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AI Ruined Quora
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- umbra07 2y agoOn a seperate note, why do people feel the need to exaggerate their Quora profile/education level/accomplishments? I'm not the only one who's noticed how many Quora profiles are filled with ludicrous, self-aggrandizing descriptions, right?
- surfingdino 2y agoBecause some people mistake walking past a university lecture hall with getting a degree.
- re-thc 2y ago> On a seperate note, why do people feel the need to exaggerate their Quora profile/education level/accomplishments? As in it is Quora specific or it's always been this way? People haven't changed...
- whywhywhywhy 2y agoQuora has always been like that, attracts a certain type of person.
- theshrike79 2y agoI'm not a 100% sure, but I've got a feeling that having a well-regarded Quora profile became a Thing in India and other parts. Then people started spamming "answers" to every question they could even tangentially produce some gibberish for. 10 years ago Quora was a place where you could get an actual expert answering questions (a thing they should've done on their own site tbh[0] with references and actual insight. Now it's just like what experts exchange turned into. [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- cromka 2y agoI read somewhere that it’s best for your blog SEO to publish there first and on medium subsequently, but couldn’t put a name to it. Thsnks!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- trickleup 2y agoQuora did a plenty good job of ruining itself, way before AI did.
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- anonzzzies 2y agoQuora was already ruined and pretty much worthless for a very long time. When a query on google has quora, I hardly ever click on it as I know a) it won’t answer the question most likely b) I walk into this incredibly confusing ux experience.
- The_Colonel 2y agoSame. I really dislike how you open one question and it sort of mixes in answers to different questions. New reddit UI does something similar.
- harryp_peng 2y agoBecause sometimes no one actually answered that question, quora just publishes many titles to index to google.
- ulrikrasmussen 2y agoEngagement optimization. 5% of users might happen to see something that will keep them on the site, but 95% are confused and waste their time. Sites only optimize for engagement these days.
- darth_avocado 2y agoThis has been one of my biggest gripes with Quora, even if user answers are useful, I’m not seeing them, which defeats the whole purpose of the site.
- dimator 2y agoI actually blacklist the entire domain from kagi search results.
- wraptile 2y agoI used to be an active Quora contributor and that platform is not worth saving. It kept getting worse and worse to the point where it's entire existance is just confusing.
- weinzierl 2y ago
- system2 2y ago[flagged]
- devjab 2y agoI wonder if it would really come down to AI if you did the user research, maybe focused on the “onboarding” process. I remember a time back when you would get a Quora result on a search query and you could click on it be find a few answers with comments on them to help you determine their merits. This is completely anecdotal, but these days I honestly can’t even find the answer if I click on a Quora result on a search engine. Instead I’m created by “similar” questions and what not in an UI I don’t really understand too well. Now, I was never a Quora user, as in, I never signed up for an account. So I’m probably not in their target audience. With their modern entry point, however, I’ve simply banned their domain from my search results along with sites like Pinterest because they are essential just a wasted of time if I accidentally hit their sites. Maybe that doesn’t matter. I would have probably never signed up to actually answer things, or even ask, but if anyone who would be potential user is like me. Then they won’t ever get to the “onboarding” process of joining the site, and I’d wager that was more damaging than AI. LLM’s are more akin to the final nail in the coffin for a lot of these sites who have made it so user hostile to join their “communities”. Again, it’s just anecdotal, I’ve done or read no research. But I do think that it’s interesting that we’re now at a point where many people will include “Reddit” in their search queries when looking for answers, and Reddit is the easiest side in the world to join or even read without signing in (at least old.reddit is).
- mort96 2y agoYeah, I've noticed this too: seeing a Quora question that's exactly what I'm looking for, clicking it, and not actually finding the question which the SERP said was there. At least this used to happen back when I actually got Quora results, I'm not sure if its search ranking has dropped or if Quora results get caught by my banner blindness these days. There are some sites which will generate a bunch of pages which show up in Google searches but which are really just site searches. You google a thing, and a site pops up with a page called "Articles about the thing", but when you go there you see it's just a site search for "the thing". I wonder if Quora is doing something similar? Maybe the question doesn't actually exist, and the page in the Google search result is just a disguised search page?
- jfengel 2y ago
- fxtentacle 2y agoI cannot remember a time when quora was not broken, so AI certainly didn't ruin it. The UI and their login popups have always been horrible enough that I try to avoid them. But in addition to that, most specific questions - the ones that would benefit the most from a nuanced human answer - get answered with generic copypasta. My impression is that Quota tried gamifying the process of answering... And they succeeded, to their detriment. Now people keep answering questions that they have no clue about just to make their presumed importance score go up. It's a bit like those grifters that order a ghost-written book in their name so that they can already claim authority before they learn a new skill.
- Havoc 2y agoYou may have just joined late? Right at the start when there was artificial signup scarcity it was fantastic. Like hn great except for questions
- bigfudge 2y agoThat was a really long time ago though. It’s seems like it’s been awful for at least 10 years.
- npn 2y agoQuora was bad when I visited it in 2021. So what year it was good again?
- ayewo 2y agoEarly 2010s. Basically around its founding. This is an article [1] from 14 years ago where Arrington characterized Quora with “People say they feel smarter after they use Quora” and “It’s kind of like Wikipedia [2]. This is the long tail of information” 1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchmark-invests-at-86-million-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchm... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/30/quora-is-really-about-a-better-wikipedia-not-robert-scobles-hopes-dreams/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/30/quora-is-really-about-a-be...
- throwaway4233 2y agoFrom my point of view the underlying problem here seems to be that someone in Quora product team feels that the best way to drive engagement is to predict what the user might want to know about and then spam them with it, rather than letting them discover on their own or use their feedback. I stopped using Quora 8 or 9 years back, because despite how much time I spent curating the feed I was served, the questions always seemed to veer back into the questions on life experiences, `write a short story in 3 lines` or about relationships. This was most probably due to topics like these being a fad in India during the time and often received a lot of answers or upvotes. Every time I marked an question as something I was not interested in, because of the topic, Quora assumed that I did not like the author's answer and then proceeded to show 5 other questions the author has responded to. I assumed it was because of some bug on their side ignoring my preferences of topics, until I spent a week in Dubai and saw most of the questions in my feed match the topics I marked as interested.
- _Algernon_ 2y agoQuora was in my uBlacklist filters many years before generative AI was a thing.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI'm pretty good at simply filtering out low quality results. But Quora is so often so aggressively topping SEO. and I've NEVER gotten a useful answer out of clicking on a result. It's pretty much the best way to explain what a hallucination in an LLM is, before such concepts were being talked about at large. If you just skim it kinda looks right, but the more you focus the more you start to realize how little sense the response makes. IT finally broke me in 2022 and had me download uBlacklist. To this day it's the only site on there.
- lofties 2y agoQuora ruined Quora. And it started well before the advance of LLMs.
- ghaff 2y agoQuora started out fairly interesting albeit often with answers written by self-evident self-promoting know it alls. That’s mostly a decade in the rear view mirror today it’s filled with people trying to shill, promote, or I don’t know exactly. In any case it’s largely low quality which of course drives any high quality answers even less likely to be contributed.
- karpovv-boris 2y agoYes. Completely agree.
- mam2 2y agoStarting with the horrific UI where you don't know which question is the answer you're reading for
- hwbunny 2y agoBefore AI there were a lot of shills on the site who deliberately gave answers that had nothing to do with reality. AI just sped up the process. And the answer the author of the article formulates has nothing to do with reality either.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI found this is a “marketing” technique, that I first encountered on LinkedIn Groups. A shill asks a specific question, which is then “answered” by a bunch of other shills, recommending some product. I remember answering a technical “question” on the Swift Language group, in LI. I gave a simple, accurate, answer to what I considered to be an earnest question about a basic dilemma. It was something that I knew all about, and had a lot of experience, dealing with. My answer was completely ignored, but the asker engaged many of the ridiculous “answers,” and I realized what was happening. I left that group years ago (along with every other LI group, and, pretty much, LI, in general), and now see this technique being applied everywhere.
- hwbunny 2y agoLinkedin also goes the quora way. Nope, it's not marketing, it's something else.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoThus, the "marketing" (with quotes). It may actually be a technique, taught in school. There's a lot of underhanded behavior in that field, especially in trying to drive talking points and corporate glossaries.
- hwbunny 2y agoIt's the UFOs. They land anytime soon :DDD.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
- svdr 2y agoI always think people calling AI just ‘fancy autocomplete‘ haven’t really tried it yet.
- tempodox 2y agoIndeed, it's actually worse. You should only use it for stuff where factuality doesn't matter. Verifying that an answer is complete and correct is more work than consulting a reliable source in the first place.
- morsch 2y agoI think it's an accurate assessment and still get some use out of LLMs. Brainstorming various things, tutorials, entertainment. Straight questions with a factual answers really are a poor fit. Just yesterday GPT3.5 told me the Belgian city famous for its mustard is Dijon.
- Zambyte 2y agoBut that's literally what it is. The only reason you can have dialog-like interactions with language models is because they have been trained with special "stop tokens" surrounding dialog, so the model can (generally) auto complete something that looks like a reasons, and then the inference engine can stop producing text when the model produces the stop token.
- svdr 2y agoTechnically it is, of course, but the experience is completely different, and I get the feeling people call it that to downplay it.
- Zambyte 2y agoI think understanding that helps me get more out of them. I feel like I am better able to provide information to the model with the expectation that it will need that information to autocomplete the dialog that I want.
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- bambax 2y agoGoing into the article, I was expecting that Quora used AI to answer questions. Instead it uses AI to ask questions. That's pathetic and fascinating at the same time. It's pathetic because it shows there aren't enough people asking questions to keep the site alive, which means it's already dead and exists only in a kind of zombie fashion. But it's fascinating because it begs the question, why are people taking time out of their busy day answering pointless questions devised by a bot that doesn't know anything (and that isn't even interested in the answer)? Quora is now a content farm where contributors work for free. That's horrible... and, in a very practical way, genius.
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- coolguy4 2y agoIt had too many Indians. Not that that's absolutely a bad thing, but it was bad for me because the answers tended to reflect Indian cultural perspectives and they weren't very relevant to me.
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- whothe 2y ago[dead]
- throwitaway222 2y agoQuora ruined Quora
- nmstoker 2y agoTotally agree. Well before AI issues the platform was turning a blind eye to low quality questions and answers, ones obviously written by people with limited experience and judgement, focused mainly on chasing completion targets over correctness.
- vineyardmike 2y agoThis story is really interesting for all the not-specific-to-quora parts. It’s pretty obvious that quora has a strange culture of know-it-alls trying to show off, but this AI product makes it clear that the act of showing off is the product. The answers are garbage and they obviously don’t care. The key action for sale is not finding an answer, but writing it. What’s really interesting is that Quora product team decided they wanted to juice engagement with fake AI created posts, and real humans are complying to answer them. Questions that make no sense, and no human asked. Quora is proving (again) that people will engage in parasocial behavior with LLMs. We’ve seen AI girlfriends and companions, we’ve seen tutors, and knowledge assistants. This is the opportunity to brag - artificial students (likely cut from the same API as those tutors). I can only assume that question-answering-users are the real market they advertise to, profitably. This would imply that this strategy is profitable or could be profitable for them. The nice thing about this compared to more personalized LLM companions like AI girlfriends is that the inference costs can be distributed across all users by sharing the questions. I would posit that there exists an opportunity to make a Twitter or Reddit clone that explicitly intermixed bots. Maybe even exclusively bots. People want to talk on the internet and told they’re special. The interaction doesn’t need to be organic. For proof, look at all the top-level comments on this HN post with no engagement, by users who have repeated the same pattern discussed about quora.
- jfengel 2y agoQuora knows that it's about attracting people to write answers, more than people with questions. They've had a number of tactics to get more questions so that people could write answers. At one point, they paid people to do it -- which went about as well as you would expect. Users complained like crazy and it lasted long, long after it was an obvious failure. Their idea wasn't completely insane. There are questions that people ask Google that they'd never ask a human. Stupid questions that people will nonetheless answer. And Quora wanted to be the place that Google directed them. Combined with a high reputation from its early days, it was well placed in SEO. They never figured out how to turn that into money, and they've floundered about. They managed to have a bunch of smart people wanting to show off -- actually giving meaningful answers -- and they squandered it.
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- gexaha 2y agoHot take: it was never good
- moralestapia 2y agoHave you ever spoke with someone high on crack? Or a schizo? That's how I feel when reading an answer in Quora after they decided to randomly mix answers to other questions into the one you're interested in. Whoever decided to do that should be fired on the spot and never allowed to touch a product in its life.
- starboat 2y agoQuora lack of high-quality answers since early on, even without AI, Quora will eventually ruined.
- readthenotes1 2y agoIIRC, it was they started rewarding question bulk, not good answers
- pm3003 2y agoRemember when Yahoo! Answers was so badly moderated that people asked stupid bait questions intentionally? Quora has managed to successfully leverage AI industrialize the process. I won't miss them as much as Yahho Answers (which already isn't much).
- jaquer_1 2y ago[dead]
- cornholio 2y agoThe post shows limited understanding of what LLMs are. Ok, so Quora has a bad model that generates "Why doesn't Donald Trump shave his mustache?" type questions. That's Quora's problem. But in general, a frontier LLMs like the ones trained by Open AI would not make such silly mistakes in their output. Its "fancy autocomplete" is trained on millions of documents that include detailed description of Trump's face and the presence of the word "Trump" in the context window would activate countless weights that relate to "orange hair", "pussy grabbing", "bribes" etc. Each word or sequence of tokens can be understood as a vector in a space of say, 12288 different dimensions, and for each round in the algorithm the entire context is refined so that each of those dimensions would access finer and finer details of the subject matter present in the training data. So the model really does "know" Trump does not have a mustache. What it lacks (or has very limited ability to do) is rational exploration of the information it holds. It's like an idiot savant with the mental ability of a 4 year old that has somehow memorized the entire information that exists on the internet.
- karpovv-boris 2y agoThe post shows no understanding of article structure or narrative skills. It’s garbage.
- rsynnott 2y ago> But in general, a frontier LLMs like the ones trained by Open AI would not make such silly mistakes in their output. This is beginning to wear a bit thin. Every public application of AI produces obvious nonsense, and this doesn’t appear to be changing. The inevitable defence is “oh, they used GPT3.5 instead of GPT4/oh, they used GPT4, but not the version that was only publicly available for three weeks in 2023/oh, they used precisely the right GPT4 but, when sacrificing the goat while petitioning Roko’s Basilisk for useful output, they used the wrong sort of knife”. Apparently, literally no-one can use these things properly, at least for publicly visible applications. Either that, or they’re just a bit shit.
- karpovv-boris 2y agoAbout article. Oh Brother, This Guy Stinks!
- loongloong 2y ago[flagged]
- baobun 2y agoThe "Quora ruined Quora" narrative was also recently featured, in Feb: https://slate.com/technology/2024/02/quora-what-happened-ai-decline.html https://slate.com/technology/2024/02/quora-what-happened-ai-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39241448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39241448
- derangedHorse 2y agoDropping web support for mobile screens killed Quora for me.
- sumedh 2y agoFounder of Quora Adam D'Angelo is still on the Open AI board board and the founder of another AI startup called POE. I am sure Quora's QnA data would have been used to train lot of AI models. Now they are just taking out the humans.
- insickness 2y ago> Fully automated luxury mansplaining It's surprising to see gendered, pejorative language thrown around in an article that has nothing to do with gender.
- _nalply 2y agoQuora already started to decline years before LLMs becoming popular. I think, it's not AI that ruined Quora, but monetization. It's a strong case of Goodhart's Law. The measure is popularity and user retention. In an ideal world the correct target would be the quality of questions and answers.
- hughdbrown 2y agoReading the author's explanation of how Quora became awful by using AI to generate questions gives me a view into the dystopian future where the deluge of AI-generated books on Amazon pollutes and undercuts the whole concept of "knowledge found in books." Instead, we will have books with the verisimilitude of knowledge because the authors did not have the expertise or ambition to edit out the hallucinations.
- nurettin 2y agoQuora was already ruined by low quality posts and so-called experts. Not everything is caused by AI.
- alabhyajindal 2y agoQuora has always been trash. There's a reason why we append 'reddit' to a search query if we want a human opinion and not 'quora'.
- rsynnott 2y agoI mean, while generally LLMs are ruining the internet as a whole, Quora, in particular, was pre-ruined.
- vpastore 2y ago[dead]