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Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely u

Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.

smcin 2y ago
Quora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value. That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined. No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of view.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > No you don't have to pay on Quora to see answers; that's incorrect. Some authors decided to join the Quora+ program where you do have to pay to see some of their answers.
  - smcin 2y ago
    I know that. There's nothing forcing you to join Quora+ premium subscription to see a small subset of answers. I wouldn't. Most Quora users don't. It's not necessary. The vast majority of Quora posters are unmonetized, and if you can't find figure out how to use Quora to get quality answers among them (e.g. figure out which Spaces to join to get traction), you might as well equally consider which Medium/Substack/Patreon to subscribe to than the not-at-all-necessary Quora+. I'd much rather that 90% of any subscriptions I paid went to sponsoring human writers.
- smcin 2y ago
  Quora 2011 = Treehouse 2020. An invite-only community with a lot of specialist knowledge.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. In the very early years of Quora, quite a lot of answers there were written by experts in their area.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  I'll never forget when I read the question, "Who is the mayor of San Jose?" on Quora, and the answer was "Joe Bloe is the mayor of San Jose. Source: I'm Joe Bloe, mayor of San Jose." Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years.
  - edgarvaldes 2y ago
    >Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years. Because he was an impersonator? Or because he really was Joe Bloe?
    - caminante 2y ago
      Appears there was never a Joe Bloe. [0] It's also whimsical of Quora because there are many "San Jose" locations. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California
      - gcanyon 2y ago
        It was a made-up name for the example, since a. I don't remember the exact year; and b. I'm not sure it was San Jose -- it was some city in the bay area, but maybe not San Jose. Chuck Reed was mayor from 2007 to 2015, and I don't see him on Quora, so probably it was some other city.
    - gcanyon 2y ago
      Who knows? I harbored a 10% skepticism that Quora astroturfed the question. That was just the first example like that I found, in the early days questions like that were common. That should have either removed my skepticism or driven it to 100% :-)
3vidence 2y ago
The early days of Quora was incredibly high quality content from experts in all sorts of fields. Was probably my favorite website, then they decided to start paying people for questions / answers and it all went to shit so incredibly quickly. The site today is completely unrecognizable from it's origins, really sad.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  This is incidentally an endemic problem of online discussion sites. There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and that is downwards. If a site begins well, with high-quality and relevant content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract value from that factor will be attracted to it. Eventually the clue up and leaves. If a site begins poorly, with low-quality and irrelevant content, and quite often, abuse, disrespect, fraud, crime, and disinformation to boot ... the clue leaves early and the site rapidly becomes a cesspit. There's a third option, of course, though one still consistent with the quality flow gradient: holding a steady state. Site quality doesn't improve, but it doesn't markedly deteriorate either. I'd put a small handful of online sites in that category, HN, LWN, and Metafilter top my own list, though I suspect there are others. What's key is that there's a sufficiently small community that norms enforcement is significantly socialised, there's effective and diligent moderation, and crucially (and possibly not the case with my examples) there's fresh blood introduced over time consistent with quality standards. Absent this last, such fora can continue for a time, even over many decades, but eventually stale, often becoming incestuous, and ultimately dying out. Among real-world institutions which seem to manage to find similar stable points, I'd include most especially academic institutions, which balance a high flux of students with a far more stable faculty and staff cohort. Selective-admissions schools have retained high rank for many decades or centuries, in some cases millennia. Cities, larger political units (states and/or empires), some businesses (including especially professional services firms) and professional organisations (e.g., not-for-profits rather than businesses) may also succeed, at least over the decades-to-centuries span. (Charles Perrow includes a discussion of several noncommercial / nongovernmental organisations with significant changes, we'd now call them "pivots", over the 20th century, in Complex Organizations (1972, 1984).) The media-quality-gradient is largely a result of scaling laws, the fact that elite cohorts (high degrees of expertise, sociability, and intelligence) tend to be small, and that once an interaction grows beyond the size of such a cohort it will incorporate participants less able, willing, and/or interested in maintaining original standards. I've posted occasionally on large-scale detailed studies of literacy (in the US) and computer skills (OECD) which show that at a population level only about 15% of the population has high literacy, numeracy, and/or computer skills, and that as much as half operate at poor or "worse than poor" levels. As I've discussed previously, this is both discouraging to those who consider themselves among the higher levels, and of significant concern in constructing systems which must and can be used by large portions of society, including those with low intrinsic capabilities (very young, old, sick, injured/traumatised, and the intrinsically less able). Ideally I'd prefer to see elite support where appropriate, but common accessibility where at all possible.
CPLX 2y ago
Quora was great for awhile and then it sucked. I used to post there a lot they put me in the top writer program at one point and I went to a party once. I can pinpoint the exact moment the site started to suck. It was when they started combining questions. Instantly and immediately they took hundreds of thousands of thoughtful answers written by real people and made them incomprehensible, because the exact wording of questions really matters. Often the answers were quite clever, or touched on a specific word used by the asker, or something. Then they'd end up moved and under some generic question on the same topic. There were a million examples, one dumb one that comes to mind is a question that was something like "If a man is willing to sleep with me, does that mean that he thinks I am attractive" and the top answer was the two word answer "attractive enough". Kind of silly obviously but funny, and accurate, and amusing content. Then they merged questions so it ended up something like "How can I know if a man I am dating casually likes me" or something, and now the top answer of "attractive enough" makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Many such cases. Almost immediately the entire site felt like weird AI output before AI output was really a thing. That happened around ten years ago, and the site never recovered.

smcin 2y ago

Quora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value. That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined. No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of view.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> No you don't have to pay on Quora to see answers; that's incorrect. Some authors decided to join the Quora+ program where you do have to pay to see some of their answers.
- smcin 2y ago
  I know that. There's nothing forcing you to join Quora+ premium subscription to see a small subset of answers. I wouldn't. Most Quora users don't. It's not necessary. The vast majority of Quora posters are unmonetized, and if you can't find figure out how to use Quora to get quality answers among them (e.g. figure out which Spaces to join to get traction), you might as well equally consider which Medium/Substack/Patreon to subscribe to than the not-at-all-necessary Quora+. I'd much rather that 90% of any subscriptions I paid went to sponsoring human writers.
smcin 2y ago
Quora 2011 = Treehouse 2020. An invite-only community with a lot of specialist knowledge.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago

> Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. In the very early years of Quora, quite a lot of answers there were written by experts in their area.

gcanyon 2y ago
I'll never forget when I read the question, "Who is the mayor of San Jose?" on Quora, and the answer was "Joe Bloe is the mayor of San Jose. Source: I'm Joe Bloe, mayor of San Jose." Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years.
- edgarvaldes 2y ago
  >Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years. Because he was an impersonator? Or because he really was Joe Bloe?
  - caminante 2y ago
    Appears there was never a Joe Bloe. [0] It's also whimsical of Quora because there are many "San Jose" locations. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California
    - gcanyon 2y ago
      It was a made-up name for the example, since a. I don't remember the exact year; and b. I'm not sure it was San Jose -- it was some city in the bay area, but maybe not San Jose. Chuck Reed was mayor from 2007 to 2015, and I don't see him on Quora, so probably it was some other city.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    Who knows? I harbored a 10% skepticism that Quora astroturfed the question. That was just the first example like that I found, in the early days questions like that were common. That should have either removed my skepticism or driven it to 100% :-)

3vidence 2y ago

The early days of Quora was incredibly high quality content from experts in all sorts of fields. Was probably my favorite website, then they decided to start paying people for questions / answers and it all went to shit so incredibly quickly. The site today is completely unrecognizable from it's origins, really sad.

dredmorbius 2y ago
This is incidentally an endemic problem of online discussion sites. There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and that is downwards. If a site begins well, with high-quality and relevant content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract value from that factor will be attracted to it. Eventually the clue up and leaves. If a site begins poorly, with low-quality and irrelevant content, and quite often, abuse, disrespect, fraud, crime, and disinformation to boot ... the clue leaves early and the site rapidly becomes a cesspit. There's a third option, of course, though one still consistent with the quality flow gradient: holding a steady state. Site quality doesn't improve, but it doesn't markedly deteriorate either. I'd put a small handful of online sites in that category, HN, LWN, and Metafilter top my own list, though I suspect there are others. What's key is that there's a sufficiently small community that norms enforcement is significantly socialised, there's effective and diligent moderation, and crucially (and possibly not the case with my examples) there's fresh blood introduced over time consistent with quality standards. Absent this last, such fora can continue for a time, even over many decades, but eventually stale, often becoming incestuous, and ultimately dying out. Among real-world institutions which seem to manage to find similar stable points, I'd include most especially academic institutions, which balance a high flux of students with a far more stable faculty and staff cohort. Selective-admissions schools have retained high rank for many decades or centuries, in some cases millennia. Cities, larger political units (states and/or empires), some businesses (including especially professional services firms) and professional organisations (e.g., not-for-profits rather than businesses) may also succeed, at least over the decades-to-centuries span. (Charles Perrow includes a discussion of several noncommercial / nongovernmental organisations with significant changes, we'd now call them "pivots", over the 20th century, in Complex Organizations (1972, 1984).) The media-quality-gradient is largely a result of scaling laws, the fact that elite cohorts (high degrees of expertise, sociability, and intelligence) tend to be small, and that once an interaction grows beyond the size of such a cohort it will incorporate participants less able, willing, and/or interested in maintaining original standards. I've posted occasionally on large-scale detailed studies of literacy (in the US) and computer skills (OECD) which show that at a population level only about 15% of the population has high literacy, numeracy, and/or computer skills, and that as much as half operate at poor or "worse than poor" levels. As I've discussed previously, this is both discouraging to those who consider themselves among the higher levels, and of significant concern in constructing systems which must and can be used by large portions of society, including those with low intrinsic capabilities (very young, old, sick, injured/traumatised, and the intrinsically less able). Ideally I'd prefer to see elite support where appropriate, but common accessibility where at all possible.

CPLX 2y ago

Quora was great for awhile and then it sucked. I used to post there a lot they put me in the top writer program at one point and I went to a party once. I can pinpoint the exact moment the site started to suck. It was when they started combining questions. Instantly and immediately they took hundreds of thousands of thoughtful answers written by real people and made them incomprehensible, because the exact wording of questions really matters. Often the answers were quite clever, or touched on a specific word used by the asker, or something. Then they'd end up moved and under some generic question on the same topic. There were a million examples, one dumb one that comes to mind is a question that was something like "If a man is willing to sleep with me, does that mean that he thinks I am attractive" and the top answer was the two word answer "attractive enough". Kind of silly obviously but funny, and accurate, and amusing content. Then they merged questions so it ended up something like "How can I know if a man I am dating casually likes me" or something, and now the top answer of "attractive enough" makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Many such cases. Almost immediately the entire site felt like weird AI output before AI output was really a thing. That happened around ten years ago, and the site never recovered.