Please login to see the answer to this question.
For the last couple of years I've been appending "?share=1" to the URL every time it asks me to login.
Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
#32India is the reason!
Look at the regional interest graph at the mentioned URL! Quora is more popular in India than in any other country!
Also change the country drop down filter below the search bar from Worldwide to India. You see an exponential rise in popularity, and the rise is not sudden. https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0bm8t1r&geo=I...
Re: Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
#33Because the network effect has started to apply. There are enough users now to make the whole ecosystem interesting.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
#34Quora is probably the best social network-ish website ever. It probably gathers all the smartest people on the internet. After I started using Quora I quit fb and twitter. It's not an apples to apples comparison but you get the idea. There are much less trolls because most people on Quora are smart enough to do other things.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
#35I dunno about its changing popularity, but like Expert Sexchange before it, I actively avoid Quora. It was the first site I added to my Google Personal Blocklist, and the reason I installed the plugin. Their unsubscribe form is (or was last I saw it in 2015) a nastier piece of work than I could imagine, even if told: Come up with the most annoying unsubscribe form you can. Make it really hard to unsubscribe from ever…
On mobile, they make you install their app to look at anything at all. Any company that needs dozens of "dark patterns" and tricks to stay afloat probably shouldn't exist. LinkedIn is the same.
They suggest their app, but the web site is fully working on mobile (Android in my case).
Re: Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
#36I dunno about its changing popularity, but like Expert Sexchange before it, I actively avoid Quora. It was the first site I added to my Google Personal Blocklist, and the reason I installed the plugin. Their unsubscribe form is (or was last I saw it in 2015) a nastier piece of work than I could imagine, even if told: Come up with the most annoying unsubscribe form you can. Make it really hard to unsubscribe from ever…
I don't know how/if it helps the collective, but sites that behave this way receive a "Mark as spam" on gmail from me. It more or less guarantees that I never see them again, and I guess if enough people mark them as spam they'll actually get caught in the "global spam filter"?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
#37Please login to see the answer to this question.
Do they still make you sign up to view all the answers? I remember being greatly annoyed that the site kept coming up at the top of Google results, only to be blocked by needing to login. Whereas other rivals sites like the ___ exchanges didn't have this nag.
Shouldn't Google catch on to this stuff and demote their site ranking?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
#38They did a very good job attracting core early contributors who wrote unique great content and then it snowballed. Reading answers posted by the top 10 contributors is just fun. All content is SEO-friendly. Much of it is authoritative and Google loves authoritative content. There is a setting to make my content appear as anonymous to search engines, but many of us associate our names with our content. Most of Quora's…
> "All content is SEO-friendly."
I think that's the crux of it. When I'm feeling lazy and google a specific question, their results pop up first because someone has most likely asked the same exact question verbatim on Quora before.
It's also really easy to fall down a Quora rabbit hole with the "associated questions" on the right side. I was watching a Star Wars marathon the other day following The Force Awakens and at one point had like 450 tabs open of associated Star Wars quora questions. Eventually I realized I could never catch up with 30+ years of nerd speculation and analysis and just simply didn't have time to read it all so I closed everything without reading them all! But I wanted to!!
Re: Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
On mobile, they make you install their app to look at anything at all. Any company that needs dozens of "dark patterns" and tricks to stay afloat probably shouldn't exist. LinkedIn is the same.
They suggest their app, but the web site is fully working on mobile (Android in my case).
I wouldn't say fully working. I'm using Chrome on a nexus 5X and whenever I go to their website I get a banner to install the app which is extremely difficult to remove. Tiny, tiny touch area. It then gets in the way enough to make the useable viewport ridiculously small.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden?
#40The question is -- Is it good for Quora?
Recently the site has basically become a plagiarism echo chamber. People copy/paste blogs verbatim in a bid for upvotes. Maybe Quora should stop optimizing for Facebook's key metrics like MAU.
Maybe the whole point of Quora is higher quality content, a special place which only allows for certain standard of content. If everyone can have a guard of honor, then it is simply a guard. If anyone is allowed to answer on Quora, it's simply a content mill. And the wrong kind at that.
To be what Quora is trying to be, you need a heavy handed deletionist culture. For that you need passionate people who spend time doing that, and you need an open platform. Both of which Quora is not. It's like they had a decent idea in 2010 but never really improvised.