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How Quora died

369 points by CharlesW 3y ago

coding123 3y ago
I never liked the site... It's always a game... Oh that's answering a different question...
thedudeabides5 3y ago
This is what happens when you gatekeep replies / lurking. Remember StackOverflow...
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  An odd takeaway. The article seems to imply that most of their issues stem from spam and low effort questions/answers. Both from users and their own AI. More gatekeeping might have been the solution here.
  - obernard 3y ago
    By making it harder for people to use the site casually, you tip the balance in favor of spammers and away from people who actually have an interest, and therefore usually some knowledge, on a given subject.
MiddleEndian 3y ago
Quora was never as great as yahoo answers
- jfengel 3y ago
  At its peak it was considerably better than Y!A. They started with Silicon Valley luminaries (their friends) and that attracted a lot of other well educated users, especially scientists and philosophers. A lot of genuinely great content was generated. I believe Q&A sites will inevitably degrade as the low-hanging fruit is picked early. ("How do I lose weight?" "Explain relativity" "Is God real?") It can start with great answers, but it quickly becomes repetitious. Y!A probably also had a similar phase, but by the time most people heard about it, it was already famously dumb. Quora followed a similar path. It actually lasted longer than one might expect, in part because they threw a lot of money at it. But it is now much worse because it's better known and a more visible target to trolls and spammers. Plus it's reputation for paying people, which attracts vast amounts of minimum effort, much of it automated. (And not paying any more, but that doesn't stop people.)
  - MiddleEndian 3y ago
    Yahoo Answers was greater because it was so bad. Quora wasn't good enough or bad enough. Gotta go one way or the other.
    - jfengel 3y ago
      If you're a fan of trolling you should check out Quora now. There are some real full time professionals.
matsemann 3y ago
When I visit Quora, mainly through it being a result for something I've searched for on Google, I can never quite understand what's the question, the answer, and what's an answer to something completely different. So I've never felt compelled to stay or join myself. Also, for a while I just hit a login wall, which of course makes you not click a link there the next time.
- input_sh 3y ago
  There's a toggle on top left that's by default set to "all related", as in answers to the question asked + a bunch of answers to things you're definitely not looking for, but are tangentially related. If you switch the toggle to "answers", you only get answers to the question.
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    Sure ... but 99 out of 100 users just say "weird" and leave. And that's "How Quora died".
    - input_sh 3y ago
      I'm not here to defend Quora, but my speculation is that Google's preference for long-form content is equally to blame. Basically the same reason as recipes that start with a long life story: Google prefers pages with lots of content, even if 10% of it is actually useful to anyone. So a page with 50+ "answers" is preferable to a page with two actual answers.
      - voisin 3y ago
        > Google prefers pages with lots of content And that’s how Google search will be overtaken by GPT with ease. People want answers, not an ad-driven algorithm’s desire for content that is long enough to support more ads.
        moralestapia 3y ago
ethbr1 3y ago
If your core business product is content contributed by users... I'm turning to the opinion that you need a C-level ombudsman- / dean of contributors-type role. Whose sole job it is to (1) figure out what contributors are thinking and want & (2) advocate for them inside the company. Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Management begins to take contributions for granted. Stops caring about attracting contributors. Then focuses on revenue. Then makes changes to the platform that kill contributions, in pursuit of revenue. And they miss so many obvious ways to placate and delight their contributors. "It'd be nice to have a mod tool that does X" shouldn't be a 3-year back burner ask. Maybe make it harder for your company to footgun your golden goose?
- jfengel 3y ago
  Quora had one, William Gunn. He was laid off, along with the entire human moderation staff and practically all of the user-facing developers. Quora had been going downhill for quite some time before that, as they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content and were grasping at straws. But that was the point where they appear to have pivoted entirely towards AI and continued the human generated content side on minimum life support.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    > they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content This sort of thing should be a nonprofit. When it was good, it was literally making the world a better place. Possibly the Library of Congress would be a good steward for such a platform. Something to make it resistant to enshittification.
    - fullshark 3y ago
      How about Wikimedia?
      - ivanmontillam 3y ago
        Wikimedia is a non-profit that operates like a for-profit when the yearly round of donations comes around. They literally hoard money[0]. I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception. -- [0]: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/
chris-orgmenta 3y ago
The UI isn't really mentioned directly in the article, and is another major problem. It's optimised to keep you reading. But you don't want to keep reading, you just want your original question answered. Unfortunately, they style all the page components the same, and you are forced to read to see if it's an answer to your question, a 'related question', or something irrelevant (like the ChatGPT example given). On top of that, it cuts off most of the answer(s) anyway 'below the fold' of the fragment it's contained in. Example where I googled 'quora van dimensions': https://www.quora.com/Is-there-much-of-a-height-difference-between-the-medium-and-high-roof-Ford-transit-vans-in-the-UK https://www.quora.com/Is-there-much-of-a-height-difference-b... 1. AI component 2. Relevant answer, but arguably a lazy one that assumes that it's a post 2020 model (instead of 2013-9). Also does not address the person's question for 'in the UK' (people answering should advise if model differs between the UK & US). Also assumes that the asker has not already looked at that spec sheet. 3. Fairly related / useful context, I suppose. 4. A 'related' question's answer, for "What is the height of a standard 53ft. semi trailer?". (Seriously?!) 5. A 'related' question's answer, for "How tall can your load be above the cab on a flatbed 2016 Ford F550?" (Seriously?!) 6. 'Related questions' 7. Answers to completely different questions. The UI is hostile to the readers' needs. So that, along with the poor quality responses mentioned (usually some business consultant giving vague pointless lists or pointing to some SaaS offering) means that "Site:old.reddit.com" or niche related websites is usually a more direct path to an answer to me.
- jfengel 3y ago
  Quora isn't a great place to get answers. It's better as a source of mindless, faintly informative entertainment. At its best it's a bit better than your ordinary content farm because it's not as click-baity; the users are volunteers who just want to write. "Recreational typing", as one prominent user puts it.
nottorp 3y ago
Don't blame LLMs, blame the registration requirement. This is one of the kinds of product that people will skip if they can't evaluate it frictionless.
- Wistar 3y ago
  This is what always stops me at quora’s door.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Me too. I've a simple but strict set of security rules for whether I'll use a website. - it does not want to run javascript - that I can access it over Tor without being blocked - that it will work in a text based browser like elinks Despite the protestations by idealogues that no such sites exist, HN meets all those requirements, as do dozens of useful sites I regularly use. If and only if I get to evaluate the quality of a site based on those requirements, I may eventually register, with nothing more than an email, in order to post replies. Quora fell off that list long ago. More recently so did StackExchange. Often I find that things break as soon as Cloudflare proxies are involved.
    - obernard 3y ago
      You must agree that for almost every web-based product, designers and product managers can safely decide to completely ignore all people who have requirements like yours without it ever affecting their success.
      - CamperBob2 3y ago
        Not only can they ignore such users, they have to.
        nonrandomstring 3y ago
        And yet here I am, the annoying fly in the ointment of your hypothesis, no?
deleted 3y ago
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rvz 3y ago
One of the first casualties caused by ChatGPT which explains the massive down-round from being valued from $1.8BN to $500M. Would need more than just Poe to justify than billion dollar valuation.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
indigoabstract 3y ago
Quora seems pure clickbait at this point. Unfortunately, because it didn't start that way, now anything still relevant on that site is burried under the weight of the nonsense.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  I get random emails from them about "popular" questions like "why has Javascript replaced C++?" Seems like ragebait.
  - spiderice 3y ago
    One thing I noticed back when I browsed Quora a lot is that most the answers were in direct opposition to the question being asked. It’s like clockwork. Q: why is running so good for you A: it actually isn’t good for you. <insert justification> Q: why do so many people run when it’s so bad for you A: it actually is really good for you. <insert justification> Every single question seemed to be this way. It probably reveals a lot about human nature, but it really turned me off to know I was just reading knee jerk reactions to questions rather than anything accurate. All this to say, yes, ragebait is the lifeblood of Quora.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      For programming questions, the answer is always "it depends" even if it doesn't really depend.
mrangle 3y ago
This article amounts to concern trolling with a barely veiled agenda for censorship. Its "users are fleeing" claim is an attempt at wish fulfillment. The key to using Quora couldn't be easier: don't search for or read topics that you don't want to see. Human inquiry will always be delightfully messy except in the view of those who have pathological control complexes.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Even if you go to Quora for stuff you want, it's useless cause it shows answers to unrelated questions. I agree the article is bogus though, reminds me of all the "Twitter is dead ever since Elon Musk bought it" ones.
- astrange 3y ago
  That's useless because it starts recommending you nonsense once it thinks it's learned what you want. I just opened the front page and the 3rd item was a space called "True Love Conquers All" with relatable-Facebook-meme-style writing and an image of a woman giving birth in the backseat of a car.
AlbertCory 3y ago
I used to like Quora, but it's gotten unuseable. I ask questions once in a while, and no one answers them. My "Notifications" today include: Why did the Beatles use a Stratocaster for electric guitars? What is the best essay writing service? What are the major challenges of writing an essay? What is a poem for you? Should I sell my Squier CV 50s Strat for an Ibanez S521? Do you count time spent thinking about what you are going to write as time spent writing? Is it important for a writer to write what he feels? What is the process of writing a book without having anything written down beforehand? Do guitar players prefer single coil pickups or humbuckers? Do guitar players prefer single coil pickups or humbuckers? Which rock musicians do you think could've been better than they actually were? New Quora insult: "Quora exists to make NextDoor users look smart"
schmudde 3y ago
Before folks jump on the business model aspect, one should keep in mind that many (all?) online communities go through a similar growth curve. Wikipedia included. But this article goes into the details of what makes this feel different. Quora is aesthetically much worse than it ever was.
walterbell 3y ago
No mention of Quora founder at OpenAI? https://archive.is/xsK8S https://archive.is/xsK8S > His position on the [OpenAI] board has also raised eyebrows because Quora has been in increasingly direct competition with OpenAI’s best-known service: ChatGPT ... Shortly after OpenAI launched ChatGPT a year ago, Quora introduced Poe, a platform that allows people to ask questions from various AI chatbots, including ChatGPT.
- robg 3y ago
  I’m still surprised that D’Angelo didn’t get as much scrutiny in the OpenAI mess, especially as the only board member still in place. Seems obvious in hindsight that Quora continuing to fail can only be saved by leveraging as training data for the next thing. And OpenAIs ambitions threaten that.
oh_my_goodness 3y ago
In its "golden age" (say 2014) Quora was a pleasant place to write answers. But it was often an unpleasant place to ask questions.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
moralestapia 3y ago
Tangentially related, since the CEO of Quora is on OpenAI's board. I recently had an interaction w/ OpenAI's community that left a sour taste in my mouth. Asked one question, some smarty guy tried to "XY problem" me, I clarified this is not an "XY problem" and my question is quite clear and specific and eventually one mod was involved, other mods ganged up on me and removed all my posts because "they were violating guidelines". I complained about that sort of abuse, but guess what? The same mods that run the forum run the "forum about the forum" section, lol, so they had their fun again. Left a note there, in case some actual OpenAI employee/investor cares, telling them "this is how StackOverflow died". I'm sharing this here because if they are taking a page from Quora's playbook, well ... good luck? I'll never bother myself again with the OpenAI community and that's exactly why I stopped being involved with Quora and StackOverflow in the past. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about the forum's demise in a couple months from now.
- Rapzid 3y ago
  GitHub Copilot must be trained on all those XY answers and can be just as insufferable.
yannis 3y ago
Not only Quora, but many other sites including the various "stackexchange" sites started declining I would say from about 2018, so this is not a phenomenon attributed to llms. IMHO I attribute this to the following: a) The overuse of social media conditioning users to provide short answers, rather than long thoughtful write-ups, b) Most topics have been saturated to the limit c) lack of interest from the new generation d) Bad management and moderation.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  I think stack exchange’s moderators killed that site. Common complaints were how antagonistic they were toward new users. Hard to grow or sustain a user base if you turn out all the new ones.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Yeah it's a really big problem with StackOverflow. The mods are all crazy. I can't find it now but the StackOverflow Devs proposed actually fixing (or at least improving) question closing by allowing the asker to reopen their question once. I can't remember the exact details, but it sounded like a good first step. Downvoted to hell by the existing mods of course. They're a bit screwed because they rely so much on volunteer mods but the volunteer mods are crazy...
    - matsemann 3y ago
      Doesn't sound like either of you know how SO works. Very little is done by mods, mainly it's votes by normal users. Like I could be voting to close something as a duplicate, off topic etc with my privileges. It's the community doing this, not moderators. And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework or doing very little effort themselves before asking. Why do these people deserve others spending their time helping them if they can't even bother to search or formulate something coherent?
      - IshKebab 3y ago
        > And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework I don't think anyone objects to closing those questions. That's not really what this is about. My questions are very clearly not asking for help with homework and trivial "how do I write a for loop" or "it doesn't work" questions. Still get downvoted/closed frequently. Most often: * It gets closed as duplicate because there's a vaguely similar - but different - question. Or sometimes there's a completely different question with an answer that incidentally also answers my question. * It gets closed as too vague or not clear because it's simply outside the domain of expertise of the voter. It's clear to people that know what I'm talking about. To be clear when I say "mods" I don't exclusively mean people with official mod power. It's also people that moderate for fun - those that trawl the new questions. Let me know if you have a better name for those people. You can tell it's them because you very often get a couple of downvotes immediately and then if you check back a month or two later it will have been upvoted by many more people that actually had the same question and arrived there via Google.
Aardwolf 3y ago
Is it dead? It and reddit (and stackoverflow) are the main "human typed" results I still get (yes I'm aware they're spending some resources on displaying an AI answer at the top). Of course never really liked quora's forced login thing and how it seems to have removed parts of questions that answers are still referring to and how it mixes answers to different questions in front of the current one
- dboreham 3y ago
  It appears that Quora's pages are SEO optimized now, to the detriment of human users. Basically you can optimize for ad revenue and not have human user experience degrade significantly.
keiferski 3y ago
I think the upvote/downvote model for evaluating content is fundamentally not a good one, and this deficiency is the root problem for a lot of sites (Reddit, Quora, etc.) that were founded around the same time, circa 2005-2012. It lends itself too much to groupthink, popularity contests, and self-promotion. X/Twitter has a million other problems, but I do like their new Community Notes of fact-checking claims. It's essentially anonymous and somewhat immune to self-promotion. Going forward, a better path for FAQ-type sites is probably something similar to that model. The hard part is how you get users to answer questions while removing the self-promotion and gamification/scoreboard incentives. It's possible that AI might just destroy this space entirely, but I still think you need some form of human fact-checking in order to avoid hallucinations.
- passion__desire 3y ago
  Anyone who shares an article or news which has been community noted gets an immediate downvote in recommendations for me.
  - wonderfulcloud 3y ago
    Community Notes could just be an expansion of a good tweet to clear up some ambiguity. The up/down feature tends to create echo chambers that eventually exclude half the population. Reddit is worse at this because of excessive moderation combined with doomscrollong incentives.
- gn4d 3y ago
  >I think the upvote/downvote model for evaluating content is fundamentally not a good one This is why the bump model that 4chan uses is superior. You can sort threads by activity, but all posters display with equal weight, and you must utilize critical thinking to evaluate each and every post (unless it is from a trip user whose authority you trust in a particular domain), not some little number that pushes them to the top or sinks them to the bottom. There are (You)'s, but that can indicate consensus, disagreement, controversy, or something else, and you need to sus that our for yourself. Consensus-based truth models are frankly shit for most types of topics. Heck, even for scientific topics, the peer review model has been shown to be completely bankrupt.
dec0dedab0de 3y ago
Didn’t we see this coming when they required you to log in to view content? Did everyone forget experts exchange?
sparks1970 3y ago
Whenever a search leads me to a question/answer on Quora I'm inevitably hit with a Sign In popup that blocks the whole screen. Feels obnoxious and I just back button away.
CM30 3y ago
Well, the revenue sharing probably didn't help much for sure. I've seen dozens of sites and platforms add that as a feature, and as unfortunate as it is, this almost always backfires. People see 'make money contributing to this platform' as 'free cash for spamming!' and the quality often falls off a cliff. You need really strict rules and a good moderation team to keep a platform under control in this situation, and that's rarely the case for services like Quora. You can see the same issues cropping up on Medium with its partner program, on Twitter thanks to Twitter Blue and revenue sharing, and even to some degree on the likes of YouTube and Twitch (though they're so massive that the scammers don't really stand out/do as well). Put money on the table, and the scammers will come out of the woodwork to try and get as much of it as they can, quality content be damned. Edit: I also suspect part of the issue with revenue sharing programs is that they don't offer enough to incentive genuine experts, but offer enough that if you're utterly desperate and local costs of living are low, you're incentivised to spam for it.
- matsemann 3y ago
  Yeah, the comments to any viral post on Xitter now is just blue checkmarks spamming memes in order to get likes and eyeballs on their junk content, and thus make money.
  - aniforprez 3y ago
    Any large film/music/video games twitter account post gets spammed by AI bots and I mean literal AI bots that occasionally give the game away with "you have run out of credits" or "I don't understand this prompt" messages. Also a bunch of them just retweeting their own posts that have nothing to do with the original in an attempt to farm engagement for their older stuff
MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
I find the answers on Quora to be way too try-hard. It feels like LinkedIn growth style BS stories.
- fabioborellini 3y ago
  Yes, the first screenful is motivation to read the answer or some personal unrelated crap.
- bmm6o 3y ago
  This is exactly it. Even at its height, it felt like everyone was trying to build a brand and a following, and that was the primary motivation for the answers.
username332211 3y ago
So, the fourth paragraph of the article is supposed to demonstrate the decline of Quora. It has a number of links. One of those links shows a UI that's fairly obviously Reddit! [1] Another is to genius.com's lyrics to some song[2] which don't seem to have anything to do with anything the author's complaining about. Of the links actually relevant to Quora, one is about an obvious joke[3], which the author either doesn't understand or pretends not to. What's left is a case of spam[4], that the article links twice. I'd suppose because it's the only evidence the author has of low quality questions on Quora. While Quora is a horrible website, I'd say the evidence shows Slate is worse. Their reporters can't even find genuine evidence of Quora's low quality. They show us Reddit instead. [1] https://twitter.com/3DrakaiNa/status/1743993622737863056 https://twitter.com/3DrakaiNa/status/1743993622737863056 [2] https://genius.com/23826656 https://genius.com/23826656 [3] https://twitter.com/Zeronelite/status/1743449094360596802 https://twitter.com/Zeronelite/status/1743449094360596802 [4] https://hollywoodactress02.quora.com/OMG-KING-CHARLES-SHOCK-the-WORLD-with-ROYAL-BAN-ON-PRINCE-HARRY-AND-MEGHAN-MARKLE-SAD https://hollywoodactress02.quora.com/OMG-KING-CHARLES-SHOCK-...
- plorkyeran 3y ago
  [3] is, as far as anyone can tell, an insane person and not a joke. They've posted literally hundreds of questions involving atheists, christian babies, and nonsensical situations.
  - aaron695 3y ago
    [dead]
mugivarra69 3y ago
i dont trust the founder
- coolThingsFirst 3y ago
  Who
jeffbee 3y ago
Quora has never been a good resource. It was always designed to trick users into clicking through from a SERP with snippet content that isn't on the landing page when you arrive. It is the same business model as Pinterest. The amazing thing is that Euro regulators have for years been trying to favor this business model, trying to force Google to rank these types of sites highly under the banner of competition, when what the users really want is for these sites to disappear from search results altogether.
- darksim905 3y ago
  I'm not sure I fully agree, I've found some useful things, but I like long form content that expands beyond what's on Reddit comments and occasionally you hear interesting stories. The problem I have is, the content I usually see is essentially the regurigation of youtube videos stealing from imdb's trivia section: "Top 10 things you didn't know about $film!" Quora does the same thing for clicks in a way, and it ends up being misleading.
wslh 3y ago
Quora is thriving! It appears on almost every search I do on Google. More than a few years ago. I understand that their quality is terrible but in a economy of focus and SEO they are doing incredible well. If you publish a well written article and adding all the SEO capabilities that you can, you will almost never appear before Quora.
jurgenaut23 3y ago
I was a super enthusiastic Quora user for a long while. This is the first time I actually took the time to _close_ an account a few months back, because I was so frustrated with the turn this whole thing took.
simpaticoder 3y ago
Quora is a good example of how artificial scarcity goes wrong. If you're not restrictive enough, you can't make a profit. But if too restrictive, then the business will starve itself. When it becomes too restrictive/extractive over time you have enshittification.
mp05 3y ago
Seems like every time I land on Quora it's just a bunch of people bragging about their IQs while simultaneously lambasting neo Nazis, all while missing the juicy irony of their entire worldview. I avoid Quora.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Most smart people I know oppose neo Nazis. That's not a very controversial position.
  - mp05 3y ago
    So you don't see the irony of people raving about how innately superior they are because of their IQ but hate on people whose core tenant was being innately superior? "Smart" is very much a function of the work you put in, though of course not the only factor. I don't feel the need to have to explain this more than I have. Edit: I have to ask... what about the smart people that don't oppose them? What's their deal?
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      I find anyone bragging about their intelligence to be intolerably obnoxious. 100% of the smart people I know oppose Nazism. It seems there are too many politicians around who are objectively intelligent but are a bit comfortable with at least some of the Nazi Party’s ideas.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - temporarara 3y ago
        "We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare." That's one Nazi Party idea according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program). I would say you are not that intelligent if you oppose that just because "Nazism bad". If you oppose racism it's pretty clear that you don't in general support Nazism. But opposing Nazism doesn't mean that you even oppose racism, maybe your smart friends just don't like that particular German codified version of racism, it's pretty pointless statement without some analysis. Just like US was back then against Nazism and ultimately even went to war with them while simultaneously being openly racist. Granted, many of the Nazi ideas revolve pretty obsessively around the concept of race, but looks like at least in one case they were even explicitly not racists: "We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race." And that's another idea I basically fully agree with. IMO death penalty should be reserved only for the most serious cases, but society needs to be extremely harsh to career criminals and their ilk, they laugh at lenient punishments.
mannyv 3y ago
Once they started monetizing things got worse. Financial incentives led to people gaming the site, which always leads to crap content. You need a low barrier to entry to get free content, but then that makes it easy to pump full of crap. But you need that content to get users and monetization <shrug>. Quora has handled that much worse than, say, reddit. But reddit doesn't allow their users to monetize their content, which keeps the spammers at bay.
mjamesk 3y ago
I don't think it died. I get answers from Quora or Reddit for most of my questions. Nowadays, Google is also pushing forum websites. The amount of questions being asked and answered is drastically reduced after GPT. So as a platform, it has died but still has the same amount of reach. They integrated AI. We have to see where this heads.
Waterluvian 3y ago
It’s profound to me how many good ideas there are online that aren’t sufficiently profitable. Reminds me of the fundamentals of the “old Web” full of altruistic endeavours.
Rapzid 3y ago
I wish Google would put Quora out of our misery at this point.
m3kw9 3y ago
Quora was a nice example on how an extremely shtty UI can still become successful if the app was useful enough. It’s insane how much people can put up with if it scratches their itch enough
Luctct 3y ago
[flagged]
krkhan 3y ago
I was an active contributor to Quora in the mid-10's -- my answers gained some 3m views. It was really something back then, as many people have fondly reminisced about the era. There were so many great writers who brought so much understanding to whatever crazy stuff they were passionate about by writing for free on Quora. You had diplomats, chefs, former propaganda writers, people living through violent conflict, doctors, teachers, scientists, physicists, astronauts and the list goes on. Quora from that time truly helped me understand the world better. AI might have driven the final nail in the coffin but the one decision which was truly an inflection point was starting a program that would pay for asking X amount of questions. The platform was cool because of people who wrote ANSWERS -- to the point where the original question sometimes became even tangential to the actual answer but you'd learn so much nevertheless. Quora not only ended the top-writer program for those people it started offering monetary incentives for asking the most inane bullshit questions as long as they got the views. It is truly baffling to me how something that holds so much genuine value can be driven into the ground while making decisions left, right and center (and the whole community trying to tell you exactly what you're doing) that destroyed everything of value in the Quora process. The older answers are still there, but the community magic has utterly evaporated. I guess it's pretty normal for folks who have seen this happening in BBS/Usenet era but regardless of all of Quora's faults (the tone-moderation of the language was always a bit overboard in IMHO but I don't think it led to the downfall -- it was always there and writers worked around it) it is genuinely disappointing to see every successive platform try to build something of value only to falter and disappear because we just can't seem to keep anything good around.
- city41 3y ago
  Quora really captured lightning in a bottle around that time. I used to get a weekly (daily? Can't remember) email from Quora and I would read just about every question in it. I came to look forward to the emails. I've never had that experience with any other other newsletter.
  - Agraillo 3y ago
    As a daily destination, Quora is no longer usable for me, no need to repeat what others already said. But the digest still surprises me and the posts are often good, even if it's a rewritten Wikipedia entry. It's like a user-generated "wonders of the past/world" newspaper for me. Daily was too much, but weekly is ok. I'm not sure whether every e-mail send it personalized, but at least in some way it looks like dependent on what I clicked before.
coolThingsFirst 3y ago
Typical american crud bs. Make an app get VC money and jump ship to cool new tech. Had great potential but sadly went tits up. I wonder why no good CRUDs come from europe. But then i remember they are busy moping.
Sparkyte 3y ago
Quora had all the opportunity to invest in AI for LLM based on user responses. It didn't. I wonder if other sites will go down this way side.
- spiderice 3y ago
  What is Poe if not exactly that?
kashunstva 3y ago
> venture capital hub Andreessen Horowitz blessed Quora with a much-needed $75 million investment Most shocking of all is that anyone would dump more and $1 or two on Quora at this point.
deleted 3y ago
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poundofshrimp 3y ago
Quora merging “all related” answers onto the same page is one of the most annoying things about it. I switch it to “Answers” 100% of the time.
standardUser 3y ago
I was a 'Top Writer' for a couple of years (pre-monetization). I loved it as a motivation to research topics I was interested in and practice writing. Eventually I lost interest, but I still get occasional search results from Quora with information that is otherwise difficult or impossible to find online. Perhaps in an alternative timeline we might be regularly typing "[some query] quora" into search engines, but Reddit seems to have filled that much-needed gap more successfully.
breck 3y ago
I think Quora died because the premise was flawed: that high quality repositories of words would have a strong ROI near indefinitely. Now it is clear there is a new thing in our world (LLMs), and turns out repositories of well crafted words will be irrelevant. Almost no one saw this change coming (or at least, not how quickly this change would come). There is nothing Quora could have done to change this fate.
CoBE10 3y ago
I remember someone asking a question on Quora around 2015: "How long do you think Quora would last?" Someone answered that it probably would not last more than the next 5 years. I forgot what were the actual reasons he gave, but it gave me such an uneasy feeling that Quora could die in the next 5 years. Looking back at it now, it's probably around 2015 that it started becoming what it is today - SEO spam.
ufmace 3y ago
Seems to me it's all about money. They all gotta make it somehow, and if ads are the plan, than it's going to reach this state eventually. User-funded services seem to fare better, but they rarely grow as large. I don't think there's any other easy solution though. Nonprofits may not be looking for the mega-exit, but they still need to pay the bills somehow, so most of the same forces still apply. They are also more likely to draw partisan ideologues who are naturally more enthusiastic about having a way to put their thumbs on the scales of the discourse despite lower pay and no chance of that lucrative mega-exit. Government-funded things have too many of their own issues. Practically impossible to start, execute, or pivot fast enough to compete with startups, and subject to political turf wars and overhead. Naturally, nothing much comparable to such sites has sprung out of that.
AlwaysRock 3y ago
Quora is basically unreadable now. The layout is so confusing.
mattmaroon 3y ago
Their UI has long been more focused on getting you to click on other questions and/or ads rather than seeing the answer you want, and they do it by making it really hard to tell which is which. They intersperse a sponsored question that has nothing to do with yours between the top two replies. I guess that’s probably the only way they could really monetize but it sure is annoying.
acdha 3y ago
See also Google: I knew they were embracing the dark side when Quora not only went unpunished for search cloaking but seemed to get even more solidly rewarded with high search weight.
seahawks78 3y ago
I have some very good opinion of this. I work in big tech and I might be a canonical example of some users who no longer find Quora interesting. From 2012 to about 2014 I was absolutely hooked to Quora spending anywhere between 2 to 4 hours every day. At that time I was a young professional in my early 30s, newly married and just at the beginning of my tech career after grad school. I used to love the questions posted on the forum which seemed very relevant to me e.g. how to build a career in tech, dating/relationship advice, tourism advice etc. I was hooked. Fast forward 10 years from then. I am a 40 year old middle aged guy. Still working in tech albeit at a Senior level; with one school going kid and have a mortgage. I still visit Quora occasionally but am hard pressed to find any content that is interesting and appropriate for my age. It seems that they are still showing me questions which were mostly relevant to my younger self 10 years back and not now. There is practically no content or discussion in that forum that can attract and keep a 40 year old middle aged guy. Its just that I evolved but they didn't. Not to mention the fact that they also became more annoying with all these "promoted", "relevant" questions intermixed within the same page. I think their lack of ability to evolve over time absolutely finished the product. My two cents.
1905 3y ago
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Apocryphon 3y ago
Twelve years ago, Quora was a Silicon Valley darling and notoriously had one of the more difficult interview processes. How far they’ve fallen.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  I must have missed this honeymoon period with Quora, I only ever remember it being as “that shitty site that tries to make me log in to view answers”. I treated it like that old “Experts Exchange” site, and just visually moved past it every time I saw it in search results. People in this thread speaking fondly of Quora has come to a complete shock to me to be honest. I thought everyone else also considered it just a spam site. Today I learned.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    I mean, user experience aside, the company had an inordinate amount of hype for a Q&A website. Guess it was one of those founder prestige stories. The concept of lionizing subject matter experts probably appealed to the Silicon Valley technocratic mindset, too.
sedatk 3y ago
I briefly enjoyed contributing to Quora, but then they added a paid tier, “spaces”, and all that spammy content. Now, as someone who created a few of its popular answers, I never want to see the site again. I’ll probably get rid of my account too. It’s almost as if they explicitly didn’t want me there, and did everything to achieve that.
saucymew 3y ago
From personal experience, the main Quora experience is their Digest e-mails; less than a third are relevant topics. And there are now constant "Edit:" updates on answers addressing the trolls and hateful responses, further dampening my interest in answering questions. Where have all the internet forums gone?
Growtika 3y ago
Some potentially interesting information I've just checked that might give a new perspective: From an SEO standpoint, Quora is currently at one of its peak levels. - It has reached 267 million organic visitors per month: https://i.imgur.com/899g3Jm.png https://i.imgur.com/899g3Jm.png - Quora's organic traffic is quite diverse https://i.imgur.com/JfbYKH1.png https://i.imgur.com/JfbYKH1.png Google's helpful content update has increased traffic for sites like Quora, Stack Overflow, and Reddit. In many instances, I believe this boost lacks justification. Quora's user experience is not intuitive. Although they removed the signup wall, which impacted their bounce rate and caused millions of organic visitors to leave their site shortly after clicking on a Quora result in a search engine, reading an answer on Quora now feels overwhelmingly disorganized.
wonderfulcloud 3y ago
Apart from how most internet companies get worse when money comes into play. I find that most of social media went south around the time of Trump's election and the heavy partisan moderation that followed it. Quora further seems to have been taken over by Chinese paid writers.
- vintermann 3y ago
  The worst is that Quora paid its own users to spam the service with questions they didn't actually need answers to. You think you're helping a real human, with a real human need, and then you see he's asked not only what museums you recommend in your hometown, but also what museums you recommend in 400 other small towns from all over the world, and what restaurants you recommend for 400 other random small towns, and then what local radio channels you recommend for 400 more etc.
Yusefmosiah 3y ago
Quora is, I think, part of the reason that OpenAI has a big lead over their rivals. Quora has, specifically for training language models, very high-signal data, when compared to Reddit, twitter, gmail, and Meta’s platforms. And OpenAI is afaik, the only AI lab with a license to Quora’s data. Quora has long been a world leader of SEO and dark UX patterns — it was never as valuable to users as its Google ranking would indicate — so it’s hard to mourn its demise. But yes, it does stink to see the quality of information going down while the quantity grows at an ever-increasing exponential rate.
ho_schi 3y ago
This awkward thing was never usable? It a bad clone of Stackoverflow. And Stackoverflow works. But it needs a new owner which has a clue what it is about. Even better - the old owners and creators buy it back :) SO lost a little through the initial AI-Hype but probably most people know already the AI is feed with SO. And SO needs humans with new knowledge. So the main problem are the new owners. Why they did even removed the job adds linked to the questions. That made sense :(
smsm42 3y ago
What a low quality work. Of course the publicly open Q&A site would have some low-quality questions and answers. Of course most of questions of general interest will be asked early, and of course some of the newer questions would regard current events, and some of the answers - oh horror! oh depravity! - will feature opinions that differ from the one the author of the article holds. Of course there would be trolls and fakes - have you been on the internet anytime lately? I don't know if Quora is doing well or not. Maybe it is dying. Maybe it is flourishing. What I am sure of it that this article didn't help me any in understanding which of those is true, despite the length of the piece.
davidguetta 3y ago
The UI has become HORRIBLE compared to when I discovered 10 years ago. Answers of other questions are on the same page that the main question, it's hard to even find comments / answers to some answers. And the constant loggin nagging is horrible. Quota is synonym of internet junk spam in the same vein as pinterest or yelp (a little less for yelp maybe)
at_a_remove 3y ago
I love a good necroscopy (incidentally, R.I.P. Brian Lumley) on communities as they wither and die. I've been watching since Usenet and IRC. There's a rhythm to this kind of thing, a kind of hype cycle for communities, but overall, I have one ur-metric which outshines them all: look for the hubris. Communities, once they reach a certain size and collective history, gain a kind of self-reflectiveness. They get meta. And right around then, you will find someone at the helm who will not remember the earliest days and fail to grasp what brought everyone together. They've forgotten the face of their father and left the riddle of steel on the battlefield. What they'll decide is, well, it's me. I, or rather what I represent, make it great. The moderation team, the steering committee, the management. This is never true in any community I have seen. It's always the individuals, maybe some interesting weirdos, or the ones with a lot of time on their hands, the lonesome lusers. They will ultimately be regarded with disregard, viewed as churnable units, cogs of cognition, replaceable. This is always wrong, and it is always a lesson learned in slow motion, after the egomaniacs have fled toward their next call to greatness.
logbiscuitswave 3y ago
Quota was once a very good website. I spent a lot of time contributing and answering questions. Then the email spams started happening pushing digests of irrelevant and in some cases harmful recommendations. Then the increasingly asshole-oriented designs around serving up search results and blocking the content unless you signed in or registered. Then the Q/A quality digressed massively to the point where it became less and less useful. There were also changes to the design that merged questions, answers, and recommendations into a largely incoherent mess where I was never really sure what I was looking at or why. Not wanting any further association with the dumpster fire Quora was becoming, I ended up deleting every one of my answers and comments before deleting my account entirely. Now I take pains to block Quora results from my searches and never click on a Quora link if I come across it. It seems like I’m not missing much based on the terribly awful “innovations” mentioned in this article.
schleck8 3y ago
Quora is the spammiest large website, for sure. Depending on your query like 80 % of responses are scams from India and/or SEO fluff bullshit and self promotion.
crtified 3y ago
I'm waiting for the inevitable counter-culture pushback against AI, where suddenly humanity realises how valuable it's "pure, non-AI polluted" content bases are/were, as a unique and critical data class in their own right.
- astrange 3y ago
  This doesn't matter, it's not a real problem for AI and can be used to improve them. It's already happened though, because it's the first thing people think of.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
I think everyone here is missing that the founders created this to make money. They didn’t found a non-profit. And it turns out, people don’t actually want to pay for this, and having taken rich people’s money the only way to pay for it is the slide into Ads and that inevitably leads to this garbage. Why are people surprised?
charcircuit 3y ago
Dead? It's still the top 28th most popular website, above tiktok. [1] [1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/ https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/
denton-scratch 3y ago
> Co-founders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever were both early Facebook employees Where have I come across the surname D'Angelo before? Oh yes - he's on the board of OpenAI, and was the only board member at the time Altman was sacked (according to WP).
zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
Quora is great if you like to read thoughts of people with fringe ideas and those who are mentally ill. There's a decent sized gangstalking group on there.
Luctct 3y ago
[flagged]
hermitcrab 3y ago
There are some interesting answers on quora. But so many stupid questions posted by trolls. The signal to noise ratio seems to drop every month.
deleted 3y ago
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theknocker 3y ago
[dead]
hunglee2 3y ago
The downward slide on Quora started with the 'Top Writers' program, which created an elite tier of contributors who were anointed and then privileged by the platform, rather than voted on by the members. This created an aristocracy who could now guarantee high visibility for even mediocre answers, whilst hugely disincentivising everyone else - especially first time contributors - to even try and make a response. A commentator made the point elsewhere - this type of platform should be a non-profit, maybe a community owned platform.
thr0waway001 3y ago
It's very evident how bad it got the moment you go to a question. Here's their layout: [ Question ] [ads] [ads] [ads] [related questions] [related questions] ....scroll farther... [related questions] [related questions] [actual answers] Like WTF?! Whose decision was this?
spamizbad 3y ago
Quora never lived as far as I'm concerned. It was always touted as some better, savvier alternative to the StackExchange network but it was just clogged up with crummy answers to bad questions. They made it extremely difficult to see the actual content and would make it near impossible to follow threads/discussions without making an account (which would in turn spam you) The fact that it was SEO-optimized up the wazoo and always clogged up search results didn't make it any better. For that reason I have "-site:quora.com" seared into my muscle memory when searching.
bastawhiz 3y ago
I was a top writer for two years (and got a pretty sweet jacket out of it). I was a multiple knowledge prize winner for my answers (which paid out enough for me to report it on my taxes!). Here's the nugget from the article that's the core reason: > that “was all about trying to come up with questions that would draw in more views and more people,” she said—not about incentivizing high-quality answers. It was all about adding webpages of individual questions, for SEO purposes. I remember the day they announced to the top writer forum that they were killing incentives for good answers and starting to incentivize engaged question askers. Overnight, you got bots posting questions about trivial math problems (literally just multiplication in most cases). The top writers disappeared. What hurts the most: I deleted my account. At some point it became undeleted. I don't have the ability, as far as I'm aware, to kill it. My profile lives on to enrich the people who betrayed the writers. Kind of sad, but it was all about engagement. Ad dollars.
- mgh2 3y ago
  Ads ruin everything. No respect for power users, plain greed. Is there any parallel to Medium?
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    I think medium had the right idea but I don't think the business model was really solid. Substack got it right: people want to pay creators to write, not a company to broker access to creators. Instead of pivoting, they seemed to double down.
    - Solvency 3y ago
      Why aren't science journals the same? Why do I still have to pay some middle man?
      - bastawhiz 3y ago
        I don't know. I'm not in academia or doing research, but from the outside looking it, it seems like a racket.
Jordan-117 3y ago
Yahoo Answers dead, Quora dying, StackExchange struggling with AI spam and mod rebellions. Meanwhile [Ask MetaFilter](https://ask.metafilter.com/ https://ask.metafilter.com/) just turned 20 and keeps on trucking. Smaller scale obviously (human-scale, I'd say), but untroubled by the exploitation and greed of the bigger sites, and still delivering best answers to questions every day. Hopefully more of the internet shifts back to this communitarian model as the pitfalls of the big VC-driven platforms become more apparent.
Glyptodon 3y ago
The real name policy meant that after trying to answer a question once I was done with it. I think it'd be interesting to move the question/topic style into something run more like Wikipedia.
mianos 3y ago
It would not be a bad thing if it just went and died but it's still here making Google search results a wasteland. It is a sad thing to me to see such a great resource just end up trash. Thanks to ublacklist for hiding the damned thing.
Gow8876 3y ago
I remember creating account there with pseudo-name for a few years. The admin there one day gotten extremely hostile and request me to give then real biodata. I didnt even consider to contribute anything not even simple comments. Just being quiet user. I would even pay annual subscription to have the site access but not contributing like E. Britanica site. Regardless, I have been extremely detrimental to that website with maybe running a multi year hostile anti-Quora campaign across the world. Quora just made an unnecessary enemy user with me. All I wanted just like HN, probe in, read, and maybe comment a bit maybe once or twice a year. Instead their admins turn very hostile threatening to remove my account simply for not giving them real biodata.
dartos 3y ago
They’re all in on Poe now. They’ve collected years of QA data.
coldtea 3y ago
As a business it was never that alive to begin with - like most startups based on eyeballs.
datavirtue 3y ago
This can't be a commercial activity. It has to be the Wikipedia model. If it supposed to make a profit, all that baggage comes into play. Imagine if your local library was run by entrepreneurs.
stemlord 3y ago
This article frames the situation as if Quora once took off, and was once good, which I very much disagree with. Quora never "took off" by way of being good/helpful. It was all just forced SEO. Quora was dead on arrival to me
michalu 3y ago
Was one of the first 500k users on Quora and loved it. Had a chance to get education and knowledge from top VCs and entrepreneurs directly. Even showed up on some meetups in London. Even was a published author with Inc, business Insider etc who were grabbing content from Quora. It went downhill as it got gamified and you saw the rise of powerusers. I remember there was a guy who'd answer a question within 2 minutes of it being posted. Mostly based on first page Google results and he was the #1 poweruser. And people assigned him an authority based on the fact that to up that point most quality users were also important in real life. But this dude seems like he was just a Quora addict with no outside credentials. These guys quickly gathered what kind of answer gets you the most upvotes and so Quora became a pretty ugly biased place. There were still small micro topics with high quality. Then couple of VCs/Entrepreneurs started using it for content marketing. And after that you've only had marketing interns from companies doing content post there. Add to it lack of monetization. I've had millions of reads and answers, it was a good source of credibility I would think but I deleted my entire profile some year ago with all my some very in-depth answers. I owe a lot to Quora though, it was a goldmine in the early days. It got me on the track of learning to code and advanced my education. also writing answers itself makes you research and double check and lookup sources. If anyone from Quora reads it thank you. Edit: oh yeah, the person mentioned in the article was one of those early powerusers that made people like me leave the site. How funny. Seems like it worked out for her though. I just hope the same thing won't happen to substack.

How Quora died

369 points by CharlesW 3y ago

coding123 3y ago

I never liked the site... It's always a game... Oh that's answering a different question...

thedudeabides5 3y ago

This is what happens when you gatekeep replies / lurking. Remember StackOverflow...

AlexandrB 3y ago
An odd takeaway. The article seems to imply that most of their issues stem from spam and low effort questions/answers. Both from users and their own AI. More gatekeeping might have been the solution here.
- obernard 3y ago
  By making it harder for people to use the site casually, you tip the balance in favor of spammers and away from people who actually have an interest, and therefore usually some knowledge, on a given subject.

MiddleEndian 3y ago

Quora was never as great as yahoo answers

jfengel 3y ago
At its peak it was considerably better than Y!A. They started with Silicon Valley luminaries (their friends) and that attracted a lot of other well educated users, especially scientists and philosophers. A lot of genuinely great content was generated. I believe Q&A sites will inevitably degrade as the low-hanging fruit is picked early. ("How do I lose weight?" "Explain relativity" "Is God real?") It can start with great answers, but it quickly becomes repetitious. Y!A probably also had a similar phase, but by the time most people heard about it, it was already famously dumb. Quora followed a similar path. It actually lasted longer than one might expect, in part because they threw a lot of money at it. But it is now much worse because it's better known and a more visible target to trolls and spammers. Plus it's reputation for paying people, which attracts vast amounts of minimum effort, much of it automated. (And not paying any more, but that doesn't stop people.)
- MiddleEndian 3y ago
  Yahoo Answers was greater because it was so bad. Quora wasn't good enough or bad enough. Gotta go one way or the other.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    If you're a fan of trolling you should check out Quora now. There are some real full time professionals.

matsemann 3y ago

When I visit Quora, mainly through it being a result for something I've searched for on Google, I can never quite understand what's the question, the answer, and what's an answer to something completely different. So I've never felt compelled to stay or join myself. Also, for a while I just hit a login wall, which of course makes you not click a link there the next time.

input_sh 3y ago
There's a toggle on top left that's by default set to "all related", as in answers to the question asked + a bunch of answers to things you're definitely not looking for, but are tangentially related. If you switch the toggle to "answers", you only get answers to the question.
- moralestapia 3y ago
  Sure ... but 99 out of 100 users just say "weird" and leave. And that's "How Quora died".
  - input_sh 3y ago
    I'm not here to defend Quora, but my speculation is that Google's preference for long-form content is equally to blame. Basically the same reason as recipes that start with a long life story: Google prefers pages with lots of content, even if 10% of it is actually useful to anyone. So a page with 50+ "answers" is preferable to a page with two actual answers.
    - voisin 3y ago
      > Google prefers pages with lots of content And that’s how Google search will be overtaken by GPT with ease. People want answers, not an ad-driven algorithm’s desire for content that is long enough to support more ads.
      - moralestapia 3y ago

ethbr1 3y ago

If your core business product is content contributed by users... I'm turning to the opinion that you need a C-level ombudsman- / dean of contributors-type role. Whose sole job it is to (1) figure out what contributors are thinking and want & (2) advocate for them inside the company. Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Management begins to take contributions for granted. Stops caring about attracting contributors. Then focuses on revenue. Then makes changes to the platform that kill contributions, in pursuit of revenue. And they miss so many obvious ways to placate and delight their contributors. "It'd be nice to have a mod tool that does X" shouldn't be a 3-year back burner ask. Maybe make it harder for your company to footgun your golden goose?

jfengel 3y ago
Quora had one, William Gunn. He was laid off, along with the entire human moderation staff and practically all of the user-facing developers. Quora had been going downhill for quite some time before that, as they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content and were grasping at straws. But that was the point where they appear to have pivoted entirely towards AI and continued the human generated content side on minimum life support.
- RajT88 3y ago
  > they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content This sort of thing should be a nonprofit. When it was good, it was literally making the world a better place. Possibly the Library of Congress would be a good steward for such a platform. Something to make it resistant to enshittification.
  - fullshark 3y ago
    How about Wikimedia?
    - ivanmontillam 3y ago
      Wikimedia is a non-profit that operates like a for-profit when the yearly round of donations comes around. They literally hoard money[0]. I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception. -- [0]: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/

chris-orgmenta 3y ago

The UI isn't really mentioned directly in the article, and is another major problem. It's optimised to keep you reading. But you don't want to keep reading, you just want your original question answered. Unfortunately, they style all the page components the same, and you are forced to read to see if it's an answer to your question, a 'related question', or something irrelevant (like the ChatGPT example given). On top of that, it cuts off most of the answer(s) anyway 'below the fold' of the fragment it's contained in. Example where I googled 'quora van dimensions': https://www.quora.com/Is-there-much-of-a-height-difference-between-the-medium-and-high-roof-Ford-transit-vans-in-the-UK https://www.quora.com/Is-there-much-of-a-height-difference-b... 1. AI component 2. Relevant answer, but arguably a lazy one that assumes that it's a post 2020 model (instead of 2013-9). Also does not address the person's question for 'in the UK' (people answering should advise if model differs between the UK & US). Also assumes that the asker has not already looked at that spec sheet. 3. Fairly related / useful context, I suppose. 4. A 'related' question's answer, for "What is the height of a standard 53ft. semi trailer?". (Seriously?!) 5. A 'related' question's answer, for "How tall can your load be above the cab on a flatbed 2016 Ford F550?" (Seriously?!) 6. 'Related questions' 7. Answers to completely different questions. The UI is hostile to the readers' needs. So that, along with the poor quality responses mentioned (usually some business consultant giving vague pointless lists or pointing to some SaaS offering) means that "Site:old.reddit.com" or niche related websites is usually a more direct path to an answer to me.

jfengel 3y ago
Quora isn't a great place to get answers. It's better as a source of mindless, faintly informative entertainment. At its best it's a bit better than your ordinary content farm because it's not as click-baity; the users are volunteers who just want to write. "Recreational typing", as one prominent user puts it.

nottorp 3y ago

Don't blame LLMs, blame the registration requirement. This is one of the kinds of product that people will skip if they can't evaluate it frictionless.

Wistar 3y ago
This is what always stops me at quora’s door.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Me too. I've a simple but strict set of security rules for whether I'll use a website. - it does not want to run javascript - that I can access it over Tor without being blocked - that it will work in a text based browser like elinks Despite the protestations by idealogues that no such sites exist, HN meets all those requirements, as do dozens of useful sites I regularly use. If and only if I get to evaluate the quality of a site based on those requirements, I may eventually register, with nothing more than an email, in order to post replies. Quora fell off that list long ago. More recently so did StackExchange. Often I find that things break as soon as Cloudflare proxies are involved.
  - obernard 3y ago
    You must agree that for almost every web-based product, designers and product managers can safely decide to completely ignore all people who have requirements like yours without it ever affecting their success.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      Not only can they ignore such users, they have to.
      - nonrandomstring 3y ago
        And yet here I am, the annoying fly in the ointment of your hypothesis, no?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rvz 3y ago

One of the first casualties caused by ChatGPT which explains the massive down-round from being valued from $1.8BN to $500M. Would need more than just Poe to justify than billion dollar valuation.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

indigoabstract 3y ago

Quora seems pure clickbait at this point. Unfortunately, because it didn't start that way, now anything still relevant on that site is burried under the weight of the nonsense.

hot_gril 3y ago
I get random emails from them about "popular" questions like "why has Javascript replaced C++?" Seems like ragebait.
- spiderice 3y ago
  One thing I noticed back when I browsed Quora a lot is that most the answers were in direct opposition to the question being asked. It’s like clockwork. Q: why is running so good for you A: it actually isn’t good for you. <insert justification> Q: why do so many people run when it’s so bad for you A: it actually is really good for you. <insert justification> Every single question seemed to be this way. It probably reveals a lot about human nature, but it really turned me off to know I was just reading knee jerk reactions to questions rather than anything accurate. All this to say, yes, ragebait is the lifeblood of Quora.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    For programming questions, the answer is always "it depends" even if it doesn't really depend.

mrangle 3y ago

This article amounts to concern trolling with a barely veiled agenda for censorship. Its "users are fleeing" claim is an attempt at wish fulfillment. The key to using Quora couldn't be easier: don't search for or read topics that you don't want to see. Human inquiry will always be delightfully messy except in the view of those who have pathological control complexes.

hot_gril 3y ago
Even if you go to Quora for stuff you want, it's useless cause it shows answers to unrelated questions. I agree the article is bogus though, reminds me of all the "Twitter is dead ever since Elon Musk bought it" ones.
astrange 3y ago
That's useless because it starts recommending you nonsense once it thinks it's learned what you want. I just opened the front page and the 3rd item was a space called "True Love Conquers All" with relatable-Facebook-meme-style writing and an image of a woman giving birth in the backseat of a car.

AlbertCory 3y ago

I used to like Quora, but it's gotten unuseable. I ask questions once in a while, and no one answers them. My "Notifications" today include: Why did the Beatles use a Stratocaster for electric guitars? What is the best essay writing service? What are the major challenges of writing an essay? What is a poem for you? Should I sell my Squier CV 50s Strat for an Ibanez S521? Do you count time spent thinking about what you are going to write as time spent writing? Is it important for a writer to write what he feels? What is the process of writing a book without having anything written down beforehand? Do guitar players prefer single coil pickups or humbuckers? Do guitar players prefer single coil pickups or humbuckers? Which rock musicians do you think could've been better than they actually were? New Quora insult: "Quora exists to make NextDoor users look smart"

schmudde 3y ago

Before folks jump on the business model aspect, one should keep in mind that many (all?) online communities go through a similar growth curve. Wikipedia included. But this article goes into the details of what makes this feel different. Quora is aesthetically much worse than it ever was.

walterbell 3y ago

No mention of Quora founder at OpenAI? https://archive.is/xsK8S https://archive.is/xsK8S > His position on the [OpenAI] board has also raised eyebrows because Quora has been in increasingly direct competition with OpenAI’s best-known service: ChatGPT ... Shortly after OpenAI launched ChatGPT a year ago, Quora introduced Poe, a platform that allows people to ask questions from various AI chatbots, including ChatGPT.

robg 3y ago
I’m still surprised that D’Angelo didn’t get as much scrutiny in the OpenAI mess, especially as the only board member still in place. Seems obvious in hindsight that Quora continuing to fail can only be saved by leveraging as training data for the next thing. And OpenAIs ambitions threaten that.

oh_my_goodness 3y ago

In its "golden age" (say 2014) Quora was a pleasant place to write answers. But it was often an unpleasant place to ask questions.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

moralestapia 3y ago

Tangentially related, since the CEO of Quora is on OpenAI's board. I recently had an interaction w/ OpenAI's community that left a sour taste in my mouth. Asked one question, some smarty guy tried to "XY problem" me, I clarified this is not an "XY problem" and my question is quite clear and specific and eventually one mod was involved, other mods ganged up on me and removed all my posts because "they were violating guidelines". I complained about that sort of abuse, but guess what? The same mods that run the forum run the "forum about the forum" section, lol, so they had their fun again. Left a note there, in case some actual OpenAI employee/investor cares, telling them "this is how StackOverflow died". I'm sharing this here because if they are taking a page from Quora's playbook, well ... good luck? I'll never bother myself again with the OpenAI community and that's exactly why I stopped being involved with Quora and StackOverflow in the past. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about the forum's demise in a couple months from now.

Rapzid 3y ago
GitHub Copilot must be trained on all those XY answers and can be just as insufferable.

yannis 3y ago

Not only Quora, but many other sites including the various "stackexchange" sites started declining I would say from about 2018, so this is not a phenomenon attributed to llms. IMHO I attribute this to the following: a) The overuse of social media conditioning users to provide short answers, rather than long thoughtful write-ups, b) Most topics have been saturated to the limit c) lack of interest from the new generation d) Bad management and moderation.

dclowd9901 3y ago
I think stack exchange’s moderators killed that site. Common complaints were how antagonistic they were toward new users. Hard to grow or sustain a user base if you turn out all the new ones.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Yeah it's a really big problem with StackOverflow. The mods are all crazy. I can't find it now but the StackOverflow Devs proposed actually fixing (or at least improving) question closing by allowing the asker to reopen their question once. I can't remember the exact details, but it sounded like a good first step. Downvoted to hell by the existing mods of course. They're a bit screwed because they rely so much on volunteer mods but the volunteer mods are crazy...
  - matsemann 3y ago
    Doesn't sound like either of you know how SO works. Very little is done by mods, mainly it's votes by normal users. Like I could be voting to close something as a duplicate, off topic etc with my privileges. It's the community doing this, not moderators. And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework or doing very little effort themselves before asking. Why do these people deserve others spending their time helping them if they can't even bother to search or formulate something coherent?
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      > And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework I don't think anyone objects to closing those questions. That's not really what this is about. My questions are very clearly not asking for help with homework and trivial "how do I write a for loop" or "it doesn't work" questions. Still get downvoted/closed frequently. Most often: * It gets closed as duplicate because there's a vaguely similar - but different - question. Or sometimes there's a completely different question with an answer that incidentally also answers my question. * It gets closed as too vague or not clear because it's simply outside the domain of expertise of the voter. It's clear to people that know what I'm talking about. To be clear when I say "mods" I don't exclusively mean people with official mod power. It's also people that moderate for fun - those that trawl the new questions. Let me know if you have a better name for those people. You can tell it's them because you very often get a couple of downvotes immediately and then if you check back a month or two later it will have been upvoted by many more people that actually had the same question and arrived there via Google.

Aardwolf 3y ago

Is it dead? It and reddit (and stackoverflow) are the main "human typed" results I still get (yes I'm aware they're spending some resources on displaying an AI answer at the top). Of course never really liked quora's forced login thing and how it seems to have removed parts of questions that answers are still referring to and how it mixes answers to different questions in front of the current one

dboreham 3y ago
It appears that Quora's pages are SEO optimized now, to the detriment of human users. Basically you can optimize for ad revenue and not have human user experience degrade significantly.

keiferski 3y ago

I think the upvote/downvote model for evaluating content is fundamentally not a good one, and this deficiency is the root problem for a lot of sites (Reddit, Quora, etc.) that were founded around the same time, circa 2005-2012. It lends itself too much to groupthink, popularity contests, and self-promotion. X/Twitter has a million other problems, but I do like their new Community Notes of fact-checking claims. It's essentially anonymous and somewhat immune to self-promotion. Going forward, a better path for FAQ-type sites is probably something similar to that model. The hard part is how you get users to answer questions while removing the self-promotion and gamification/scoreboard incentives. It's possible that AI might just destroy this space entirely, but I still think you need some form of human fact-checking in order to avoid hallucinations.

passion__desire 3y ago
Anyone who shares an article or news which has been community noted gets an immediate downvote in recommendations for me.
- wonderfulcloud 3y ago
  Community Notes could just be an expansion of a good tweet to clear up some ambiguity. The up/down feature tends to create echo chambers that eventually exclude half the population. Reddit is worse at this because of excessive moderation combined with doomscrollong incentives.
gn4d 3y ago
>I think the upvote/downvote model for evaluating content is fundamentally not a good one This is why the bump model that 4chan uses is superior. You can sort threads by activity, but all posters display with equal weight, and you must utilize critical thinking to evaluate each and every post (unless it is from a trip user whose authority you trust in a particular domain), not some little number that pushes them to the top or sinks them to the bottom. There are (You)'s, but that can indicate consensus, disagreement, controversy, or something else, and you need to sus that our for yourself. Consensus-based truth models are frankly shit for most types of topics. Heck, even for scientific topics, the peer review model has been shown to be completely bankrupt.

dec0dedab0de 3y ago

Didn’t we see this coming when they required you to log in to view content? Did everyone forget experts exchange?

sparks1970 3y ago

Whenever a search leads me to a question/answer on Quora I'm inevitably hit with a Sign In popup that blocks the whole screen. Feels obnoxious and I just back button away.

CM30 3y ago

Well, the revenue sharing probably didn't help much for sure. I've seen dozens of sites and platforms add that as a feature, and as unfortunate as it is, this almost always backfires. People see 'make money contributing to this platform' as 'free cash for spamming!' and the quality often falls off a cliff. You need really strict rules and a good moderation team to keep a platform under control in this situation, and that's rarely the case for services like Quora. You can see the same issues cropping up on Medium with its partner program, on Twitter thanks to Twitter Blue and revenue sharing, and even to some degree on the likes of YouTube and Twitch (though they're so massive that the scammers don't really stand out/do as well). Put money on the table, and the scammers will come out of the woodwork to try and get as much of it as they can, quality content be damned. Edit: I also suspect part of the issue with revenue sharing programs is that they don't offer enough to incentive genuine experts, but offer enough that if you're utterly desperate and local costs of living are low, you're incentivised to spam for it.

matsemann 3y ago
Yeah, the comments to any viral post on Xitter now is just blue checkmarks spamming memes in order to get likes and eyeballs on their junk content, and thus make money.
- aniforprez 3y ago
  Any large film/music/video games twitter account post gets spammed by AI bots and I mean literal AI bots that occasionally give the game away with "you have run out of credits" or "I don't understand this prompt" messages. Also a bunch of them just retweeting their own posts that have nothing to do with the original in an attempt to farm engagement for their older stuff

MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago

I find the answers on Quora to be way too try-hard. It feels like LinkedIn growth style BS stories.

fabioborellini 3y ago
Yes, the first screenful is motivation to read the answer or some personal unrelated crap.
bmm6o 3y ago
This is exactly it. Even at its height, it felt like everyone was trying to build a brand and a following, and that was the primary motivation for the answers.

username332211 3y ago

So, the fourth paragraph of the article is supposed to demonstrate the decline of Quora. It has a number of links. One of those links shows a UI that's fairly obviously Reddit! [1] Another is to genius.com's lyrics to some song[2] which don't seem to have anything to do with anything the author's complaining about. Of the links actually relevant to Quora, one is about an obvious joke[3], which the author either doesn't understand or pretends not to. What's left is a case of spam[4], that the article links twice. I'd suppose because it's the only evidence the author has of low quality questions on Quora. While Quora is a horrible website, I'd say the evidence shows Slate is worse. Their reporters can't even find genuine evidence of Quora's low quality. They show us Reddit instead. [1] https://twitter.com/3DrakaiNa/status/1743993622737863056 https://twitter.com/3DrakaiNa/status/1743993622737863056 [2] https://genius.com/23826656 https://genius.com/23826656 [3] https://twitter.com/Zeronelite/status/1743449094360596802 https://twitter.com/Zeronelite/status/1743449094360596802 [4] https://hollywoodactress02.quora.com/OMG-KING-CHARLES-SHOCK-the-WORLD-with-ROYAL-BAN-ON-PRINCE-HARRY-AND-MEGHAN-MARKLE-SAD https://hollywoodactress02.quora.com/OMG-KING-CHARLES-SHOCK-...

plorkyeran 3y ago
[3] is, as far as anyone can tell, an insane person and not a joke. They've posted literally hundreds of questions involving atheists, christian babies, and nonsensical situations.
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]

mugivarra69 3y ago

i dont trust the founder

coolThingsFirst 3y ago
Who

jeffbee 3y ago

Quora has never been a good resource. It was always designed to trick users into clicking through from a SERP with snippet content that isn't on the landing page when you arrive. It is the same business model as Pinterest. The amazing thing is that Euro regulators have for years been trying to favor this business model, trying to force Google to rank these types of sites highly under the banner of competition, when what the users really want is for these sites to disappear from search results altogether.

darksim905 3y ago
I'm not sure I fully agree, I've found some useful things, but I like long form content that expands beyond what's on Reddit comments and occasionally you hear interesting stories. The problem I have is, the content I usually see is essentially the regurigation of youtube videos stealing from imdb's trivia section: "Top 10 things you didn't know about $film!" Quora does the same thing for clicks in a way, and it ends up being misleading.

wslh 3y ago

Quora is thriving! It appears on almost every search I do on Google. More than a few years ago. I understand that their quality is terrible but in a economy of focus and SEO they are doing incredible well. If you publish a well written article and adding all the SEO capabilities that you can, you will almost never appear before Quora.

jurgenaut23 3y ago

I was a super enthusiastic Quora user for a long while. This is the first time I actually took the time to _close_ an account a few months back, because I was so frustrated with the turn this whole thing took.

simpaticoder 3y ago

Quora is a good example of how artificial scarcity goes wrong. If you're not restrictive enough, you can't make a profit. But if too restrictive, then the business will starve itself. When it becomes too restrictive/extractive over time you have enshittification.

mp05 3y ago

Seems like every time I land on Quora it's just a bunch of people bragging about their IQs while simultaneously lambasting neo Nazis, all while missing the juicy irony of their entire worldview. I avoid Quora.

kstrauser 3y ago
Most smart people I know oppose neo Nazis. That's not a very controversial position.
- mp05 3y ago
  So you don't see the irony of people raving about how innately superior they are because of their IQ but hate on people whose core tenant was being innately superior? "Smart" is very much a function of the work you put in, though of course not the only factor. I don't feel the need to have to explain this more than I have. Edit: I have to ask... what about the smart people that don't oppose them? What's their deal?
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    I find anyone bragging about their intelligence to be intolerably obnoxious. 100% of the smart people I know oppose Nazism. It seems there are too many politicians around who are objectively intelligent but are a bit comfortable with at least some of the Nazi Party’s ideas.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - temporarara 3y ago
      "We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare." That's one Nazi Party idea according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program). I would say you are not that intelligent if you oppose that just because "Nazism bad". If you oppose racism it's pretty clear that you don't in general support Nazism. But opposing Nazism doesn't mean that you even oppose racism, maybe your smart friends just don't like that particular German codified version of racism, it's pretty pointless statement without some analysis. Just like US was back then against Nazism and ultimately even went to war with them while simultaneously being openly racist. Granted, many of the Nazi ideas revolve pretty obsessively around the concept of race, but looks like at least in one case they were even explicitly not racists: "We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race." And that's another idea I basically fully agree with. IMO death penalty should be reserved only for the most serious cases, but society needs to be extremely harsh to career criminals and their ilk, they laugh at lenient punishments.

mannyv 3y ago

Once they started monetizing things got worse. Financial incentives led to people gaming the site, which always leads to crap content. You need a low barrier to entry to get free content, but then that makes it easy to pump full of crap. But you need that content to get users and monetization <shrug>. Quora has handled that much worse than, say, reddit. But reddit doesn't allow their users to monetize their content, which keeps the spammers at bay.

mjamesk 3y ago

I don't think it died. I get answers from Quora or Reddit for most of my questions. Nowadays, Google is also pushing forum websites. The amount of questions being asked and answered is drastically reduced after GPT. So as a platform, it has died but still has the same amount of reach. They integrated AI. We have to see where this heads.

Waterluvian 3y ago

It’s profound to me how many good ideas there are online that aren’t sufficiently profitable. Reminds me of the fundamentals of the “old Web” full of altruistic endeavours.

Rapzid 3y ago

I wish Google would put Quora out of our misery at this point.

m3kw9 3y ago

Quora was a nice example on how an extremely shtty UI can still become successful if the app was useful enough. It’s insane how much people can put up with if it scratches their itch enough

Luctct 3y ago

[flagged]

krkhan 3y ago

I was an active contributor to Quora in the mid-10's -- my answers gained some 3m views. It was really something back then, as many people have fondly reminisced about the era. There were so many great writers who brought so much understanding to whatever crazy stuff they were passionate about by writing for free on Quora. You had diplomats, chefs, former propaganda writers, people living through violent conflict, doctors, teachers, scientists, physicists, astronauts and the list goes on. Quora from that time truly helped me understand the world better. AI might have driven the final nail in the coffin but the one decision which was truly an inflection point was starting a program that would pay for asking X amount of questions. The platform was cool because of people who wrote ANSWERS -- to the point where the original question sometimes became even tangential to the actual answer but you'd learn so much nevertheless. Quora not only ended the top-writer program for those people it started offering monetary incentives for asking the most inane bullshit questions as long as they got the views. It is truly baffling to me how something that holds so much genuine value can be driven into the ground while making decisions left, right and center (and the whole community trying to tell you exactly what you're doing) that destroyed everything of value in the Quora process. The older answers are still there, but the community magic has utterly evaporated. I guess it's pretty normal for folks who have seen this happening in BBS/Usenet era but regardless of all of Quora's faults (the tone-moderation of the language was always a bit overboard in IMHO but I don't think it led to the downfall -- it was always there and writers worked around it) it is genuinely disappointing to see every successive platform try to build something of value only to falter and disappear because we just can't seem to keep anything good around.

city41 3y ago
Quora really captured lightning in a bottle around that time. I used to get a weekly (daily? Can't remember) email from Quora and I would read just about every question in it. I came to look forward to the emails. I've never had that experience with any other other newsletter.
- Agraillo 3y ago
  As a daily destination, Quora is no longer usable for me, no need to repeat what others already said. But the digest still surprises me and the posts are often good, even if it's a rewritten Wikipedia entry. It's like a user-generated "wonders of the past/world" newspaper for me. Daily was too much, but weekly is ok. I'm not sure whether every e-mail send it personalized, but at least in some way it looks like dependent on what I clicked before.

coolThingsFirst 3y ago

Typical american crud bs. Make an app get VC money and jump ship to cool new tech. Had great potential but sadly went tits up. I wonder why no good CRUDs come from europe. But then i remember they are busy moping.

Sparkyte 3y ago

Quora had all the opportunity to invest in AI for LLM based on user responses. It didn't. I wonder if other sites will go down this way side.

spiderice 3y ago
What is Poe if not exactly that?

kashunstva 3y ago

> venture capital hub Andreessen Horowitz blessed Quora with a much-needed $75 million investment Most shocking of all is that anyone would dump more and $1 or two on Quora at this point.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

poundofshrimp 3y ago

Quora merging “all related” answers onto the same page is one of the most annoying things about it. I switch it to “Answers” 100% of the time.

standardUser 3y ago

I was a 'Top Writer' for a couple of years (pre-monetization). I loved it as a motivation to research topics I was interested in and practice writing. Eventually I lost interest, but I still get occasional search results from Quora with information that is otherwise difficult or impossible to find online. Perhaps in an alternative timeline we might be regularly typing "[some query] quora" into search engines, but Reddit seems to have filled that much-needed gap more successfully.

breck 3y ago

I think Quora died because the premise was flawed: that high quality repositories of words would have a strong ROI near indefinitely. Now it is clear there is a new thing in our world (LLMs), and turns out repositories of well crafted words will be irrelevant. Almost no one saw this change coming (or at least, not how quickly this change would come). There is nothing Quora could have done to change this fate.

CoBE10 3y ago

I remember someone asking a question on Quora around 2015: "How long do you think Quora would last?" Someone answered that it probably would not last more than the next 5 years. I forgot what were the actual reasons he gave, but it gave me such an uneasy feeling that Quora could die in the next 5 years. Looking back at it now, it's probably around 2015 that it started becoming what it is today - SEO spam.

ufmace 3y ago

Seems to me it's all about money. They all gotta make it somehow, and if ads are the plan, than it's going to reach this state eventually. User-funded services seem to fare better, but they rarely grow as large. I don't think there's any other easy solution though. Nonprofits may not be looking for the mega-exit, but they still need to pay the bills somehow, so most of the same forces still apply. They are also more likely to draw partisan ideologues who are naturally more enthusiastic about having a way to put their thumbs on the scales of the discourse despite lower pay and no chance of that lucrative mega-exit. Government-funded things have too many of their own issues. Practically impossible to start, execute, or pivot fast enough to compete with startups, and subject to political turf wars and overhead. Naturally, nothing much comparable to such sites has sprung out of that.

AlwaysRock 3y ago

Quora is basically unreadable now. The layout is so confusing.

mattmaroon 3y ago

Their UI has long been more focused on getting you to click on other questions and/or ads rather than seeing the answer you want, and they do it by making it really hard to tell which is which. They intersperse a sponsored question that has nothing to do with yours between the top two replies. I guess that’s probably the only way they could really monetize but it sure is annoying.

acdha 3y ago

See also Google: I knew they were embracing the dark side when Quora not only went unpunished for search cloaking but seemed to get even more solidly rewarded with high search weight.

seahawks78 3y ago

I have some very good opinion of this. I work in big tech and I might be a canonical example of some users who no longer find Quora interesting. From 2012 to about 2014 I was absolutely hooked to Quora spending anywhere between 2 to 4 hours every day. At that time I was a young professional in my early 30s, newly married and just at the beginning of my tech career after grad school. I used to love the questions posted on the forum which seemed very relevant to me e.g. how to build a career in tech, dating/relationship advice, tourism advice etc. I was hooked. Fast forward 10 years from then. I am a 40 year old middle aged guy. Still working in tech albeit at a Senior level; with one school going kid and have a mortgage. I still visit Quora occasionally but am hard pressed to find any content that is interesting and appropriate for my age. It seems that they are still showing me questions which were mostly relevant to my younger self 10 years back and not now. There is practically no content or discussion in that forum that can attract and keep a 40 year old middle aged guy. Its just that I evolved but they didn't. Not to mention the fact that they also became more annoying with all these "promoted", "relevant" questions intermixed within the same page. I think their lack of ability to evolve over time absolutely finished the product. My two cents.

1905 3y ago

[dead]

Apocryphon 3y ago

Twelve years ago, Quora was a Silicon Valley darling and notoriously had one of the more difficult interview processes. How far they’ve fallen.

ninkendo 3y ago
I must have missed this honeymoon period with Quora, I only ever remember it being as “that shitty site that tries to make me log in to view answers”. I treated it like that old “Experts Exchange” site, and just visually moved past it every time I saw it in search results. People in this thread speaking fondly of Quora has come to a complete shock to me to be honest. I thought everyone else also considered it just a spam site. Today I learned.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  I mean, user experience aside, the company had an inordinate amount of hype for a Q&A website. Guess it was one of those founder prestige stories. The concept of lionizing subject matter experts probably appealed to the Silicon Valley technocratic mindset, too.

sedatk 3y ago

I briefly enjoyed contributing to Quora, but then they added a paid tier, “spaces”, and all that spammy content. Now, as someone who created a few of its popular answers, I never want to see the site again. I’ll probably get rid of my account too. It’s almost as if they explicitly didn’t want me there, and did everything to achieve that.

saucymew 3y ago

From personal experience, the main Quora experience is their Digest e-mails; less than a third are relevant topics. And there are now constant "Edit:" updates on answers addressing the trolls and hateful responses, further dampening my interest in answering questions. Where have all the internet forums gone?

Growtika 3y ago

Some potentially interesting information I've just checked that might give a new perspective: From an SEO standpoint, Quora is currently at one of its peak levels. - It has reached 267 million organic visitors per month: https://i.imgur.com/899g3Jm.png https://i.imgur.com/899g3Jm.png - Quora's organic traffic is quite diverse https://i.imgur.com/JfbYKH1.png https://i.imgur.com/JfbYKH1.png Google's helpful content update has increased traffic for sites like Quora, Stack Overflow, and Reddit. In many instances, I believe this boost lacks justification. Quora's user experience is not intuitive. Although they removed the signup wall, which impacted their bounce rate and caused millions of organic visitors to leave their site shortly after clicking on a Quora result in a search engine, reading an answer on Quora now feels overwhelmingly disorganized.

wonderfulcloud 3y ago

Apart from how most internet companies get worse when money comes into play. I find that most of social media went south around the time of Trump's election and the heavy partisan moderation that followed it. Quora further seems to have been taken over by Chinese paid writers.

vintermann 3y ago
The worst is that Quora paid its own users to spam the service with questions they didn't actually need answers to. You think you're helping a real human, with a real human need, and then you see he's asked not only what museums you recommend in your hometown, but also what museums you recommend in 400 other small towns from all over the world, and what restaurants you recommend for 400 other random small towns, and then what local radio channels you recommend for 400 more etc.

Yusefmosiah 3y ago

Quora is, I think, part of the reason that OpenAI has a big lead over their rivals. Quora has, specifically for training language models, very high-signal data, when compared to Reddit, twitter, gmail, and Meta’s platforms. And OpenAI is afaik, the only AI lab with a license to Quora’s data. Quora has long been a world leader of SEO and dark UX patterns — it was never as valuable to users as its Google ranking would indicate — so it’s hard to mourn its demise. But yes, it does stink to see the quality of information going down while the quantity grows at an ever-increasing exponential rate.

ho_schi 3y ago

This awkward thing was never usable? It a bad clone of Stackoverflow. And Stackoverflow works. But it needs a new owner which has a clue what it is about. Even better - the old owners and creators buy it back :) SO lost a little through the initial AI-Hype but probably most people know already the AI is feed with SO. And SO needs humans with new knowledge. So the main problem are the new owners. Why they did even removed the job adds linked to the questions. That made sense :(

smsm42 3y ago

What a low quality work. Of course the publicly open Q&A site would have some low-quality questions and answers. Of course most of questions of general interest will be asked early, and of course some of the newer questions would regard current events, and some of the answers - oh horror! oh depravity! - will feature opinions that differ from the one the author of the article holds. Of course there would be trolls and fakes - have you been on the internet anytime lately? I don't know if Quora is doing well or not. Maybe it is dying. Maybe it is flourishing. What I am sure of it that this article didn't help me any in understanding which of those is true, despite the length of the piece.

davidguetta 3y ago

The UI has become HORRIBLE compared to when I discovered 10 years ago. Answers of other questions are on the same page that the main question, it's hard to even find comments / answers to some answers. And the constant loggin nagging is horrible. Quota is synonym of internet junk spam in the same vein as pinterest or yelp (a little less for yelp maybe)

at_a_remove 3y ago

I love a good necroscopy (incidentally, R.I.P. Brian Lumley) on communities as they wither and die. I've been watching since Usenet and IRC. There's a rhythm to this kind of thing, a kind of hype cycle for communities, but overall, I have one ur-metric which outshines them all: look for the hubris. Communities, once they reach a certain size and collective history, gain a kind of self-reflectiveness. They get meta. And right around then, you will find someone at the helm who will not remember the earliest days and fail to grasp what brought everyone together. They've forgotten the face of their father and left the riddle of steel on the battlefield. What they'll decide is, well, it's me. I, or rather what I represent, make it great. The moderation team, the steering committee, the management. This is never true in any community I have seen. It's always the individuals, maybe some interesting weirdos, or the ones with a lot of time on their hands, the lonesome lusers. They will ultimately be regarded with disregard, viewed as churnable units, cogs of cognition, replaceable. This is always wrong, and it is always a lesson learned in slow motion, after the egomaniacs have fled toward their next call to greatness.

logbiscuitswave 3y ago

Quota was once a very good website. I spent a lot of time contributing and answering questions. Then the email spams started happening pushing digests of irrelevant and in some cases harmful recommendations. Then the increasingly asshole-oriented designs around serving up search results and blocking the content unless you signed in or registered. Then the Q/A quality digressed massively to the point where it became less and less useful. There were also changes to the design that merged questions, answers, and recommendations into a largely incoherent mess where I was never really sure what I was looking at or why. Not wanting any further association with the dumpster fire Quora was becoming, I ended up deleting every one of my answers and comments before deleting my account entirely. Now I take pains to block Quora results from my searches and never click on a Quora link if I come across it. It seems like I’m not missing much based on the terribly awful “innovations” mentioned in this article.

schleck8 3y ago

Quora is the spammiest large website, for sure. Depending on your query like 80 % of responses are scams from India and/or SEO fluff bullshit and self promotion.

crtified 3y ago

I'm waiting for the inevitable counter-culture pushback against AI, where suddenly humanity realises how valuable it's "pure, non-AI polluted" content bases are/were, as a unique and critical data class in their own right.

astrange 3y ago
This doesn't matter, it's not a real problem for AI and can be used to improve them. It's already happened though, because it's the first thing people think of.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

I think everyone here is missing that the founders created this to make money. They didn’t found a non-profit. And it turns out, people don’t actually want to pay for this, and having taken rich people’s money the only way to pay for it is the slide into Ads and that inevitably leads to this garbage. Why are people surprised?

charcircuit 3y ago

Dead? It's still the top 28th most popular website, above tiktok. [1] [1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/ https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/

denton-scratch 3y ago

> Co-founders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever were both early Facebook employees Where have I come across the surname D'Angelo before? Oh yes - he's on the board of OpenAI, and was the only board member at the time Altman was sacked (according to WP).

zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago

Quora is great if you like to read thoughts of people with fringe ideas and those who are mentally ill. There's a decent sized gangstalking group on there.

Luctct 3y ago

[flagged]

hermitcrab 3y ago

There are some interesting answers on quora. But so many stupid questions posted by trolls. The signal to noise ratio seems to drop every month.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

theknocker 3y ago

[dead]

hunglee2 3y ago

The downward slide on Quora started with the 'Top Writers' program, which created an elite tier of contributors who were anointed and then privileged by the platform, rather than voted on by the members. This created an aristocracy who could now guarantee high visibility for even mediocre answers, whilst hugely disincentivising everyone else - especially first time contributors - to even try and make a response. A commentator made the point elsewhere - this type of platform should be a non-profit, maybe a community owned platform.

thr0waway001 3y ago

It's very evident how bad it got the moment you go to a question. Here's their layout: [ Question ] [ads] [ads] [ads] [related questions] [related questions] ....scroll farther... [related questions] [related questions] [actual answers] Like WTF?! Whose decision was this?

spamizbad 3y ago

Quora never lived as far as I'm concerned. It was always touted as some better, savvier alternative to the StackExchange network but it was just clogged up with crummy answers to bad questions. They made it extremely difficult to see the actual content and would make it near impossible to follow threads/discussions without making an account (which would in turn spam you) The fact that it was SEO-optimized up the wazoo and always clogged up search results didn't make it any better. For that reason I have "-site:quora.com" seared into my muscle memory when searching.

bastawhiz 3y ago

I was a top writer for two years (and got a pretty sweet jacket out of it). I was a multiple knowledge prize winner for my answers (which paid out enough for me to report it on my taxes!). Here's the nugget from the article that's the core reason: > that “was all about trying to come up with questions that would draw in more views and more people,” she said—not about incentivizing high-quality answers. It was all about adding webpages of individual questions, for SEO purposes. I remember the day they announced to the top writer forum that they were killing incentives for good answers and starting to incentivize engaged question askers. Overnight, you got bots posting questions about trivial math problems (literally just multiplication in most cases). The top writers disappeared. What hurts the most: I deleted my account. At some point it became undeleted. I don't have the ability, as far as I'm aware, to kill it. My profile lives on to enrich the people who betrayed the writers. Kind of sad, but it was all about engagement. Ad dollars.

mgh2 3y ago
Ads ruin everything. No respect for power users, plain greed. Is there any parallel to Medium?
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  I think medium had the right idea but I don't think the business model was really solid. Substack got it right: people want to pay creators to write, not a company to broker access to creators. Instead of pivoting, they seemed to double down.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    Why aren't science journals the same? Why do I still have to pay some middle man?
    - bastawhiz 3y ago
      I don't know. I'm not in academia or doing research, but from the outside looking it, it seems like a racket.

Jordan-117 3y ago

Yahoo Answers dead, Quora dying, StackExchange struggling with AI spam and mod rebellions. Meanwhile [Ask MetaFilter](https://ask.metafilter.com/ https://ask.metafilter.com/) just turned 20 and keeps on trucking. Smaller scale obviously (human-scale, I'd say), but untroubled by the exploitation and greed of the bigger sites, and still delivering best answers to questions every day. Hopefully more of the internet shifts back to this communitarian model as the pitfalls of the big VC-driven platforms become more apparent.

Glyptodon 3y ago

The real name policy meant that after trying to answer a question once I was done with it. I think it'd be interesting to move the question/topic style into something run more like Wikipedia.

mianos 3y ago

It would not be a bad thing if it just went and died but it's still here making Google search results a wasteland. It is a sad thing to me to see such a great resource just end up trash. Thanks to ublacklist for hiding the damned thing.

Gow8876 3y ago

I remember creating account there with pseudo-name for a few years. The admin there one day gotten extremely hostile and request me to give then real biodata. I didnt even consider to contribute anything not even simple comments. Just being quiet user. I would even pay annual subscription to have the site access but not contributing like E. Britanica site. Regardless, I have been extremely detrimental to that website with maybe running a multi year hostile anti-Quora campaign across the world. Quora just made an unnecessary enemy user with me. All I wanted just like HN, probe in, read, and maybe comment a bit maybe once or twice a year. Instead their admins turn very hostile threatening to remove my account simply for not giving them real biodata.

dartos 3y ago

They’re all in on Poe now. They’ve collected years of QA data.

coldtea 3y ago

As a business it was never that alive to begin with - like most startups based on eyeballs.

datavirtue 3y ago

This can't be a commercial activity. It has to be the Wikipedia model. If it supposed to make a profit, all that baggage comes into play. Imagine if your local library was run by entrepreneurs.

stemlord 3y ago

This article frames the situation as if Quora once took off, and was once good, which I very much disagree with. Quora never "took off" by way of being good/helpful. It was all just forced SEO. Quora was dead on arrival to me

michalu 3y ago

Was one of the first 500k users on Quora and loved it. Had a chance to get education and knowledge from top VCs and entrepreneurs directly. Even showed up on some meetups in London. Even was a published author with Inc, business Insider etc who were grabbing content from Quora. It went downhill as it got gamified and you saw the rise of powerusers. I remember there was a guy who'd answer a question within 2 minutes of it being posted. Mostly based on first page Google results and he was the #1 poweruser. And people assigned him an authority based on the fact that to up that point most quality users were also important in real life. But this dude seems like he was just a Quora addict with no outside credentials. These guys quickly gathered what kind of answer gets you the most upvotes and so Quora became a pretty ugly biased place. There were still small micro topics with high quality. Then couple of VCs/Entrepreneurs started using it for content marketing. And after that you've only had marketing interns from companies doing content post there. Add to it lack of monetization. I've had millions of reads and answers, it was a good source of credibility I would think but I deleted my entire profile some year ago with all my some very in-depth answers. I owe a lot to Quora though, it was a goldmine in the early days. It got me on the track of learning to code and advanced my education. also writing answers itself makes you research and double check and lookup sources. If anyone from Quora reads it thank you. Edit: oh yeah, the person mentioned in the article was one of those early powerusers that made people like me leave the site. How funny. Seems like it worked out for her though. I just hope the same thing won't happen to substack.