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Two comments: 1) Why wouldn’t the people answering the questions get that money? Aren’t they the ones adding value to the site? 2) I’ve noticed a ton of spam answers recently where the answer is just a link to another site, didn’t used to happen like 2 years ago
asking questions can be done anywhere. the point of paying is to attract them to quora vs the competition.
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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.
Everything after the comma explains why Quora is junk.
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? 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.
Is advertising a male business?
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I dunno. I’ve noticed my feed now contains more and more ads. And posts out of order. And posts on repeat. It’s clearly no longer the simple service which simply shows me the latest images posted by those I follow. It’s now a site I can tell is trying to game me, and that’s such a turn off. Facebook had that moment where they crossed a line and that was when I stopped posting. Instagram too is getting close. They sho…
Funny thing is a lot of those ads aren't even paid for, wannabe influencers post ads now to make themselves look like they are being paid to post ads, to eventually get paid to post ads. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/influ...
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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.
What is a "bro"? Is advertising a male business?
When I see a startup with a woman at the helm, it seems that advertising is a bit less aggressive, but again, that may be selection bias.
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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 maint…
That is so easy to game for a startup - Post something related, get friends/ pay for upvotes, repeat. What applies to quora's fall also applies to HN. How could HN (or any other niche community for that matter) survive that downward spiral?
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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 maint…
> ... everything that looks like an attempt to advertise (as opposed to honest suggestions) gets downvoted and/or banned directly. That is so easy to game for a startup - Post something related, get friends/ pay for upvotes, repeat. What applies to quora's fall also applies to HN. How could HN (or any other niche community for that matter) survive that downward spiral?
But I guess a big part of the reason is that HN generally doesn't want to have this kind of content here, whereas people running Quora embraced and encouraged thinly-veiled ads.
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? 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.
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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.
My point still stands. It's all driven by an economics in some form or another and the more of the economics you drive the more it's possible for you to align the incentives to produce things in your favor. This is the case no matter which actor in the system you are.
Heck, you controlling the economics in terms of what you spend your money and attention on are really the only levers you've got in order to drive the supply/demand mechanism of the market. The other variables are technology and what the other people in the market are demanding as that effects what will be supplied.
If you had enough money you could pay for a one off piece of unique research if you really wanted to. These days you even get people subscribing to individuals on patreon as a model that exists.
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If that figure is accurate for what they are paying for questions then I'm guessing it is a big chunk of revenue. Ads don't pay that well on a site like this. I didn't appreciate how hard it was to come up with good QA pairs for a topic until IBM Watson acquired the company I was working for (Blekko) and got to see how things got made. I isn't something you can farm out to Mechanical Turk, and without AGI it isn't so…
I don't know about the vetting process, but the ranking is by popularity not accuracy. So, I like this theory but I doubt the quality of what your algorithms would learn this way.
The canonical example is "Siri, where can I hide a dead body?" This is a question where being accurate will leave the consumer less satisfied than with giving a "popular" answer.