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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 des
by 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 agoSeems like jobs after LLMs still have a chance sob
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoCouldn'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 agoA/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.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoI feel the same way about Amazon.com. It feels cluttered and messy. Most the opt-ins / opt-outs have to be read closely to make sure you're not being suckered by some dark pattern. If you visit Amazon often enough you kinda get used to it. But a new vistor imho would be shellshocked.
- recursivecaveat 3y agoI remember fondly this paragraph from the famous google platform memo: > Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
- esafak 3y agoIn general there are two causes: * Shortsighted metrics that don't contribute to the holistic quality of the product. Ad-supported products are especially prone to this. * Treating a mature product just like a new one, and adding too many features instead of maintaining it and doing less.