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Advertising seems to be toxic to free communication. It pretty much killed Usenet.
The corollary is that spending money on information is the control for this.
What happened to Quora anyway? When it started I recall it being super hot with crazy high quality answers. Then they started with logins being required and it all seemed to go downhill at an amazing speed.
Pretty sure that got killed off at some point in their pre-MS struggles, at least on LI there was more chance of getting people with relevant experience.
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>What happened to Quora anyway? It became marketing. Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup. Same with Medium. Once the startup bros say a site is good for "native marketing", that's when the begins to die.
So economics eventually kills anything that's free to consume. Well... I can't say that surprises me.
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The corollary is that spending money on information is the control for this.
Most people pay something for their communications in the form of home internet or cell service, so I don't think the answer is just nested paywalls or the internet would be more polite than it is.
That people pay for the internet connection doesn't really have much effect on the economics. It's the payment for the production of the information or lack thereof that is driving the deleterious effects on quality of information that we are seeing.
This is mostly of our choosing too! And we will continue to put up with it until we don't and we sort out alternative systems. You can already see things changing with some sites putting up paywalls and some people choosing to pay or some people clicking away.
It's not an easy fix in aggregate, but as an individual it's possible to make choices where the economics isn't skewing in a direction you're not happy with. The trade-off is you might not be happy to pay for what you used to get for free. Well I don't have a good answer to that other than it is what it is.
Two good examples in my life at least I can think of is paying for access to Pluralsight means I'm getting high quality, in-depth, curated tech education on demand rather than scrappily piecing together random tutorials that bug me with passive aggressive "no, I don't want to become a coding ninja" ebook offers. The being I buy and read a decent amount of high quality books as the economics is structured such that they have to provide the value upfront before I'll exchange the money and the cost to produce the book is higher than just a blog post, so it's much more in-depth and Im not being sucked into anyone's marketing funnel.
All personal choices but I've been saying for years now the economics of the internet is somewhat busted as it relates to information. You just have to be careful and don't be afraid to use economics to drive the quality up in your favor.
Then there is stuff like Khan Academy. That's just out of this world awesome. Free and insane quality.
Then again that's a case of education as infrastructure. That guy put in the work to produce that content once and it can go on teaching forever. That is the real power of the internet, but it seems that's the exception to the rule.
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>What happened to Quora anyway? It became marketing. Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup. Same with Medium. Once the startup bros say a site is good for "native marketing", that's when the begins to die.
> Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup. They break all of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high-quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they…
I left Quora in 2014, but your first statement feels very true to me. I can't say what they did after I left, but I saw a clear willingness to have a fuzzy interpretation of the rules for power users.
There was a time when Quora would bend over backwards to have one person from NASA write answers. I felt that wasn't really a great strategy. I always felt it would be much more valuable to have 1000 NASA employees write their best answer, and to find a way to make that happen.
This clearly didn't happen, as the one person from NASA who wrote thousands of answers is still a very active.
Full disclosure: I deleted my entire account, questions (>100), answers (>1000), and edits (>100,000) in rage in around 2015, mainly because I'm immature, but partly because I didn't want Quora to have what I made after I left. Also, I created a new account, because I wanted to feel it out to see how it was now, in case someone comes looking :P
Im still wondering why Quora is allowed in google results. They're like the new expertsexchange. Plus it completely baffles me that anyone would use it for a topic that has a stack exchange.
More than anything I want a search engine I can blacklist domains in.
For me, it's "Pinterest, what's that?"
With Quora I learned how real filter bubbles are. During the 2016 elections I used to click on a lot of anti-trump questions. The site painted me a picture that trump was a "joke" and that he no one seriously believe he had a "chance". I was genuinely chock he started winning the primaries.. and then the elections. Looking back I still can't believe that I was so out of touch with reality. I haven't use Quora since t…
I think there was a conservative chilling effect that went above and beyond what they could have done to help.
I wonder what motivates Adam D’Angelo to keep on as founder and CEO after 10 years of running Quora. Here is someone who got rich off FB and could do anything. Maybe early on that “anything” was Quora but I really can’t believe that what Quora is now is anything close to what he envisioned when he first started the site. At this point it feels like a Zombie co that keeps chugging along because it has no other choice…
Quora is Adam's baby. He owns most of it and has been involved as a primary investor for... I'm not sure how long. Before that he was CTO of Facebook and an early investor in Instagram. He's made immense returns on these investments. I don't have numbers, but I would bet money he could buy back Quora from investors with cash and still be a several-hundred-millionaire. With that said, why would he do anything but his pet project?
Does StackOverflow and those guys pay anything? IIRC you don't even get paid to answer. Quora's investors' money is goin' down the toilet.
Haha, paying for questions: the dumbest idea I've heard in 2018!