5 ms·

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 lo

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.

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.