Layoffs hit Quora • Hacker News Board

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#111

Post by Mathnerd314 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:06 AM UTC

codyb wrote: post #102

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fed is pumping money, the yield curve inverted, job openings are flat/declining, people have been predicting recession for 2 years... the precise date of an actual recession is not declared until long after the fact, but I certainly wouldn't bet on the recession not having started already. And there are strong political reasons to avoid any mention of recession, so we might see economic indicators getting distort…

Alternatively The fed is ensuring liquidity in the overnight markets via short term loans which are paid back the next day (no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there, could be higher asset values require greater liquid reserves, or some form of capital outflow tightening usd liquidity due to the strength of the dollar, or something else?) Unemployment is exceeding low, which means more jobs are filled, wh…

Job openings were a leading indicator in the last recession, see "Planned Next Three Months and Current Job Openings" in https://www.nfib.com/assets/SBET-December-2019.pdf (I ignore planned as it seems noisier). There has been no substantial decline since 2010. The decline in recent months is bigger than in 2017 but could still be noise.

The yield curve is relatively standard economic news: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/12/31/th...

Unemployment is used to define the recession so once that starts increasing again the process is already well underway.

I agree though, predicting a recession is like reading tea leaves. The data is so fuzzy and updated so infrequently that it's useless for practical decisions.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#112

Post by wyxuan » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:08 AM UTC

codyb wrote: post #102

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fed is pumping money, the yield curve inverted, job openings are flat/declining, people have been predicting recession for 2 years... the precise date of an actual recession is not declared until long after the fact, but I certainly wouldn't bet on the recession not having started already. And there are strong political reasons to avoid any mention of recession, so we might see economic indicators getting distort…

Alternatively The fed is ensuring liquidity in the overnight markets via short term loans which are paid back the next day (no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there, could be higher asset values require greater liquid reserves, or some form of capital outflow tightening usd liquidity due to the strength of the dollar, or something else?) Unemployment is exceeding low, which means more jobs are filled, wh…

Sure the fed is doing repo market operations (the overnight lending you talk about), but the vast majority of that money is going to bond buying. 300 billion (or some gigantic number like that) has been infused in the econ. This is much of the reason stock market does well. Since money doesn't go to consumer price inflation, it goes to a different kind of inflation, inflation of real assets, like stocks.

People do know why there is less liquidity there. Something like the repo crisis doesn't happen out of the blue.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#113

Post by paultopia » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

to1y wrote: post #68

plerpin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that Quora is failing because it's user-hostile? I do not visit Quora links on Google because I know it's going to tease me with a snippet and force me to login.

That plus it seems >90% of answers are guerilla advertising

And those two facts are related. Quora actively drives casual users away with the forced-login behavior. So the only people on Quora are the people with strong incentives to do so... that is, people who are being paid. Marketeers.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#114

Post by arkadiyt » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

codyb wrote: post #102

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fed is pumping money, the yield curve inverted, job openings are flat/declining, people have been predicting recession for 2 years... the precise date of an actual recession is not declared until long after the fact, but I certainly wouldn't bet on the recession not having started already. And there are strong political reasons to avoid any mention of recession, so we might see economic indicators getting distort…

Alternatively The fed is ensuring liquidity in the overnight markets via short term loans which are paid back the next day (no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there, could be higher asset values require greater liquid reserves, or some form of capital outflow tightening usd liquidity due to the strength of the dollar, or something else?) Unemployment is exceeding low, which means more jobs are filled, wh…

> no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there

It's because JPMorgan Chase and friends think there is too much risk of intraday bankruptcy right now and no one wants to be left hanging on their loan.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#115

Post by geofft » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #74

geofft wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web? TripAdvisor, Quora, and Yelp are just as rent-seeking and profit-driven as Google. If I write a review on TripAdvisor or Yelp or answer a question on Quora, I, the author, certainly don't get compensated for it. If Quora fails and another compa…

The paradox is, if these companies fold, Google has to get the data from somewhere.

What's the paradox there? Google has its own review system for restaurants / hotels / etc., so they can definitely survive TripAdvisor and Yelp disappearing. They'll just collect the data themselves.

For Quora and StackOverflow, they can (and do) index personal blogs etc., too. Google is a search engine; they don't need a single fixed third party to be the first search result to all questions in a category.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#116

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:25 AM UTC

catalogia wrote: post #92

codingslave wrote: post #23

Any company that relies on SEO content is basically going to disapear. Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes. Not only that, other lower ranked content can be verified to be "true" using neural network based NLP, meaning that the value of content has gone down. Google stole the business of q…

Is it actually theft, or do you actually mean it's something more mundane like copyright infringement or a TOS violation?

I don't know what the legal definition of theft is, but to me if you take something without permission (even if it is just a copy) it is theft. Of course, I'm nobody, so it doesn't matter what I think. However, if we all acted like humans instead of lawyers (which by definition are no longer human), I think most people would agree with the above definition.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#117

Post by greglindahl » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:26 AM UTC

aguyfromnb wrote: post #38

cletus wrote: post #28

Better title: Quora still inexplicably exists 8 years after its irrelevance became apparent. You know, good news story.

> You know, good news story. You're missing the forest for the trees. It's Quora. It's Softbank imploding. It's WeWork. It's Wag. It's Uber. It's Tesla. It's Doordash. It's Lyft. It's Casper. It's 23andme. It's Digital Ocean. It's Mozilla. Who knows what the financials of the giant private companies actually look like? This is classic late economic cycle: the companies still appear to be succesful, but the fundamenta…

Did you intend to include public companies on your list?

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#118

Post by preommr » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #10

hinkley wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find out Quora is still running every time I make a search query and get pages full of useless answers. Oh, here's a bunch of Quora links. I'm screwed.

Quora: the Pinterest of text search. Or is Pinterest the Quora of image search?

Nah, Pintrest is somehow amazingly good at offering similar content. People must love making those boards because I get good enough results that there must be a lot of users doing good work in categorizing and organizing those images.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#119

Post by dehrmann » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

irjustin wrote: post #47

I've said it in a few other posts but post WeWork, a lot of the big D, E, F companies are expected to hit profitability/break-even soon. Some other threads are talking about Google stealing a lot of the content. That's definitely true for weather, flights, but things like long form content is still long form. I would argue these layoffs aren't a function of the GMachine at work, but more generally all the big tech fi…

Was the WeWork failed IPO the RIP Good Times[1] of this boom?

[1]: https://venturebeat.com/2008/10/10/the-sequoia-rip-good-time...

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#120

Post by pm90 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

kinkora wrote: post #59

Not sure if a bit of confirmation bias on my side but seems like there is a recent big uptick of layoffs at Silicon Valley companies? Popular ones like Quora, TripAvisor, Ebay, Mozilla, Uber, 23andMe, etc we hear about but among my own network, i am even hearing it from smaller startups & businesses. Just wondering if it is just me but I am surmising that it seems to indicate a wider systematic.. issue? Maybe issue i…

Modern recessions are caused by 2 things: 1) Some very inflated assest class being spread out among a large number of folks suddenly failing or 2) the fear of 1) happening, which can lead to a self fulfilling prophecy. Since we’ve always seen recessions in the past, nobody believes we can achieve sustained economic growth... and they are mostly right. If enough people believe there is a recession they will start behaving in ways that ironically contribute to the recession.

What’s really protecting us from recession today, in my humble opinion, is that all of humanity is so interconnected and so hates recession that we’re willing to help out others who are on the brink of disaster of limit their failures to a small region rather than let it blow up in everybody’s face.

Also... small layoffs are not necessarily an indicator of recession, they can also be course corrections by overly optimistic companies whose wildly grandiose plans didn’t pan out as planned. While these well known businesses lay-off folks, my inbox is flooded by recruiters looking to fill multiple positions in a bevy of startups. In other words, business as usual.