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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, an

• 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
          Exactly this. I was recently involved in a decision of whether or not to make a nascent community SEO-friendly, which meant significant changes to the UI and reduced UX. In the end the conclusion was "f... SEO, let's build something good instead and have users come back because of that".
          • voisin 3y ago
            Keep fighting the good fight. This is the hill to die on.
        • klabb3 3y ago
          > And that’s how Google search will be overtaken by GPT with ease. Yes if the LLMs are designed to give you the best results. Right now, it’s a honey moon phase for consumers, when there’s a fierce competitive race. But just like any other tech its deployment and realization is governed by incentives. If we get an entrenched LLM monopolist I don’t think it’ll be any different from a search monopolist. Perhaps worse.
          • esafak 3y ago
            It's going to be hard to become entrenched with open source LLMs in the wild.
            • klabb3 3y ago
              You could make the same argument for search or many other products - but it doesn’t hold in practice. If the commercial closed one is more powerful and/or convenient people will not choose freedom. There’s a reason these companies are getting drenched in investor money. I can think of a thousand ways that they could get that convenience edge against open models. For instance, when LLMs are personalized based on your own history, chats etc people won’t give those conveniences up. And that data would not be accessible to the open models, at least not seamlessly.
      • 6510 3y ago
        They most likely also prefer titles that get clicked. But the best results are those where the user uses the back button and clicks something else. They must not click back within n seconds of course. The user has to spend a minimum amount of time on the almost useless page. I got this feeling looking for many things. I know there are pages but get many results very very close to what I was looking for. Dubious reversal of key words where "how to turn a car into an airplane" becomes "how to turn an airplane into a car" Then people start making perfect SEO pages like "how to style css with html"
        • mkl 3y ago
          > "how to style css with html" I was intrigued by the idea of such a page, but unfortunately your comment is apparently the only mention of that phrase on the internet.
          • moralestapia 3y ago
            @6510 should sell that precious internet real estate
  • zdragnar 3y ago
    I occasionally visit quora off of search results because I kinda got used to parsing out what I wanted, but never knew about this toggle. I literally cannot understand how anyone thought intermixing related questions and answers together is in any way useful or beneficial to their users, especially when the default is set to ON.
    • darksim905 3y ago
      Can people not really understand this? Some of those related questions are dupes, other times they are paths to rabbit holes. ycombinator does the same thing. When you guys see posts that come up that have been here before, you post links to previous discussions. I saw this recently specifically with the links to articles on Martin Couney (I had a hard time finding that because the article is so poorly worded). Even Reddit has linkability to detect the URL and show you an 'other discussions' lens (for Old Reddit). Granted, this is a slight taxonomy difference of 'other discussions' of the same exact topic, vs other discussions related to your topic. But I think it's a useful and helpful feature.
      • zdragnar 3y ago
        The problem is that there's no continuity between what is related and what is an answer to the question asked. Related answers are intermixed with real answers at the same level. You can only tell something is a real answer by the absence of bold text and presence of light grey text. The link upthread isn't a good example, because the question is so basic it's easy for them to have a lot of related (duplicate) questions and answers. When the topic requires more nuance or is more specific, then the related questions and answers really aren't related at all, and they just add a bunch of useless noise. hackere news isn't a question / answer site. I don't come here with the same expectations that I do when I go to something like stack overflow or quora. Ironically, if I do a google search for something and ycombinator comes up in the results, the link is directly to the comment that is relevant- not to the top level of the article with all of the related sibling comments. If anything, from that perspective hacker news is actually a better question and answer site than quora.
• CM30 3y ago
  Yeah, this is the main problem I have with Quora. You go to a thread to look for answers to a question, then find the platform has merged in a bunch of answers to related questions alongside the ones I'm actually there to read. For example, I found this random question just now: https://www.quora.com/How-does-blockchain-technology-work-11 https://www.quora.com/How-does-blockchain-technology-work-11 About half the answers there are actually to that question. The rest are to questions that are about the same thing but with different wording: * 'How does block chain technology work?' * 'How blockchain technology works?' * etc or to related but not quite identical ones: * 'What is blockchain technology and how does it work?' * 'What is blockchain technology, could you explain it in an easy way?' * 'What is a blockchain?' So you'll see a lot of answers... which may or may not actually be for the question you were interested in. Or which may explain it in a weird way, since the actual question they answered was worded very differently. At least with StackOverflow you know that the answers are all related to the same question.
  • Arainach 3y ago
    >At least with StackOverflow you know that the answers are all related to the same question. I don't know, most StackOverflow answers I run into are "closed as duplicate of <not my question>" or "closed as duplicate of <how would I have solved my problem 8 years ago with only the tools available then>"
    • ahoka 3y ago
      Or gods forbid, someone had a slightly open ended question.
      • _a_a_a_ 3y ago
        Slightly open-ended doesn't seem to be a problem for me on SO. Where I've really had a problem is the admins not reading the question properly then closing it as already answered elsewhere. I find that screeching like a banshee gets it apologetically reopened. Bit frustrating but a flawed SO is better than no SO at all.
  • 3y ago
• pokstad 3y ago
  It’s a UX trainwreck
• lencastre 3y ago
  That’s exactly my experience so I just avoided quora, for some reason the question I was looking at had many answers to different questions below, after scrolling a bit downwards something resembling a connection with the question in the form of an answer would be found but… it’s too much trouble.
• scarface_74 3y ago
  Quora is the only site that I actively block to make sure that I don’t go there by mistake. It has to be the worse site on the internet.
  • croisillon 3y ago
    nah i think pinterest is even a notch worse
    • frfl 3y ago
      Quora and Pinterest... one has cornered the text-based SEO-spam segment, other has cornered the SEO-spam image segment.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • whimsicalism 3y ago
      pinterest can be better if you are actually there to use it (ie not directed from search traffic)
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Pintrest stays in its lane and it sounds like actual users can benefit from it for their own needs. It's only annoying if I need a quick image snip. Quora can and will pop up for nearly every search query and I've never been satisfied with the answers I peek at, ever.
• conductr 3y ago
  I’m not sure what their business model is, I assume ads, so I always wonder what good the login wall does and making the UX so horrible. I too only ever get there from a Google search too, much like Wikipedia, but with Wikipedia I’m usually going to make a few clicks once I’m there as the related link exploration is natural. I assume quora could get more clicks out of me if it wasn’t so awful. They’ve instead taught me to never click past the initial Google link, my bounce rate is 100%. It seems like such a missed opportunity. Even when I compare to my stack exchange usage, I’m not a registered user, I’m only ever consuming information, but I click around and they benefit through ads.
  • telesilla 3y ago
    >I’m not sure what their business model is Probably also email harvesting and any associated segmentation they get with your reading history, since it's required to sign up to read anything.
  • frfl 3y ago
    Biggest difference is Wikipedia isn't ad driven and the information on there is actually interesting, naturally drives you to explore. My bounce rate is 100% and I rarely click a Quora link if I can help it. 1% useful 99% noise. I agree with StackExchange, sometimes the random things on the sidebar grab my attention, whether it's some random travel question, workplace, about writing/sci-fi, etc. Pinterest is another spammy site. Same with Quora. Like what is the model here? Spam SEO, drive ad revenue? In my experience Yahoo Answers was 10x more interesting than anything Quora offers, but maybe I and others like me are the exception and companies like Quora are actually getting eyeballs with their UX and business model and that's why Yahoo Answers isn't a thing anymore.?
• baxtr 3y ago
  I’m pretty sure this is the result of a heavy A/B testing culture. Every single idea was probably increasing an important KPI. The page in it’s entirety got destroyed over time.
  • k__ 3y ago
    Seems like jobs after LLMs still have a chance sob
  • hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Couldn't agree more. It's easy to see this user hostility increase slightly, over and over across a period of years, each time having some idea that there is some short-term metric that is positively affected. Considering I rarely understand what I'm even looking at with the mish mosh of answers, and I'm not willing to create an account, I've outright blocked Quora in my browser. As an aside, I think the extreme enshittification of Quora basically highlights every single problem with VC-driven, growth-at-all costs, "metrics and data driven" tech platforms (as an aside, the reason I put square quotes there is not that I think metrics and data are bad, but I think most companies are not honest that they're optimizing for metrics and data that are easy to gather, while the fuzzier but actually more critical concepts of user trust and sentiment get ignored over time). I mean honestly, is there any single employee at Quora that thinks that what the site became is anything but a total shit show?
  • nine_zeros 3y ago
    > I’m pretty sure this is the result of a heavy A/B testing culture. Every single idea was probably increasing an important KPI. The page in it’s entirety got destroyed over time. This is the reality. Not just in Quora but all tech companies. A/B testing is used to determine how to squeeze more and more engagement, in small parts of the app. And over time the app becomes an ad factory with unrelated posts because apparently people are more engaged when they are lost and unable to find any information.
  • bertil 3y ago
    A/B tests are likely involved because no human would suggest those changes in earnest, but what metric could those tests have improved!? Either it’s a series of unchallenged false positives, or there’s a lot about web interface that neither I nor they understand, but I would challenge the idea that is the result of a well-informed A/B testing culture. It’s the output of a thousand monkeys running a thousand tests a day for three years, and releasing anything that hits the green line.
• dbbk 3y ago
  The single change they made that killed the platform was changing the dropdown default from "answers to the question" to "answers to related questions". Absolutely insane.
  • p1esk 3y ago
    I bet whoever suggested this insanity got promoted because “user engagement” went up. Users becoming more confused.
• thayne 3y ago
  That used to not be the case, and the site design was more reasonable. But now, I completely agree with you.
• babyshake 3y ago
  This is the result of stickiness being more important than utility.
• hot_gril 3y ago
  I think it's an attempt at question deduplication where they had more confidence in that matching algo than they should have. It usually conflates two questions with similar words but very different meanings.
• whimsicalism 3y ago
  feel like this was somewhat recent. i didn’t use quora much already, but this is the change that took me from using ever to never using
• temporallobe 3y ago
  Yep. As a UI/UX specialist, it’s nothing short of a nightmare. I can’t decide if it’s purposeful (they’re trying to kill the site), negligent (they can’t hire or retain talent, or who they have is making bad decisions), or just full of corporate/organizational bloat (basically all decisions made by non-engineers such as stakeholders or investors designed to maximize profit and ad space).I am leaning towards bloat.
  • mattmaroon 3y ago
    I think it’s just a really logical way for them to monetize. If the UI was good you’d never click on (or likely even see) an ad. I’d bet they just tested it and found that’s how they make money.
    • lupire 3y ago
      People complaining about the site wouldn't pay for the site they say they want.
      • mattmaroon 3y ago
        That’s probably true and for a long time Quora was of sufficient value that I would have said it was worth it. Anymore that’s not the case. Answer quality has gone down drastically and the percent of Google searches that end up there has gone up. Google really ought to de-index them. And don’t even get me started on Pinterest.
• freediver 3y ago
  Google sending traffic to Quora, one ad-based business to another, with user being secondary and content on both being incentivized by ad clickthrough rates, is a dying paradigm. It had a good run though but I do not imagine it will be missed.
  • russellbeattie 3y ago
    Google needs to nerf their rankings. It's essentially a near-useless click bait website for ads. Any new site with such horrible signal to noise ratio would never get such a priority in results. I can't imagine any other website linking to it, so I can't imagine how Quora remains so high anyways, even if page rank is long gone.
• pram 3y ago
  I’ve never used Quora because of this, and also it has always looked like a scam website. You know those pages you find on google that are just SO/Wikipedia articles copied? That’s what Quora looks like lol
• karaterobot 3y ago
  Reddit is the same way if you don't go to old.reddit.com. You see that there are N comments, but you only get to read the first few, and suddenly you're looking at an entirely different post. Every time I accidentally go there I get confused by it. There is no chance anybody asked for this, it's so stupid it had to come out of perversely chasing some metric.
  • temporarara 3y ago
    That behaviour is complete madness. And old.reddit has pretty much the perfect interface for computer usage anyway. Why they won't just label it "desktop style" and call it a day is beyond me.
  • dpkirchner 3y ago
    And often when you expand comment replies the comment you were looking at disappears and you have to scroll around to find it again. It must be deliberate, there's no way you accidentally make something work that poorly.
• joegahona 3y ago
  Quora also comingles ads with content, and the ads look almost identical to content. Quora has become unpleasant and unusable in the past decade, and I only end up there on accident. I just logged in out of curiosity, and I have an avalanche of “notifications” that are just pathetic — “Dark Psychology Facts posted in a space you might like: ‘Can a human win in a battle with a hyena?’”
• rjh29 3y ago
  Installed uBlocklist, and both quora and pinterest are on it, never have to see them in results again.
• flurdy 3y ago
  Yeah, the login wall made me always close the tab. I am just assuming there is still a login requirement with Quara so I still automatically close the tab.