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Quora pays thousands for posting questions

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Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#131

Post by TeMPOraL »

sh87 wrote: post #123
madamelic wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

makes me wonder how HN manages to maintain sanity in such a world

By allowing only the following forms of advertising: YC startups looking for employees, companies looking for employees. Show HN threads are meant for "hey look I made this, I'd like feedback / this may be useful to some". Beyond that, everything that looks like an attempt to advertise (as opposed to honest suggestions) gets downvoted and/or banned directly.

HN has indirect benefits to YC, so it gets hosted and maintained. In that model, ensuring authenticity and freedom from advertising cancer works for the benefit of both the community and YC.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#132

Post by lordnacho »

Havoc wrote: post #6

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.

> What happened to Quora anyway?

My experience:

- Quality of content has declined. You get asked a lot of nonsensical questions. On the answer side, too many quick and easy, no-more-thinking-required, answers.

- It needs to find a more specific niche. If there's a StackExchange for it, it doesn't need to be on Quora. I'm not gonna ask on Quora about how to use Python decorators. The thing they're good is though, is relating personal experiences. There's a lot of great answers to open ended questions relating to people's personal feelings about various things.

- Discovery is broken somehow. At one point I selected some topics, and now I'm in a filter bubble of my own making. I might like burgers, but that doesn't mean I should be fed burgers for every meal. Changing the topics is not the solution, there's always enough content to fill up the feed for hours.

- Cheerleading. Too many people get upvoted for being famous. Too many people get upvoted for pandering to popular opinion.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#133

Post by SergeAx »

If we look at Quora as a marketplace connecting users in need of information and experts, then paying for questions means oversupply of experts. This is a bad sign: if a lot of people are ready to work for free, there is another incentive behind. I believe it is either marketing or vain. If so, it seems irrational to me to seek any kind of information anything on Quora.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#134

Post by sharken »

hyperpallium wrote: post #79
dmoy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any good replacement sites? (If you were to answer longform somewhere now, where would it be?)

well... http://stackoverflow.com for programming, and the family of http://stackexchange.com websites for many other fields.

Exactly this, for the past many years, when ever i have needed a good answer to a not-so-common problem, Stack Overflow cuts right to the chase and delivers a useful answer.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#135

Post by brynjolf »

smithesh wrote: post #50
Havoc wrote: post #6

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.

One thing that has happened is that Quora is now dominated by users from India. That has resulted in much content that is not as relevant to audiences in the US. One would think that an answer is an answer but it turns out it’s not like that, there is a cultural element and something that works in one country doesn’t work in all others.

You know like Americans talk on the internet? Where you guys just presume everyone is from your state or even city.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#137

Post by CM30 »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #68
anigbrowl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really. People spend money on network/satellite TV, and that still comes with ads. Heck, they still spend money on newspapers and magazines, and those have ads too.

For most media outlets, someone paying is still someone they're gonna show ads too.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#138

Post by codezero »

manigandham wrote: post #101
codezero wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you thought about this a lot? 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…

Having so much success though can also mean that you don't have as much drive to make a great product because you're already set. Not that it must be the case here, but passion is hard to maintain when it doesn't really have much effect on your life. Also, if the site can be run completely independently (and it looks like operational costs are rather low) then why even take VC in the first place? Surely the effects o…

I agree with your first point, but Adam is also one of the sharpest people I’ve ever known. It’s hard for me to resolve the idea that he’d be complacent.

As for funding, he wasn’t liquid when Quora started afaik, but also even smart wealthy people take loans and get VC.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#139

Post by codezero »

manigandham wrote: post #104
codezero wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I helped write a bunch of Quora's rules and policies, and I also helped create the Top Writer's program. I probably hand selected you in the first two years. 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…

I think it's what they're breaking rules for that makes all the difference. Helping a few writers that pump out amazing content seems to benefit everyone and is worth it if there are tight controls on exactly what's allowed. Right now the system seems to be breaking rules that hurt writers and readers alike, with no discernible benefit other than creating tons of ad inventory and SEO inbound traffic.

Monetization definitely complicates things. When I was there, there wasn’t any.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#140

Post by vasilipupkin »

manigandham wrote: post #102
vasilipupkin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m proposing leaving the upvotes in the hands of users but paying users for high karma

Sure, but the overall point is that as soon as you introduce money people will spend inordinate amounts of time to game the system. Paying for high scores will mean people doing anything they can to get upvotes unethically that will eventually hurt the community, similar to what's happening on Quora right now.

agree that there are complications but I think there are also advantages. All these sites depend on quality content and creating an explicit incentive to provide it is not so bad, is it ?
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