a Google problem. That’s a problem with the Internet. Your average independent website or blog puts up some heavily biased answer that is just limited to that one writer’s perspective.
- reisse 3y ago
  Google problem is that appending reddit is the only reliable way to get something different from shitty copywrited SEO trash sites. I don't know when I last saw real independent websites and blogs in the search results, probably ten years ago?..
  - mrbeast6001 3y ago
    I agree to this one. Google is often pointing to websites that haven’t been updated in years, or reused their content from 2008 by adding 2023 at the end of the headline
    - noblecreator 3y ago
      The clear example of quality vs. quantity. Quora definitely wins in terms of quantity.
    - _a_a_a_ 3y ago

booleandilemma 3y ago

Do people actually use Quora?

mrbeast6001 3y ago
A hell of a lot of people, mostly in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh). The public perception there about Quora is that it’s a great and informative community. It’s from my experience not regarded as spam.
- ashu1461 3y ago
  It used to be there in India, not anymore. It had its peak 7-8 years ago, now it just a place with low quality content and dozens of paywalls.
- jfengel 3y ago
  At the beginning, Quora was heavily focused on Silicon Valley. It had a bunch of Silicon Valley VCs and other notables providing content, as friends of the founders. As far as I could tell, that made it much prized among that set of South Asians who were either in Silicon Valley or desperately wanted to be. It led to some very unfortunate culture clashes. Its appeal to India seems to have broadened from there, and it still seems very popular.

jasonlotito 3y ago

For those of you who have been here long enough, it is indeed 2023, and we are still talking about Quora. I just wanted to post this here because I know someone is going to completely wonder if it's not a decade ago or more. Has anything changed? No, not really. You aren't missing anything. Maybe something has changed? Younger people who were only recently made aware of Quora are being roped in, and they are learning things we've taken for granted. But you aren't crazy, it's 2023, and you can just ignore this. You already know the story.

philihp 3y ago

The design of Quora is awful. It's like Yahoo Answers, but instead of an inane unqualified answer, you get a dubious answer surrounded and camouflaged by answers to sponsored questions you didn't ask.

shauryamanu 3y ago
Sponsored questions are really spammy.

theodric 3y ago

Somehow I ended up on Quora's spam list, and despite my many requests, they refuse to unsubscribe me. What I see come through as the subject of those daily e-mails is a constant trickle of inflammatory pseudo-questions, and not infrequently paedo-/incest-adjacent ragebait, intended to provoke engagement. Someone or some algo that someone owns is curating this crap and believes that it's OK that it goes out as the "face of the company" to whoever is on their spam list. Examples: - 3 Sept: "I caught my 13 year old daughter using pads for her period without my permission. What do I do now?" - 24 August: "My 15-year-old son punched his pregnant baby sitter’s belly and she punched him back. She now has a miscarriage and my son has a bruise. Is she wrong for this?" - 23 August: "My 15-year-old step daughter told me to wash her back in the shower. What should I do?" - 21 August: "I caught my 14-year-old son and his friend’s 41 year old dad holding hands. Should I be concerned?" This site is garbage, and some of its users clearly are, as well. Go ahead and cancel it, for all I care.

WhowasFired 3y ago
> inflammatory pseudo-questions, and not infrequently paedo-/incest-adjacent ragebait, intended to provoke engagement This exactly
jfengel 3y ago
Those are all from the same person, or a small cadre using the same pattern. They brag about it to each other on a subreddit. Such questions get a huge amount of attention, and Quora's algorithm mistakes that for users wanting to see more of it. There is nobody curating it. It's all automated.
- theodric 3y ago
  But if the admins of the site cared more about integrity than pure profit, they'd put in a simple heuristic to filter this shit. So one way or another, they're culpable; and more so if this is a known phenomenon.
  - jfengel 3y ago

fortran77 3y ago

In the early days of Quora, it was a lot of fun. I remember asking questions and getting answers from Olympic athletes, college professors, and other true experts. I actually made friends on Quora. Then they tried to monetize it in various ways (and I don't mind paying for things!) and it went downhill fast. Just junk questions and answers, and a lot of fringe political ideas and topics, and people promoting their MLM businesses.

braza 3y ago
> other true experts For me this was the biggest moat for Quora. Back in the day, you could have someone who has a legitimate background in geopolitics chiming in a question and answering it with politeness and bringing sources for further in-depth reading. And this was about in most of the categories of the site. Looking at Quora now, I can see the same level of questions and answers as Yahoo Answers, but with the aggravation that you have "power responders" that use LLMs and lazy Wikipedia copy-pasting to chase clout in the platform. I do not know the context of replacing content moderation, but I believe that was a not-so-good decision for the platform. If Quora was a fountain service that serves water from several clean/reliable sources, the _only job_ that the platform should do is to ensure that people do not take a piss in the upstream water.
nonameiguess 3y ago
The interesting thing to me is I didn't really notice the monetization thing. I think it probably happened later than when I stopped using the site, because I notice now hitting it from web search you can't view anything without logging in, but that wasn't the case when I was still using it. What you say here was definitely the draw, but that was true as an answerer, too. I don't exactly consider myself an "expert" on anything, but I was a fairly senior budget officer in the 1st CAV division headquarters before getting into software and both details of military operations and the federal budgeting process are things I had an insider view that I also see being discussed both in web forums and news media with a lot of naivete and wrong information. I was happy to answer questions about these topics, and it was nice to have the setup with your real name, official qualifications, and specific people vouching for you. It worked for a while and high-quality answers drifted to the top. But that all changed in 2016. The US presidential election between Trump and Hillary ruined the Internet. For over a year, every top answer and most of the top-ranked members giving answers were purely partisan. The only way to get noticed and rewarded was to say something flattering to one political party and insulting to another. Nobody cared about the quality of information any more. This just didn't hit Quora. It hit the entire Internet. It probably helped ruin Twitter and Facebook as well, though I didn't care as much because I didn't really use them anyway. Really, it ruined the entire global information ecosystem. As much as news media had been going downhill ever since CNN kicked off the 24 hours permanent news cycle in the early 90s, I feel like a threshold was crossed in 2016 that made it no longer tolerable and no longer worth even bothering to consume news. Maybe some of Quora was insulated from this and wasn't ruined until a later monetization push, to the extent they somewhat cordoned you by interest, if you managed to only follow questions on purely tech or business topics and ignore civics and world affairs. Certainly, I think this is largely what has saved Hacker News. Being the only place on the Internet I still read anything, it's interesting to observe that apparently Israel is at war and I didn't even know about it until watching football last night.

initramfs 3y ago

I tend to find more answers on stack Exchange & Overflow.

hdarshane 3y ago

Quora probably had the most beautiful mechanism of all these Web 2.0 Social apps. you ask a question, and then there's a good chance it reaches an authority in that particular subject and is subsequently answered. that's incredible. it's not even about the monetisation part. imo it all went downhill when they started to allow incredibly low-quality content onto the site. I open my feed and it's filled with stuff like "what's your favorite food" "what scares you" "what are some common tech hacks etc. etc" it's incredibly annoying. I'm still pretty hopeful about Quora and I think they can still turn this around as there's a sizeable population of subject experts on the website who keenly answer questions and share insights. Quora's one of these counter-intuitive cases when a product could've been better off with a dozen or so people working on a shoestring budget instead of raising venture capital and trying to do 10 things at once as they in fact did.

jfengel 3y ago
A lot of the lowest-quality questions came from a period when they were paying people to ask questions. People of course flooded it with questions designed to attract that kind answer, which is precisely what Quora wanted because it drives engagement. They replaced it with a bot which actually does a better job, in my opinion, despite also having a ton of howlers.

ericflo 3y ago

Whenever I think of Quora, I think of their giant party in SF around a decade ago, which stands out in my mind as the height of that era of tech.

mikhailfranco 3y ago
That reminds me of the Palantir Xmas party (2011), at some huge museum in Golden Gate Park (de Young or Asian Art, I forget :)

spamizbad 3y ago

I can remember when both Quora and Stackoverflow (Stackexchange) were first on the scene, and it was interesting to see that battle unfold. For me, it was the first time I noticed a cultural division between capital and labor. If you spoke to builders, Quora was a non-entity or seen as a joke; whereas Stackoverflow was a productivity supertool. However, when talking to VCs, influencers, and people "up the food chain" they saw far more potential in Quora. They didn't look down on Stackoverflow, but they just saw it as another tool, like a screwdriver: very useful, but it was nothing more than a better mousetrap. I suppose ultimately the Quora crowd was both right and wrong. Right in recognizing Stackexchange's influence ceiling but wrong in recognizing Quora's reach and impact. And I think, in part, it's because Quora needed something that Stackoverflow had in spades: Quality content and a less hostile interface. Quora truly inherited the crown of Yahoo Answers, but unfortunately took all of its warts (low quality content) with it.

shauryamanu 3y ago

Used Quora long back. Their feed is very hard to navigate.

vpastore 3y ago

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catlover76 3y ago

Most of us don't use Quora for anything anyways, even if we did so in the past. It's bad--what's the big deal? Why does this merit a ranty blog post like this? The post comes across as kind of unhinged.