[HN Gopher] How Quora died
___________________________________________________________________
How Quora died
Author : CharlesW
Score : 237 points
Date : 2024-02-03 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slate.com)
| coding123 wrote:
| I never liked the site... It's always a game... Oh that's
| answering a different question...
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| This is what happens when you gatekeep replies / lurking.
|
| Remember StackOverflow...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| An odd takeaway. The article seems to imply that most of their
| issues stem from spam and low effort questions/answers. Both
| from users and their own AI. _More_ gatekeeping might have been
| the solution here.
| obernard wrote:
| By making it harder for people to use the site casually, you
| tip the balance in favor of spammers and away from people who
| actually have an interest, and therefore usually some
| knowledge, on a given subject.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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, and what's an answer
| to something completely different. So I've never felt compelled
| to stay or join myself.
|
| Also, for a while I just hit a login wall, which of course makes
| you not click a link there the next time.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sure ... but 99 out of 100 users just say "weird" and leave.
|
| And that's "How Quora died".
| input_sh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Keep fighting the good fight. This is the hill to die on.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > 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.
| 6510 wrote:
| 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"
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| That, and I have seen AI answers in the mix too, often
| wildly wrong or completely off topic.
|
| So you look for a question, and all the answers are not
| even relevant, and often completely off topic or wrong.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Seems wild to put a bunch of "related" answers that are
| relationship advice, movie questions and other things
| when you look up things like programming questions.
|
| I can understand the rabbit hole thing. Never thought
| about that. That they think of themselves as TikTok and
| not stack overflow or Reddit.
| CM30 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Or gods forbid, someone had a slightly open ended question.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| 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.
| frabjoused wrote:
| I really fail to understand how a company can consciously
| guide itself to degrade so badly. Like these were actual
| decisions of meetings and the results of a ton of work of
| teams to implement. And it destroyed the site.
|
| Product of too much VC, probably.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Product of middle managers, the cause of nearly all
| corporate problems.
| lupire wrote:
| Middle managers pursue the CEO's vision. They aren't
| steering the ship.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| That's your theory, anyway.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Either the CEO sees what's going on and is fine with it
| mean it is their vision, they are putting their feet up
| and don't care, or they are not fine with it and have no
| control over the company.
|
| Seems bad any way you look at it.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > they are not fine with it and have no control over the
| company
|
| something something "all unhappy families are unhappy in
| their own way"
|
| In some places, the "vision" is sufficiently vague that
| all sorts of dumb decisions can be justified by it.
|
| Or the CEO is so stupid that he only listens to his
| direct reports, who all tell him everything is under
| control. And when they tell him not to "micromanage" he
| listens and backs off.
|
| You can't make any universal statements about this.
| frabjoused wrote:
| Can't see a something like "show answers to related
| questions directly under a single answer to the intended
| question" being a middle-manager decision.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You can't? How do you think it happens in a fairly large
| company, then?
| pokstad wrote:
| It's a UX trainwreck
| lencastre wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| nah i think pinterest is even a notch worse
| frfl wrote:
| Quora and Pinterest... one has cornered the text-based SEO-
| spam segment, other has cornered the SEO-spam image
| segment.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| pinterest can be better if you are actually there to use it
| (ie not directed from search traffic)
| conductr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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__ wrote:
| Seems like jobs after LLMs still have a chance _sob_
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| foota wrote:
| Answers per question?
| lupire wrote:
| ad views, and paid subdcriptions, and retention of
| subscribers.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| dbbk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I bet whoever suggested this insanity got promoted because
| "user engagement" went up. Users becoming more confused.
| babyshake wrote:
| This is the result of stickiness being more important than
| utility.
| thayne wrote:
| That used to not be the case, and the site design was more
| reasonable. But now, I completely agree with you.
| hot_gril wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| People complaining about the site wouldn't pay for the site
| they say they want.
| freediver wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?'"
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Quora was never as great as yahoo answers
| jfengel wrote:
| At its peak it was considerably better than Y!A. They started
| with Silicon Valley luminaries (their friends) and that
| attracted a lot of other well educated users, especially
| scientists and philosophers. A lot of genuinely great content
| was generated.
|
| I believe Q&A sites will inevitably degrade as the low-hanging
| fruit is picked early. ("How do I lose weight?" "Explain
| relativity" "Is God real?") It can start with great answers,
| but it quickly becomes repetitious. Y!A probably also had a
| similar phase, but by the time most people heard about it, it
| was already famously dumb.
|
| Quora followed a similar path. It actually lasted longer than
| one might expect, in part because they threw a lot of money at
| it. But it is now much worse because it's better known and a
| more visible target to trolls and spammers. Plus it's
| reputation for paying people, which attracts vast amounts of
| minimum effort, much of it automated. (And not paying any more,
| but that doesn't stop people.)
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Yahoo Answers was greater because it was so bad. Quora wasn't
| good enough or bad enough. Gotta go one way or the other.
| jfengel wrote:
| If you're a fan of trolling you should check out Quora now.
| There are some real full time professionals.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| If your core business product is content contributed by users...
| I'm turning to the opinion that you need a C-level ombudsman- /
| dean of contributors-type role.
|
| Whose sole job it is to (1) figure out what contributors are
| thinking and want & (2) advocate for them inside the company.
|
| Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the
| shark, and all in exactly the same way.
|
| Management begins to take contributions for granted. Stops caring
| about attracting contributors. Then focuses on revenue. Then
| makes changes to the platform that kill contributions, in pursuit
| of revenue.
|
| And they miss so many obvious ways to placate and delight their
| contributors. "It'd be nice to have a mod tool that does X"
| shouldn't be a 3-year back burner ask.
|
| Maybe make it harder for your company to footgun your golden
| goose?
| jfengel wrote:
| Quora had one, William Gunn. He was laid off, along with the
| entire human moderation staff and practically all of the user-
| facing developers.
|
| Quora had been going downhill for quite some time before that,
| as they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content
| and were grasping at straws. But that was the point where they
| appear to have pivoted entirely towards AI and continued the
| human generated content side on minimum life support.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content
|
| This sort of thing should be a nonprofit. When it was good,
| it was literally making the world a better place.
|
| Possibly the Library of Congress would be a good steward for
| such a platform. Something to make it resistant to
| enshittification.
| fullshark wrote:
| How about Wikimedia?
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| Wikimedia is a non-profit that operates like a for-profit
| when the yearly round of donations comes around. They
| literally hoard money[0].
|
| I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception.
|
| --
|
| [0]: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-
| bank-beg/
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception.
|
| I will always downvote a comment when someone writes
| something like this. It is irrelevant to the conversation
| and screams insecurity.
| njharman wrote:
| 100%
| SantalBlush wrote:
| It's also tinged with a "People can't handle the based
| truth I'm laying down" attitude, which is annoying to
| read.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Interesting reference. Non profits cannot hoard money. I
| believe it becomes taxable and they can lose their non
| profit status (i am not an expert)
|
| Though, hoarding seems like a mischaracterization. Per
| the article linked, the cash burn rate is on the order of
| $100M/yr, having $150M in the bank is 18 months worth of
| funding.
|
| The biggest gripe I read in the article is the "high"
| expenditure rate and how necessary it is. It seems like
| reasonable people may disagree on whether that spend rate
| is excessive.
|
| If the expenditure rate were lower, I'd agree it would be
| hoarding.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I guess I can't see the reasonable argument that it is
| necessary when you look at the growth rate of their
| spending.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_
| has...
|
| If they kept expenditures low and hoarded, I would
| actually be fine with that and happy to contribute. I see
| nothing wrong with forming a large endowment for a
| project like Wikipedia.
| lupire wrote:
| Citation needed for your claim about hoarding money,
| which is refuted by simple observation of the many, many
| endowments that exist.
| HillRat wrote:
| There are no limits on a nonprofit's ability to raise and
| maintain cash reserves; there _are_ limits on how and to
| whom funds can be disbursed and (to a lesser extent) the
| kinds of activities that can be used to generate funds.
| But a nonprofit can sit on an endlessly-growing hoard of
| cash if that 's what they (and their donors) want to do.
| rospaya wrote:
| I'm fine with that.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > the yearly round of donations comes around
|
| The what? I cannot visit Wikipedia without seeing a
| donate bar, even when I close it every time. "Year-round"
| maybe.
| Karellen wrote:
| One person's hoard is another person's endowment. To-mah-
| to, to-may-to.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Wikimedia is not a platform.
|
| Their sister Wikicities / Wikia / Fandom (also relying on
| MediaWiki), and now owned by Texas Pacific Group, is
| however, another example of a platform getting
| enshittified.
| allenrb wrote:
| Agreed re: being a non-profit. My great hope was that Elon
| might do that with Twitter. Needless to say, I was... not
| right about that.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Arguably, prelon Twitter was not-for-profit.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Post Elon, they are not-turning-a-profit.
| prepend wrote:
| Are their losses greater or less than pre purchase. I
| know revenue is down, but I wonder how the cost cuts
| affected margin.
| simonw wrote:
| They made a profit in 2018 and 2019 ($1.2bn and $1.45bn
| according to SEC filings) but not in any other year.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Thanks for the laugh.
| choppaface wrote:
| Marc Bodnick was the original "community manager" and
| frequent contributor. He's now working on his own social net,
| the first-ish of which (Telepath) already flopped.
| kiba wrote:
| Perhaps VC backed businesses aren't really ideal for these type
| of sites.
| asveikau wrote:
| > Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the
| shark, and all in exactly the same way.
|
| Do you think Wikipedia has jumped the shark? Obviously not
| perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than Quora in terms of
| accuracy. It's been around for a very long time and it doesn't
| seem to me like quality has decreased.
|
| Edit: to be clear and re-iterate, I never said Wikipedia was
| perfect, just that it has a certain baseline, generally above
| where Quora is, and hasn't seemed to decline over the years.
| bbarnett wrote:
| It's only accurate if the view espoused in the page, matches
| what the gatekeeping moderator believes.
| throw310822 wrote:
| A lot of Wikipedia entries have become extremely partisan,
| and kept that way by moderators who are deeply invested in
| certain narratives. I find it very disappointing that no
| countermeasures have been taken- afaik Wikipedia still works
| exactly like 20 years ago, a barebone wiki governed by a lot
| of obscure, complex and unstructured politics.
|
| Granted, it might be the best possible way for an open-source
| encyclopedia to work. It is after all an incredible success.
| It's just pretty bad in some parts.
| apexalpha wrote:
| Could you point to some examples of partisan entries?
| throw310822 wrote:
| As one example, I wrote this comment a few weeks ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974614
|
| But to expand a bit, for example I'm annoyed at many of
| the entries calling their subject "conspiracy theory/
| theorist". Not that conspiracy theories and their
| believers don't exist, but at this point it has become a
| highly pejorative and judgemental term to frame ideas and
| narratives that need to be _stigmatized_ rather than
| _explained_. Passing judgements should not, in my view,
| be the primary focus of an encyclopedia entry.
| emj wrote:
| So climate change, is it surprising the thread went
| bonkers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford
|
| What ever I answer in this case the easiest reaction will
| be; for you will be to judge me and lump me together with
| what you cal activists, and for those activists it will
| me easiest to put me in the same conspiracy theorist
| group as you. This is not a problem with Wikipedia, this
| is a human problem.
|
| While I also think that article is abysmal, it does give
| context what to expect from people posting stuff by her.
| The biggest problem with your complaint is that you are
| not linking to an alternative, just do a fast draft on
| Wikipedia remove everything that you feel is not relevant
| and link that. Sure it will be reverted but that is
| probably because you first draft will not be a good
| article, those are evidently very hard to write when
| people think so differently about something.
| wonderfulcloud wrote:
| Essentially any issue that relates to politics or
| geopolitics tends to have a strong left wing bias, as if
| it is written from the perspective of the left wing
| against the right wing.
| Angostura wrote:
| Or, your Overton window has shifted.
| eastbound wrote:
| Wikipedia is in the business of paying secret writers for
| content to sway opinions, politically. Of course they have
| jumped the shark, they're basically working for agencies.
| sp332 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/
| 2...
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Wikipedia is great for non political, non-controversial
| topics, such as sciences. I wouldn't trust it on active
| politicians or other figures of public interest.
|
| One major problem is that you need to submit references to
| back up any claim. PR companies can easily buy an article in
| a fringe news site and them modify Wikipedia with a reference
| to that article. It is almost impossible to roll back.
|
| I once tried to update a company page to state they were
| going through redundancies. I was personally affected by
| this, and had internal emails to back this up. However,
| lacking a public reference it was rolled back.
| multjoy wrote:
| Which is how it works. It is an encyclopaedia, not a
| breaking news site.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| The problem is that PR companies can push out whatever
| they want, where as an ordinary individual with personal
| knowledge of a topic, can't. It means many Wiki articles
| on person or companies, are often glorified
| advertisements, rather than encyclopedic entries.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I've thought a two/three-lens Wikipedia split was needed
| to handle this, because each brings its benefits.
|
| I remember when nascent Wikipedia had user-contributed
| content, and the niche articles were way more interesting
| and detailed. Though at the cost of inaccuracy.
|
| Now, the submarine PR being backfed into it makes cited
| content pretty beige.
|
| Something like (1) a non-reader-visible, upstream
| Wikifacts + (2) a community-driven, laxer Wikiprototype +
| (3) an authoritative, cited Wikipedia.
| multjoy wrote:
| A blog post can be sufficient reference.
|
| The point is that Wikipedia isn't original research. You
| updating the page on the basis of personal knowledge
| isn't the way it is supposed to work.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Yes, I am not necessarily disagreeing with this approach.
| The problem is the imbalance. A PR company can buy a news
| article, link it and update a Wikipedia page. It means
| the balance is in favour of big corporations and wealthy
| individuals.
| Theodores wrote:
| Actually it is really hard if you work for a company and
| you need some amends on Wikipedia.
|
| Imagine your quite large company has a small guitar shop
| on the other side of the globe that has the same name.
|
| You just want a disambiguation so nobody thinks your
| company is this little guitar shop. You can't just edit
| it yourself, you need to find a Wikipedia expert and
| bribe them to somehow help with your plight. It is easy
| to imagine that a vast PR company will wave a magic wand,
| but it is not always like that.
| thriftwy wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019573
|
| An amusing discussion where the OP says Wikipedia is here to
| stay, and every answer is downvoted, most of them flagged.
| All of them voicing concerns of some validity.
|
| This is super representative of that happens _on_ Wikipedia.
| asveikau wrote:
| I have show dead enabled here. There is a shocking amount
| of irrational negativity in that thread, even for HN.
| thriftwy wrote:
| It is well-known that people radicalize when they are
| excluded from political process.
|
| Wikipedia is notorious for excluding ordinary
| contributors from the process. Anybody can revert your
| change and that takes precedence over what you did, and
| there is no obvious appeal process for you, but de facto
| _there is_ for the well-connected long-time editors. They
| can always gather some cavalry and run you over.
|
| So they should probably do what Stack Overflow tried to
| do, and explicitly say that new users / infrequent
| contributors have to receive more care, that needs to be
| provided by veterans / frequent contributors, as well as
| provide mechanisms to do so.
|
| Otherwise it is not a wikipedia that everyone can edit,
| rather a wikipedia written by a cabal who is also
| contains a large number of biased people, often getting
| direct or indirect funding from maintaining that bias.
| araes wrote:
| I like Wikipedia and think it is still one of the better user
| contribution sites on the web.
|
| However, having been a long time contributor to [Current
| Events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events)
| (fought over because of news relevancy), there have been
| waves of sock puppeting and attempts to constantly revoke all
| edits from certain users, that often make you not want to
| contribute.
|
| There is also this editorial talking about spending that
| makes some arguments about current issues with Wikipedia.
| Namely, that there's a lot of money going in, and not a lot
| of requested feature development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yeah, it's probably more accurate to say
|
| > Every _for-profit_ contributor-driven platform has
| eventually jumped the shark
| kranke155 wrote:
| Wikipedia is extremely hard to edit these days, and some of
| the other language Wikipedias are dominated by ill intended
| accounts. The Portuguese language Wikipedia is censored by
| mods that work for local politicians in Portugal. It's
| virtually impossible to add corruption cases to their page.
|
| So now you have this bizarro world where English language
| pages on Portuguese politicians have corruption scandals but
| Portuguese language do not.
| samstave wrote:
| Its almost as if user-created-content sites are un-MBA-able...
| in the way that MBAs are cloned to measure only certain metrics
| in a soulless gaze toward a self-exit from the growth hocky
| stick launching pad they are attempting to build on bad faith
| and anti-patterns...
|
| Reddit is a cluster that manages to ONLY keep going because of
| how agressive mods can be about their positions, but as we have
| seen time in, time out, MODs positions get molested by ADMINs
| and ADMINs posing as MODs. MODs on the take.
|
| The point being that when Reddit IPOs - there are undoubtedly
| mods who have/are/will-be compensated/profit when IPO hits.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| What would be a platform that is NOT contributor-driven ??
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Facebook: social over random content. Streaming services:
| commissioned content. Arguably non-monetized YouTube: where
| its used simply for its utility of serving video.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yes, but all of this "content"* comes from contributors,
| who else ??
|
| Streaming services (you mean 5he likes of Netflix ?) are
| arguably not platforms, because they are much closer to
| distributors or even publishers (rather than just editors,
| sometimes), with all the extra legal issues and contract-
| signing that come with that.
|
| *"content" is really corporate-speak, I would hate my works
| to be called that :
|
| https://craphound.com/content/Cory_Doctorow_-
| _Content.html#1
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| I have no experience running a site centered on user generated
| content, but it seems to me that the biggest problem/threat to
| any of them is the people who start showing up once it gains
| traction and becomes more popular.
|
| Early users are a different band of the population, on every
| successful platform from StackOverflow to Uber they create a
| particular culture which is impossible to maintain as the
| general public arrives in large numbers.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| In what way were early users of Uber different from the
| current users? Are you saying the drivers used to be better?
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| To me personally, no, not better, but at one time the
| phrase "ride share" had a lot more meaning than it does
| today. People would creatively decorate their cars for
| example.
| binkHN wrote:
| Sounds a lot like Reddit.
| scoofy wrote:
| >Maybe make it harder for your company to footgun your golden
| goose?
|
| As someone who has started a "content contributed by users"
| website recently (golfcourse.wiki), I've thought long and hard
| about why the enshitification creep happens. I really think it
| happens because most of the people who start these businesses
| either need to take venture capital to survive, or are looking
| for a way to sell the business to retire rich af.
|
| I thought long and hard about a monetization strategy, and I've
| got a few in my mind that don't suck. However, to achieve those
| goals, the project has to stay a side project and it has to run
| on a shoe string budget.
|
| Call me an optimist, but in the long run, I think we will
| replace our enshitified websites with more open ones, the slow
| but steady growth fediverse shows this is happening, it's just
| that it won't happen fast enough for most of us to be satisfied
| consumers.
|
| I just think we are looking at this through the lens of
| consumers, not generous creators. I occasionally help edit
| Wikipedia, and it looks like about 10,000-to-1, at best, people
| who contribute to my dumb little site. If we're all willing to
| waste a bit of time we can build some pretty cool sites, but
| there always needs to be a way for users to capture that good
| if the company turns evil instead of the company trying to
| capture the users for profit.
|
| I see it as, well, a sort of mexican-standoff relationship that
| Wikipedia has built for itself (for lack of a better term).
| Basically, we won't enshitify the website because you'll just
| copy-paste it, but you won't copy-paste it because you know
| it's a waste of time right now. If you don't need to squeeze
| revenues, that's a very good relationship for long-term
| success.
| chris-orgmenta wrote:
| The UI isn't really mentioned directly in the article, and is
| another major problem.
|
| It's optimised to keep you reading. But you don't want to keep
| reading, you just want your original question answered.
|
| Unfortunately, they style all the page components the same, and
| you are forced to read to see if it's an answer to your question,
| a 'related question', or something irrelevant (like the ChatGPT
| example given).
|
| On top of that, it cuts off most of the answer(s) anyway 'below
| the fold' of the fragment it's contained in.
|
| Example where I googled 'quora van dimensions':
| https://www.quora.com/Is-there-much-of-a-height-difference-b...
|
| 1. AI component
|
| 2. Relevant answer, but arguably a lazy one that assumes that
| it's a post 2020 model (instead of 2013-9). Also does not address
| the person's question for 'in the UK' (people answering should
| advise if model differs between the UK & US). Also assumes that
| the asker has not already looked at that spec sheet.
|
| 3. Fairly related / useful context, I suppose.
|
| 4. A 'related' question's answer, for "What is the height of a
| standard 53ft. semi trailer?". (Seriously?!)
|
| 5. A 'related' question's answer, for "How tall can your load be
| above the cab on a flatbed 2016 Ford F550?" (Seriously?!)
|
| 6. 'Related questions'
|
| 7. Answers to completely different questions.
|
| The UI is hostile to the readers' needs.
|
| So that, along with the poor quality responses mentioned (usually
| some business consultant giving vague pointless lists or pointing
| to some SaaS offering) means that "Site:old.reddit.com" or niche
| related websites is usually a more direct path to an answer to
| me.
| jfengel wrote:
| Quora isn't a great place to get answers. It's better as a
| source of mindless, faintly informative entertainment. At its
| best it's a bit better than your ordinary content farm because
| it's not as click-baity; the users are volunteers who just want
| to write. "Recreational typing", as one prominent user puts it.
| nottorp wrote:
| Don't blame LLMs, blame the registration requirement.
|
| This is one of the kinds of product that people will skip if they
| can't evaluate it frictionless.
| Wistar wrote:
| This is what always stops me at quora's door.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Me too.
|
| I've a simple but strict set of security rules for whether
| I'll use a website.
|
| - it does not want to run javascript
|
| - that I can access it over Tor without being blocked
|
| - that it will work in a text based browser like elinks
|
| Despite the protestations by idealogues that no such sites
| exist, HN meets all those requirements, as do dozens of
| useful sites I regularly use.
|
| If and only if I get to evaluate the quality of a site based
| on those requirements, I may eventually register, with
| nothing more than an email, in order to post replies.
|
| Quora fell off that list long ago. More recently so did
| StackExchange.
|
| Often I find that things break as soon as Cloudflare proxies
| are involved.
| obernard wrote:
| You must agree that for almost every web-based product,
| designers and product managers can safely decide to
| completely ignore all people who have requirements like
| yours without it ever affecting their success.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Not only _can_ they ignore such users, they _have_ to.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| And yet here I am, the annoying fly in the ointment of
| your hypothesis, no?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| One thing I like about HN is that they make the same
| amount of money off of me whether I run JavaScript or
| not. I imagine we can agree there...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Yes I absolutely do agree with that.
|
| Designers and product managers may completely ignore
| people like me, trample all over our needs and ignore us.
| Why would they care about the one percent. All good luck
| power to them and their values.
|
| But I am also not the least bit concerned with whether
| their products are a success or not. Why would I care if
| they do not?
|
| Yet I cannot concur that "almost every" site does. No,
| there are some that do. Moreover, those sites seem to
| self curate as being of very good quality. So I am happy
| that there are thoughtful, intelligent people out there
| who "get it". When they stop, so do I, and just move on.
| It's not personal and I'm not invested in them.
| foobiekr wrote:
| It's not 1%, more like 0.005%.
| thexumaker wrote:
| You're not even 1%, maybe .000001%
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I can 100% guarantees you that Quora didn't die because of
| people who didn't want to run JavaScript or be able to
| access it over Tor.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Surely my absence played no pivotal role in their
| downfall. I didn't even know Quora had "died". How sad.
| RIP Quora. But a tjpnz said:
|
| "They're also driving away contributors with more
| altruistic motivations"
|
| Now, I can agree with that, because I see a very strong
| alignment between the set of people who strongly uphold
| their own values and have self-respect, and those who
| stand up for the rights of others and have something to
| give.
|
| The "walled garden" internet basically drives away people
| who give a fuck.
| zht wrote:
| One other way of saying "drives away people who give a
| fuck" could be saying those people are self-aggrandizing,
| self important, always yelling at the top of their lungs
| about their zealotry telling everyone at first
| opportunity about how they turn off JavaScript and don't
| contribute the much to the discussion
|
| I liken people like this to the Amish. They balk at
| modernity as being incompatible with their beliefs. So
| they withdraw from the world and live life as they see
| fit.
|
| What they don't do is go around all the time yelling at
| people telling them how their lifestyle is wrong or
| constantly telling other people how they don't use
| certain technologies.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That really flipped your wig didn't it?
|
| I'm intellectually curious, what you're so deeply
| invested in that was just threatened?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| He's right, people who always talk about they don't use
| sites that require Javacript adds about as much to the
| conversation as people who show up in television
| conversations and say "I haven't owned a television in 20
| years, do people still watch TV?"
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Forget about me for a moment.
|
| Does Javascript really mean something important to you?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Not running JavaScript in 2024 is like putting a speed
| governor on your own car that limits you to going 35
| miles an hour.
|
| It serves no useful purpose
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > It serves no useful purpose
|
| No useful purpose to who?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| What purpose do you have for removing functionality that
| has been part of the web since the 90s?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| If we stick with that analogy, then since HN requires no
| Javascript, it's more like we're having a discussion on a
| radio show, and I am saying "I don't really watch much
| TV", no?
|
| What I hear is that Javascript is a means of speed and
| power to you. And for you, forgoing that power would
| serve no useful purpose. Do I understand that correctly?
|
| What I am wondering is, do you think that for other
| people, they should, maybe even _must_ , feel the same
| way? Even if they are very pleased just listening to the
| radio?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Well, how many people do you really think disable
| JavaScript and want to browse the web over Tor?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It's not completely unrelated I think.
|
| It's hard to me to see how a site with a vision like
| Quora (had) can continue existing for long after they
| start ignoring accessibility issues.
|
| Sounds like I should be looking for a Stack Overflow
| alternative too.
|
| (I'm suspecting that this might be related to the recent
| issue of better accessibility also making it easier to
| abuse for neural network based abusers, and it certainly
| looks like a hard problem to solve for the most popular
| websites.)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Accessibility is important. But it doesn't relate to
| success of a company. Besides, modern screen readers and
| even accessibility affordances on modern cell phones - at
| least iPhones - don't struggle or care whether the site
| uses JavaScript
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| This is not what users seem to say ?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39211037
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > But it doesn't relate to success of a company.
|
| I am wondering what you mean by "success" of a company
| here? Is that purely financial success? Or rate of growth
| or something like that?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Financial success or rate of growth
| nottorp wrote:
| > Sounds like I should be looking for a Stack Overflow
| alternative too.
|
| SO went to hell when they started demanding ready to copy
| paste answers instead of 'teach the man how to fish'
| answers.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm I was going to say something about Stallman-like
| fanaticism, but then I remembered Stallman proved to be
| mostly right...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Richard is most concerned about injustices toward people
| that take away their freedoms. I am most concerned about
| the security of people and how software makes them
| insecure in order to profit from, or abuse them. These
| are proximate but different.
|
| It is a bit worrying that both freedom and security are
| thought 'fanatical' by some.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > It is a bit worrying that both freedom and security are
| thought 'fanatical' by some.
|
| Because those are your grandpa's and your dad's causes,
| respectively. The operative word for this generation is
| "consent."
|
| Manipulate someone into giving Consent and you can do
| whatever the hell you want to them. They asked for and
| agreed to the abuse!
|
| It all starts with clicking "I accept."
|
| My skin crawls anytime I see someone bring it up; it's a
| red flag that someone is trying to apply BDSM protocol
| negotiation to an otherwise-simple interaction. Attorneys
| do this shit too. People only ever do it at all when
| they're trying to rewrite the rules in their favor.
| nottorp wrote:
| > It all starts with clicking "I accept."
|
| You don't have to click 'I accept'. If the dialog is too
| complex to figure out what you're accepting, click reject
| or close the page.
|
| If there is no obvious reject (even if there is a hidden
| one) just close the page and never come back.
| tjpnz wrote:
| They're also driving away contributors with more altruistic
| motivations. There are a few niche subjects for which I can
| offer a semi-useful perspective. But I'm not going to do it if
| Quora build a big fucking wall around it. When they started
| introducing that I deleted my account. Fuck them.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I blame what the other comment says, the UI mixing in answers
| to other questions.
| rvz wrote:
| One of the first casualties caused by ChatGPT which explains the
| massive down-round from being valued from $1.8BN to $500M.
|
| Would need more than just Poe to justify than billion dollar
| valuation.
| indigoabstract wrote:
| Quora seems pure clickbait at this point. Unfortunately, because
| it didn't start that way, now anything still relevant on that
| site is burried under the weight of the nonsense.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I get random emails from them about "popular" questions like
| "why has Javascript replaced C++?" Seems like ragebait.
| spiderice wrote:
| One thing I noticed back when I browsed Quora a lot is that
| most the answers were in direct opposition to the question
| being asked. It's like clockwork.
|
| Q: why is running so good for you
|
| A: it actually isn't good for you. <insert justification>
|
| Q: why do so many people run when it's so bad for you
|
| A: it actually is really good for you. <insert justification>
|
| Every single question seemed to be this way. It probably
| reveals a lot about human nature, but it really turned me off
| to know I was just reading knee jerk reactions to questions
| rather than anything accurate.
|
| All this to say, yes, ragebait is the lifeblood of Quora.
| hot_gril wrote:
| For programming questions, the answer is always "it
| depends" even if it doesn't really depend.
| mrangle wrote:
| This article amounts to concern trolling with a barely veiled
| agenda for censorship. Its "users are fleeing" claim is an
| attempt at wish fulfillment.
|
| The key to using Quora couldn't be easier: don't search for or
| read topics that you don't want to see. Human inquiry will always
| be delightfully messy except in the view of those who have
| pathological control complexes.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Even if you go to Quora for stuff you want, it's useless cause
| it shows answers to unrelated questions. I agree the article is
| bogus though, reminds me of all the "Twitter is dead ever since
| Elon Musk bought it" ones.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I used to like Quora, but it's gotten unuseable. I ask questions
| once in a while, and no one answers them. My "Notifications"
| today include:
|
| Why did the Beatles use a Stratocaster for electric guitars?
|
| What is the best essay writing service?
|
| What are the major challenges of writing an essay?
|
| What is a poem for you?
|
| Should I sell my Squier CV 50s Strat for an Ibanez S521?
|
| Do you count time spent thinking about what you are going to
| write as time spent writing?
|
| Is it important for a writer to write what he feels?
|
| What is the process of writing a book without having anything
| written down beforehand?
|
| Do guitar players prefer single coil pickups or humbuckers?
|
| Do guitar players prefer single coil pickups or humbuckers?
|
| Which rock musicians do you think could've been better than they
| actually were?
|
| New Quora insult: "Quora exists to make NextDoor users look
| smart"
| schmudde wrote:
| Before folks jump on the business model aspect, one should keep
| in mind that many (all?) online communities go through a similar
| growth curve. Wikipedia included.
|
| But this article goes into the details of what makes this _feel_
| different. Quora is aesthetically much worse than it ever was.
| walterbell wrote:
| No mention of Quora founder at OpenAI? https://archive.is/xsK8S
|
| _> His position on the [OpenAI] board has also raised eyebrows
| because Quora has been in increasingly direct competition with
| OpenAI's best-known service: ChatGPT ... Shortly after OpenAI
| launched ChatGPT a year ago, Quora introduced Poe, a platform
| that allows people to ask questions from various AI chatbots,
| including ChatGPT._
| robg wrote:
| I'm still surprised that D'Angelo didn't get as much scrutiny
| in the OpenAI mess, especially as the only board member still
| in place. Seems obvious in hindsight that Quora continuing to
| fail can only be saved by leveraging as training data for the
| next thing. And OpenAIs ambitions threaten that.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| In its "golden age" (say 2014) Quora was a pleasant place to
| write answers. But it was often an unpleasant place to ask
| questions.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Tangentially related, since the CEO of Quora is on OpenAI's
| board.
|
| I recently had an interaction w/ OpenAI's community that left a
| sour taste in my mouth. Asked one question, some smarty guy tried
| to "XY problem" me, I clarified this is not an "XY problem" and
| my question is quite clear and specific and eventually one mod
| was involved, other mods ganged up on me and removed all my posts
| because "they were violating guidelines". I complained about that
| sort of abuse, but guess what? The same mods that run the forum
| run the "forum about the forum" section, lol, so they had their
| fun again. Left a note there, in case some actual OpenAI
| employee/investor cares, telling them "this is how StackOverflow
| died".
|
| I'm sharing this here because if they are taking a page from
| Quora's playbook, well ... good luck? I'll never bother myself
| again with the OpenAI community and that's exactly why I stopped
| being involved with Quora and StackOverflow in the past. I
| wouldn't be surprised to hear about the forum's demise in a
| couple months from now.
| Rapzid wrote:
| GitHub Copilot must be trained on all those XY answers and can
| be just as insufferable.
| yannis wrote:
| Not only Quora, but many other sites including the various
| "stackexchange" sites started declining I would say from about
| 2018, so this is not a phenomenon attributed to llms. IMHO I
| attribute this to the following: a) The overuse of social media
| conditioning users to provide short answers, rather than long
| thoughtful write-ups, b) Most topics have been saturated to the
| limit c) lack of interest from the new generation d) Bad
| management and moderation.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I think stack exchange's moderators killed that site. Common
| complaints were how antagonistic they were toward new users.
| Hard to grow or sustain a user base if you turn out all the new
| ones.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah it's a really big problem with StackOverflow. The mods
| are all crazy. I can't find it now but the StackOverflow Devs
| proposed actually fixing (or at least improving) question
| closing by allowing the asker to reopen their question once.
| I can't remember the exact details, but it sounded like a
| good first step. Downvoted to hell by the existing mods of
| course.
|
| They're a bit screwed because they rely so much on volunteer
| mods but the volunteer mods are crazy...
| matsemann wrote:
| Doesn't sound like either of you know how SO works. Very
| little is done by mods, mainly it's votes by normal users.
| Like I could be voting to close something as a duplicate,
| off topic etc with my privileges. It's the community doing
| this, not moderators.
|
| And the community is tired of people asking for help with
| their homework or doing very little effort themselves
| before asking. Why do these people deserve others spending
| their time helping them if they can't even bother to search
| or formulate something coherent?
| IshKebab wrote:
| > And the community is tired of people asking for help
| with their homework
|
| I don't think anyone objects to closing those questions.
| That's not really what this is about. My questions are
| _very clearly_ not asking for help with homework and
| trivial "how do I write a for loop" or "it doesn't work"
| questions. Still get downvoted/closed frequently. Most
| often:
|
| * It gets closed as duplicate because there's a vaguely
| similar - _but different_ - question. Or sometimes there
| 's a completely different question with an answer that
| incidentally also answers my question.
|
| * It gets closed as too vague or not clear because it's
| simply outside the domain of expertise of the voter. It's
| clear to people that know what I'm talking about.
|
| To be clear when I say "mods" I don't exclusively mean
| people with official mod power. It's also people that
| moderate for fun - those that trawl the new questions.
| Let me know if you have a better name for those people.
|
| You can tell it's them because you very often get a
| couple of downvotes immediately and then if you check
| back a month or two later it will have been upvoted by
| many more people that actually had the same question and
| arrived there via Google.
| klabb3 wrote:
| You are missing the elephant in the room, the incentives that
| drive shit content: SEO. Both quora and stack exchange - as
| businesses - are downstream of Google search in particular.
| Their main goal is to appease PageRank. All else follows from
| that.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Is it dead? It and reddit (and stackoverflow) are the main "human
| typed" results I still get
|
| (yes I'm aware they're spending some resources on displaying an
| AI answer at the top).
|
| Of course never really liked quora's forced login thing and how
| it seems to have removed parts of questions that answers are
| still referring to and how it mixes answers to different
| questions in front of the current one
| dboreham wrote:
| It appears that Quora's pages are SEO optimized now, to the
| detriment of human users. Basically you can optimize for ad
| revenue and not have human user experience degrade
| significantly.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think the upvote/downvote model for evaluating content is
| fundamentally not a good one, and this deficiency is the root
| problem for a lot of sites (Reddit, Quora, etc.) that were
| founded around the same time, circa 2005-2012. It lends itself
| too much to groupthink, popularity contests, and self-promotion.
|
| X/Twitter has a million other problems, but I do like their new
| Community Notes of fact-checking claims. It's essentially
| anonymous and somewhat immune to self-promotion.
|
| Going forward, a better path for FAQ-type sites is probably
| something similar to that model. The hard part is how you get
| users to answer questions while removing the self-promotion and
| gamification/scoreboard incentives.
|
| It's possible that AI might just destroy this space entirely, but
| I still think you need some form of human fact-checking in order
| to avoid hallucinations.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Anyone who shares an article or news which has been community
| noted gets an immediate downvote in recommendations for me.
| wonderfulcloud wrote:
| Community Notes could just be an expansion of a good tweet to
| clear up some ambiguity.
|
| The up/down feature tends to create echo chambers that
| eventually exclude half the population. Reddit is worse at
| this because of excessive moderation combined with
| doomscrollong incentives.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Didn't we see this coming when they required you to log in to
| view content? Did everyone forget experts exchange?
| sparks1970 wrote:
| Whenever a search leads me to a question/answer on Quora I'm
| inevitably hit with a Sign In popup that blocks the whole screen.
| Feels obnoxious and I just back button away.
| CM30 wrote:
| Well, the revenue sharing probably didn't help much for sure.
| I've seen dozens of sites and platforms add that as a feature,
| and as unfortunate as it is, this almost always backfires. People
| see 'make money contributing to this platform' as 'free cash for
| spamming!' and the quality often falls off a cliff. You need
| really strict rules and a good moderation team to keep a platform
| under control in this situation, and that's rarely the case for
| services like Quora.
|
| You can see the same issues cropping up on Medium with its
| partner program, on Twitter thanks to Twitter Blue and revenue
| sharing, and even to some degree on the likes of YouTube and
| Twitch (though they're so massive that the scammers don't really
| stand out/do as well). Put money on the table, and the scammers
| will come out of the woodwork to try and get as much of it as
| they can, quality content be damned.
|
| Edit: I also suspect part of the issue with revenue sharing
| programs is that they don't offer enough to incentive genuine
| experts, but offer enough that if you're utterly desperate and
| local costs of living are low, you're incentivised to spam for
| it.
| matsemann wrote:
| Yeah, the comments to any viral post on Xitter now is just blue
| checkmarks spamming memes in order to get likes and eyeballs on
| their junk content, and thus make money.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| I find the answers on Quora to be way too try-hard. It feels like
| LinkedIn growth style BS stories.
| fabioborellini wrote:
| Yes, the first screenful is motivation to read the answer or
| some personal unrelated crap.
| bmm6o wrote:
| This is exactly it. Even at its height, it felt like everyone
| was trying to build a brand and a following, and that was the
| primary motivation for the answers.
| username332211 wrote:
| So, the fourth paragraph of the article is supposed to
| demonstrate the decline of Quora. It has a number of links.
|
| One of those links shows a UI that's fairly obviously Reddit! [1]
| Another is to genius.com's lyrics to some song[2] which don't
| seem to have anything to do with anything the author's
| complaining about.
|
| Of the links actually relevant to Quora, one is about an obvious
| joke[3], which the author either doesn't understand or pretends
| not to.
|
| What's left is a case of spam[4], that the article links twice.
| I'd suppose because it's the only evidence the author has of low
| quality questions on Quora.
|
| While Quora is a horrible website, I'd say the evidence shows
| Slate is worse. Their reporters can't even find genuine evidence
| of Quora's low quality. They show us Reddit instead.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/3DrakaiNa/status/1743993622737863056 [2]
| https://genius.com/23826656 [3]
| https://twitter.com/Zeronelite/status/1743449094360596802 [4]
| https://hollywoodactress02.quora.com/OMG-KING-CHARLES-SHOCK-...
| plorkyeran wrote:
| [3] is, as far as anyone can tell, an insane person and not a
| joke. They've posted literally hundreds of questions involving
| atheists, christian babies, and nonsensical situations.
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| i dont trust the founder
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| Who
| jeffbee wrote:
| Quora has never been a good resource. It was always designed to
| trick users into clicking through from a SERP with snippet
| content that isn't on the landing page when you arrive. It is the
| same business model as Pinterest. The amazing thing is that Euro
| regulators have for years been trying to favor this business
| model, trying to force Google to rank these types of sites highly
| under the banner of competition, when what the users really want
| is for these sites to disappear from search results altogether.
| darksim905 wrote:
| I'm not sure I fully agree, I've found some useful things, but
| I like long form content that expands beyond what's on Reddit
| comments and occasionally you hear interesting stories.
|
| The problem I have is, the content I usually see is essentially
| the regurigation of youtube videos stealing from imdb's trivia
| section: "Top 10 things you didn't know about $film!"
|
| Quora does the same thing for clicks in a way, and it ends up
| being misleading.
| wslh wrote:
| Quora is thriving! It appears on almost every search I do on
| Google. More than a few years ago. I understand that their
| quality is terrible but in a economy of focus and SEO they are
| doing incredible well.
|
| If you publish a well written article and adding all the SEO
| capabilities that you can, you will almost never appear before
| Quora.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| I was a super enthusiastic Quora user for a long while. This is
| the first time I actually took the time to _close_ an account a
| few months back, because I was so frustrated with the turn this
| whole thing took.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Quora is a good example of how artificial scarcity goes wrong. If
| you're not restrictive enough, you can't make a profit. But if
| too restrictive, then the business will starve itself. When it
| becomes too restrictive/extractive over time you have
| enshittification.
| mp05 wrote:
| Seems like every time I land on Quora it's just a bunch of people
| bragging about their IQs while simultaneously lambasting neo
| Nazis, all while missing the juicy irony of their entire
| worldview.
|
| I avoid Quora.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Most smart people I know oppose neo Nazis. That's not a very
| controversial position.
| mp05 wrote:
| So you don't see the irony of people raving about how
| innately superior they are because of their IQ but hate on
| people whose core tenant was being innately superior?
|
| "Smart" is very much a function of the work you put in,
| though of course not the only factor. I don't feel the need
| to have to explain this more than I have.
|
| Edit: I have to ask... what about the smart people that don't
| oppose them? What's their deal?
| kstrauser wrote:
| I find anyone bragging about their intelligence to be
| intolerably obnoxious.
|
| 100% of the smart people I know oppose Nazism. It seems
| there are too many politicians around who are objectively
| intelligent but are a bit comfortable with at least some of
| the Nazi Party's ideas.
| mannyv wrote:
| Once they started monetizing things got worse. Financial
| incentives led to people gaming the site, which always leads to
| crap content.
|
| You need a low barrier to entry to get free content, but then
| that makes it easy to pump full of crap. But you need that
| content to get users and monetization <shrug>.
|
| Quora has handled that much worse than, say, reddit. But reddit
| doesn't allow their users to monetize their content, which keeps
| the spammers at bay.
| mjamesk wrote:
| I don't think it died. I get answers from Quora or Reddit for
| most of my questions. Nowadays, Google is also pushing forum
| websites.
|
| The amount of questions being asked and answered is drastically
| reduced after GPT. So as a platform, it has died but still has
| the same amount of reach. They integrated AI. We have to see
| where this heads.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's profound to me how many good ideas there are online that
| aren't sufficiently profitable. Reminds me of the fundamentals of
| the "old Web" full of altruistic endeavours.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I wish Google would put Quora out of our misery at this point.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Quora was a nice example on how an extremely shtty UI can still
| become successful if the app was useful enough.
|
| It's insane how much people can put up with if it scratches their
| itch enough
| Luctct wrote:
| And here we go again!
|
| "...things got worse in a post-Gamergate internet, with alt-
| right, Trump-loving trolls invading online forums"
|
| So if you defend Trump, who leads every single poll, you are
| automatically labeled a "troll."
|
| "...with ugly ideologies running rampant."
|
| Points to some place called "it's ok to be white" although
| finding overtly anti-white pages and profiles is at least 10
| times easier since that is never punished.
|
| Meanwhile, again: Trump leads every single poll while whoever
| pulls the strings on the Biden puppet does everything possible
| and imaginable to wreck the country.
|
| These loons really underestimate people. They really think people
| will hear the thunder and feel the rain on their faces whenever
| they step out the door and still believe the "sunny and mild"
| weather reports. They really expect people to believe that
| referees' whistles are causing football athletes to drop dead on
| the pitch (google that, I am not joking).
|
| I left Quora years ago when I saw the brutal bias that just made
| it useless for any actual information. Sure, they were
| vandalized, but they let themselves be vandalized while they were
| too busy propagating lies. Quora made itself useless.
| krkhan wrote:
| I was an active contributor to Quora in the mid-10's -- my
| answers gained some 3m views. It was really something back then,
| as many people have fondly reminisced about the era. There were
| so many great writers who brought so much understanding to
| whatever crazy stuff they were passionate about by writing for
| free on Quora. You had diplomats, chefs, former propaganda
| writers, people living through violent conflict, doctors,
| teachers, scientists, physicists, astronauts and the list goes
| on. Quora from that time truly helped me understand the world
| better.
|
| AI might have driven the final nail in the coffin but the one
| decision which was truly an inflection point was starting a
| program that would pay for asking X amount of questions. The
| platform was cool because of people who wrote ANSWERS -- to the
| point where the original question sometimes became even
| tangential to the actual answer but you'd learn so much
| nevertheless. Quora not only ended the top-writer program for
| those people it started offering monetary incentives for asking
| the most inane bullshit questions as long as they got the views.
| It is truly baffling to me how something that holds so much
| genuine value can be driven into the ground while making
| decisions left, right and center (and the whole community trying
| to tell you exactly what you're doing) that destroyed everything
| of value in the Quora process. The older answers are still there,
| but the community magic has utterly evaporated.
|
| I guess it's pretty normal for folks who have seen this happening
| in BBS/Usenet era but regardless of all of Quora's faults (the
| tone-moderation of the language was always a bit overboard in
| IMHO but I don't think it led to the downfall -- it was always
| there and writers worked around it) it is genuinely disappointing
| to see every successive platform try to build something of value
| only to falter and disappear because we just can't seem to keep
| anything good around.
| city41 wrote:
| Quora really captured lightning in a bottle around that time. I
| used to get a weekly (daily? Can't remember) email from Quora
| and I would read just about every question in it. I came to
| look forward to the emails. I've never had that experience with
| any other other newsletter.
| Agraillo wrote:
| As a daily destination, Quora is no longer usable for me, no
| need to repeat what others already said. But the digest still
| surprises me and the posts are often good, even if it's a
| rewritten Wikipedia entry. It's like a user-generated
| "wonders of the past/world" newspaper for me. Daily was too
| much, but weekly is ok. I'm not sure whether every e-mail
| send it personalized, but at least in some way it looks like
| dependent on what I clicked before.
| samstave wrote:
| I rage quit Quora some years ago publicly here on HN, I dont
| recall now the exact reason (something to do with unwanted
| profile/content/privacy change or some such...
|
| It was quite a while back, but I have never really gone to
| quora since, especially since its basically a paywall (I also
| never go to NYT unfortunately because their paywall is so
| BFY;TW I cant stand it.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Fascinating and confirms my suspicions. The point when the
| questions popping up in my feed were obviously not genuine is
| when I lost interest in Quora. The worst was how it'd always
| show me variations of questions fetishizing working at Google.
| Seriously every single Quora digest email had some variation of
| a question like "What is the best thing about working at
| Google?" Unsubscribed and don't miss it.
| civilized wrote:
| > It is truly baffling to me how something that holds so much
| genuine value can be driven into the ground while making
| decisions left, right and center (and the whole community
| trying to tell you exactly what you're doing) that destroyed
| everything of value in the Quora process.
|
| It's crazy that the operators of a website like this could
| understand so little about what made it special, but I guess
| all they understood was engagement metrics.
| throwaway277432 wrote:
| StackOverflow has the same problem, prioritizing question
| askers instead of answerers.
|
| As a result, the site is now "welcoming" to new users asking
| low-quality questions, but actively hostile to what the
| answerers and mods would like. While they're the ones left to
| clean up the spam.
|
| And when the low-effort questions are closed that then drives
| away the question askers too, because all the "nice" onboarding
| didn't tell them their question should actually be well-
| researched. Their expectations of getting help now clash with
| reality and they end up hating the experience.
|
| But all this drives views and "questions" in the short-term and
| management is so clueless it's hopeless. See e.g. the recent
| mod strike due to the AI policy issues, where they initially
| wanted to prevent/ban mods from deleting low-quality AI content
| from serial ChatGPT spammers.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| Typical american crud bs.
|
| Make an app get VC money and jump ship to cool new tech.
|
| Had great potential but sadly went tits up.
|
| I wonder why no good CRUDs come from europe. But then i remember
| they are busy moping.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| Quora had all the opportunity to invest in AI for LLM based on
| user responses. It didn't. I wonder if other sites will go down
| this way side.
| spiderice wrote:
| What is Poe if not exactly that?
| kashunstva wrote:
| > venture capital hub Andreessen Horowitz blessed Quora with a
| much-needed $75 million investment
|
| Most shocking of all is that anyone would dump more and $1 or two
| on Quora at this point.
| poundofshrimp wrote:
| Quora merging "all related" answers onto the same page is one of
| the most annoying things about it. I switch it to "Answers" 100%
| of the time.
| standardUser wrote:
| I was a 'Top Writer' for a couple of years (pre-monetization). I
| loved it as a motivation to research topics I was interested in
| and practice writing. Eventually I lost interest, but I still get
| occasional search results from Quora with information that is
| otherwise difficult or impossible to find online.
|
| Perhaps in an alternative timeline we might be regularly typing
| "[some query] quora" into search engines, but Reddit seems to
| have filled that much-needed gap more successfully.
| breck wrote:
| I think Quora died because the premise was flawed: that high
| quality repositories of words would have a strong ROI near
| indefinitely.
|
| Now it is clear there is a new thing in our world (LLMs), and
| turns out repositories of well crafted words will be irrelevant.
|
| Almost no one saw this change coming (or at least, not how
| quickly this change would come).
|
| There is nothing Quora could have done to change this fate.
| CoBE10 wrote:
| I remember someone asking a question on Quora around 2015: "How
| long do you think Quora would last?" Someone answered that it
| probably would not last more than the next 5 years. I forgot what
| were the actual reasons he gave, but it gave me such an uneasy
| feeling that Quora could die in the next 5 years. Looking back at
| it now, it's probably around 2015 that it started becoming what
| it is today - SEO spam.
| ufmace wrote:
| Seems to me it's all about money. They all gotta make it somehow,
| and if ads are the plan, than it's going to reach this state
| eventually. User-funded services seem to fare better, but they
| rarely grow as large. I don't think there's any other easy
| solution though.
|
| Nonprofits may not be looking for the mega-exit, but they still
| need to pay the bills somehow, so most of the same forces still
| apply. They are also more likely to draw partisan ideologues who
| are naturally more enthusiastic about having a way to put their
| thumbs on the scales of the discourse despite lower pay and no
| chance of that lucrative mega-exit.
|
| Government-funded things have too many of their own issues.
| Practically impossible to start, execute, or pivot fast enough to
| compete with startups, and subject to political turf wars and
| overhead. Naturally, nothing much comparable to such sites has
| sprung out of that.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Quora is basically unreadable now. The layout is so confusing.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Their UI has long been more focused on getting you to click on
| other questions and/or ads rather than seeing the answer you
| want, and they do it by making it really hard to tell which is
| which. They intersperse a sponsored question that has nothing to
| do with yours between the top two replies.
|
| I guess that's probably the only way they could really monetize
| but it sure is annoying.
| acdha wrote:
| See also Google: I knew they were embracing the dark side when
| Quora not only went unpunished for search cloaking but seemed to
| get even more solidly rewarded with high search weight.
| seahawks78 wrote:
| I have some very good opinion of this. I work in big tech and I
| might be a canonical example of some users who no longer find
| Quora interesting. From 2012 to about 2014 I was absolutely
| hooked to Quora spending anywhere between 2 to 4 hours every day.
| At that time I was a young professional in my early 30s, newly
| married and just at the beginning of my tech career after grad
| school. I used to love the questions posted on the forum which
| seemed very relevant to me e.g. how to build a career in tech,
| dating/relationship advice, tourism advice etc. I was hooked.
|
| Fast forward 10 years from then. I am a 40 year old middle aged
| guy. Still working in tech albeit at a Senior level; with one
| school going kid and have a mortgage. I still visit Quora
| occasionally but am hard pressed to find any content that is
| interesting and appropriate for my age. It seems that they are
| still showing me questions which were mostly relevant to my
| younger self 10 years back and not now. There is practically no
| content or discussion in that forum that can attract and keep a
| 40 year old middle aged guy. Its just that I evolved but they
| didn't. Not to mention the fact that they also became more
| annoying with all these "promoted", "relevant" questions
| intermixed within the same page. I think their lack of ability to
| evolve over time absolutely finished the product. My two cents.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Twelve years ago, Quora was a Silicon Valley darling and
| notoriously had one of the more difficult interview processes.
| How far they've fallen.
| sedatk wrote:
| I briefly enjoyed contributing to Quora, but then they added a
| paid tier, "spaces", and all that spammy content. Now, as someone
| who created a few of its popular answers, I never want to see the
| site again. I'll probably get rid of my account too. It's almost
| as if they explicitly didn't want me there, and did everything to
| achieve that.
| saucymew wrote:
| From personal experience, the main Quora experience is their
| Digest e-mails; less than a third are relevant topics.
|
| And there are now constant "Edit:" updates on answers addressing
| the trolls and hateful responses, further dampening my interest
| in answering questions.
|
| Where have all the internet forums gone?
| Growtika wrote:
| Some potentially interesting information I've just checked that
| might give a new perspective:
|
| From an SEO standpoint, Quora is currently at one of its peak
| levels.
|
| - It has reached 267 million organic visitors per month:
| https://i.imgur.com/899g3Jm.png
|
| - Quora's organic traffic is quite diverse
| https://i.imgur.com/JfbYKH1.png
|
| Google's helpful content update has increased traffic for sites
| like Quora, Stack Overflow, and Reddit. In many instances, I
| believe this boost lacks justification.
|
| Quora's user experience is not intuitive. Although they removed
| the signup wall, which impacted their bounce rate and caused
| millions of organic visitors to leave their site shortly after
| clicking on a Quora result in a search engine, reading an answer
| on Quora now feels overwhelmingly disorganized.
| wonderfulcloud wrote:
| Apart from how most internet companies get worse when money comes
| into play.
|
| I find that most of social media went south around the time of
| Trump's election and the heavy partisan moderation that followed
| it.
|
| Quora further seems to have been taken over by Chinese paid
| writers.
| vintermann wrote:
| The worst is that Quora paid its own users to spam the service
| with questions they didn't actually need answers to.
|
| You think you're helping a real human, with a real human need,
| and then you see he's asked not only what museums you recommend
| in your hometown, but also what museums you recommend in 400
| other small towns from all over the world, and what restaurants
| you recommend for 400 other random small towns, and then what
| local radio channels you recommend for 400 more etc.
| Yusefmosiah wrote:
| Quora is, I think, part of the reason that OpenAI has a big lead
| over their rivals. Quora has, specifically for training language
| models, very high-signal data, when compared to Reddit, twitter,
| gmail, and Meta's platforms. And OpenAI is afaik, the only AI lab
| with a license to Quora's data.
|
| Quora has long been a world leader of SEO and dark UX patterns --
| it was never as valuable to users as its Google ranking would
| indicate -- so it's hard to mourn its demise. But yes, it does
| stink to see the quality of information going down while the
| quantity grows at an ever-increasing exponential rate.
| ho_schi wrote:
| This awkward thing was never usable? It a bad clone of
| Stackoverflow.
|
| And Stackoverflow works. But it needs a new owner which has a
| clue what it is about. Even better - the old owners and creators
| buy it back :)
|
| SO lost a little through the initial AI-Hype but probably most
| people know already the AI is feed with SO. And SO needs humans
| with new knowledge. So the main problem are the new owners. Why
| they did even removed the job adds linked to the questions. That
| made sense :(
| smsm42 wrote:
| What a low quality work. Of course the publicly open Q&A site
| would have some low-quality questions and answers. Of course most
| of questions of general interest will be asked early, and of
| course some of the newer questions would regard current events,
| and some of the answers - oh horror! oh depravity! - will feature
| opinions that differ from the one the author of the article
| holds. Of course there would be trolls and fakes - have you been
| on the internet anytime lately?
|
| I don't know if Quora is doing well or not. Maybe it is dying.
| Maybe it is flourishing. What I am sure of it that this article
| didn't help me any in understanding which of those is true,
| despite the length of the piece.
| davidguetta wrote:
| The UI has become HORRIBLE compared to when I discovered 10 years
| ago. Answers of other questions are on the same page that the
| main question, it's hard to even find comments / answers to some
| answers. And the constant loggin nagging is horrible.
|
| Quota is synonym of internet junk spam in the same vein as
| pinterest or yelp (a little less for yelp maybe)
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I love a good necroscopy (incidentally, R.I.P. Brian Lumley) on
| communities as they wither and die. I've been watching since
| Usenet and IRC. There's a rhythm to this kind of thing, a kind of
| hype cycle for communities, but overall, I have one ur-metric
| which outshines them all: _look for the hubris_.
|
| Communities, once they reach a certain size and collective
| history, gain a kind of self-reflectiveness. They get meta. And
| right around then, you will find someone at the helm who will not
| remember the earliest days and fail to grasp what brought
| everyone together. They've forgotten the face of their father and
| left the riddle of steel on the battlefield. What they'll decide
| is, well, _it 's me_. I, or rather what I represent, make it
| great. The moderation team, the steering committee, the
| management. This is never true in any community I have seen. It's
| always the individuals, maybe some interesting weirdos, or the
| ones with a lot of time on their hands, the lonesome lusers. They
| will ultimately be regarded with disregard, viewed as churnable
| units, cogs of cognition, replaceable. This is always wrong, and
| it is always a lesson learned in slow motion, after the
| egomaniacs have fled toward their next call to greatness.
| logbiscuitswave wrote:
| Quota was once a very good website. I spent a lot of time
| contributing and answering questions.
|
| Then the email spams started happening pushing digests of
| irrelevant and in some cases harmful recommendations.
|
| Then the increasingly asshole-oriented designs around serving up
| search results and blocking the content unless you signed in or
| registered.
|
| Then the Q/A quality digressed massively to the point where it
| became less and less useful. There were also changes to the
| design that merged questions, answers, and recommendations into a
| largely incoherent mess where I was never really sure what I was
| looking at or why.
|
| Not wanting any further association with the dumpster fire Quora
| was becoming, I ended up deleting every one of my answers and
| comments before deleting my account entirely.
|
| Now I take pains to block Quora results from my searches and
| never click on a Quora link if I come across it. It seems like
| I'm not missing much based on the terribly awful "innovations"
| mentioned in this article.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Quora is the spammiest large website, for sure. Depending on your
| query like 80 % of responses are scams from India and/or SEO
| fluff bullshit and self promotion.
| crtified wrote:
| I'm waiting for the inevitable counter-culture pushback against
| AI, where suddenly humanity realises how valuable it's "pure,
| non-AI polluted" content bases are/were, as a unique and critical
| data class in their own right.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I think everyone here is missing that the founders created this
| to make money. They didn't found a non-profit. And it turns out,
| people don't actually want to pay for this, and having taken rich
| people's money the only way to pay for it is the slide into Ads
| and that inevitably leads to this garbage. Why are people
| surprised?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Dead? It's still the top 28th most popular website, above tiktok.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Co-founders Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever were both early
| Facebook employees
|
| Where have I come across the surname D'Angelo before? Oh yes -
| he's on the board of OpenAI, and was the _only_ board member at
| the time Altman was sacked (according to WP).
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Quora is great if you like to read thoughts of people with fringe
| ideas and those who are mentally ill. There's a decent sized
| gangstalking group on there.
| Luctct wrote:
| Partially reposting:
|
| "...things got worse in a post-Gamergate internet, with alt-
| right, Trump-loving trolls invading online forums"
|
| So if you defend Trump, who leads every single poll, you are
| automatically labeled a "troll."
|
| "...with ugly ideologies running rampant."
|
| Points to some place called "it's ok to be white" although
| finding overtly anti-white pages and profiles is at least 10
| times easier since those are never punished.
|
| What happened? I was "moderated" down and my comment now is
| shadow banned of course.
|
| Look, I only came here and posted what I think to make a test. I
| was 100% sure my comment would be shadow banned and of course I
| was proven right in under two hours. I usually don't bother
| posting in these places anymore such as Quora or here. And if I
| gave up on these places, who else did? How many else did? How
| many others are jumping ship every day? That is how these places
| become irrelevant. We know there is no truth in them anymore,
| just a farcical fantasy imposed by a minority mob. Only people
| who want to hide their heads in a hole still have any interest in
| these places. I am not alone. I am enjoying tons of freedom of
| expression with tons of like-minded people on Mastodon. I get a
| lot of great information there. My life is better without Quora,
| without ycombinator, without Facebook, without Instagram, without
| Twitter, without the censorship crazed mobs. Mastodon is
| currently the only place of value. Everything else may die and I
| don't care. My life is better this way.
|
| Enjoy your bubble.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| There are some interesting answers on quora. But so many stupid
| questions posted by trolls. The signal to noise ratio seems to
| drop every month.
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