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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

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.
chefandy 3y ago
Not directly related, but adjacent to quora likely turning into an AI dispenser: I knew that it would generate a whole bunch of crap through existing channels— like the ones that were being fed by SEO-driven writers or fake product reviews on YouTube that are just a slide show of product shots taken from Amazon and their descriptions read in a text-to-speech voice— but I hadn't considered that it could make really low-quality previously impossible business concepts juuuust barely profitable enough to be worth it to someone. I imagine we're going to see brand-new paradigms in spam that we never imagined would be worthwhile. Is there anything stopping phone companies from training models based on your voicemail messages? Imagine if data brokers started collecting and selling them? Sure the whole fraud thing is a an obvious problem, but how about your best friend's voice on a voicemail saying "I've got something of life-or-death importance to tell you. Call me back when you get this message at nnnnnnnnn," and when you call, it's your simulated best friend breathlessly answering "OH thank god you called back. Please listen carefully: You're in grave danger every moment you spend in your home without a reliable security system, and here at... " And probably some even weirder than that. I've already started seeing low-quality bulk-generated images pop up in my image searches... That's a problem I didn't forsee a couple of years ago.
- deleted 3y ago
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codezero 3y ago
They always intended to sell ads for monetization, the belief that the plan from 2009 would work 10 years later (internally this was their proposed timeline) is what put them so far behind when they finally started trying to think of new ways to monetize out of semi-necessity (Adam could buy out the other investors easily if he had to). I was disappointed they weren't trying newer/creative ways to monetize much earlier. Context: I worked at Quora from 2012-2014.

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.

chefandy 3y ago

Not directly related, but adjacent to quora likely turning into an AI dispenser: I knew that it would generate a whole bunch of crap through existing channels— like the ones that were being fed by SEO-driven writers or fake product reviews on YouTube that are just a slide show of product shots taken from Amazon and their descriptions read in a text-to-speech voice— but I hadn't considered that it could make really low-quality previously impossible business concepts juuuust barely profitable enough to be worth it to someone. I imagine we're going to see brand-new paradigms in spam that we never imagined would be worthwhile. Is there anything stopping phone companies from training models based on your voicemail messages? Imagine if data brokers started collecting and selling them? Sure the whole fraud thing is a an obvious problem, but how about your best friend's voice on a voicemail saying "I've got something of life-or-death importance to tell you. Call me back when you get this message at nnnnnnnnn," and when you call, it's your simulated best friend breathlessly answering "OH thank god you called back. Please listen carefully: You're in grave danger every moment you spend in your home without a reliable security system, and here at... " And probably some even weirder than that. I've already started seeing low-quality bulk-generated images pop up in my image searches... That's a problem I didn't forsee a couple of years ago.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

codezero 3y ago

They always intended to sell ads for monetization, the belief that the plan from 2009 would work 10 years later (internally this was their proposed timeline) is what put them so far behind when they finally started trying to think of new ways to monetize out of semi-necessity (Adam could buy out the other investors easily if he had to). I was disappointed they weren't trying newer/creative ways to monetize much earlier. Context: I worked at Quora from 2012-2014.