Layoffs hit Quora • Hacker News Board

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#221

Post by usr1106 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 12:57 PM UTC

plerpin wrote: post #65

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…

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.

I have skipped quora links for so long that I don't remember why I started doing so. It's just a synonym for not worth clicking.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#222

Post by njsubedi » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

Personally I love reading some answers on Quora. But it's not because of Quora; the answer could be on any other site. I tried Quora Ads and lost some money only to discover that the returns are comparatively the worst among all the channels we tried, and off by several folds. That takes me and my money off of Quora Ads. If the company wants to monetize by selling ads, they should probably spend time making the advertisers' experience better. Because at the end of the day the advertisers are the people who are paying them.

Disclaimer: I didn't write this to badmouth or (un)recommend them. I am only curious if other people's experience is the same.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#223

Post by jaclaz » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

mamon wrote: post #215

jaclaz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but we shouldn’t need to do that to have a decent user experience. Not only that, this (as well as many other simple "tricks" or "workarounds") creates (arbitrarily) two kinds of users, those that know the trick and those that don't (and likely create two different sets of user opinions). I mean, to me (because I know the little trick) usage of Quora is relatively painless (though I still try my best to avoiding usi…

Also, this might constitute a fellony, basically you're "hacking" Quora, using technical tricks to circumvent security measures they put in place. And no, it doesn't matter that the trick is so trivial.

Sure, that is why it is - rectius was until now - a secret, that only a selected number of criminals knew.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#224

Post by wrinkl3 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

omega3 wrote: post #184

TomVDB wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kind of questions where most likely generated by paid question askers who receive a cut of the ad revenue. I have first hand knowledge of somebody who made pretty good money doing exactly that. His rule of thumb was: the dumber the question, the more profitable it was for him.

What has always amazed me about Quora is that for every dumb one line question in the vein of "How do we know that the moon is not made of cheese?" there would be 500 word very well researched reply from an ex NASA chief of lunar mission. It always was baffling for me that such low effort questions would get such amazing answers.

Some people just enjoy listening to themselves talk.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#225

Post by asymptotically2 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

plerpin wrote: post #65

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…

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.

It would be nice if there was a way to block certain domains from Google (or any other search engine) results. There are also a lot of sites that seem like they scrape posts from StackOverflow that I would like to block too.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#226

Post by geofft » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:36 PM UTC

drywater wrote: post #194

geofft wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with Google is that everything is attached to your name. I never write any review on Google knowing that anybody can judge me based on that review alone. Reviews are between me and the target of the review. My coworkers don't need to know what I've bought, where I've been and all my opinions about those things.

People generally use their real name on sites like Quora, Yelp, Amazon, etc. and they seem to work fine. You can also choose to use a fake name pretty easily on these sites - or on Google.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#227

Post by geofft » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

gauravjain13 wrote: post #200

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…

HN feels like such a sanctuary: a high quality space not (yet?) perverted by the pressures of a purely profit motive. It’d be interesting to study how does HN thrives; more deeply understand the incentives that sustain the HN ecosystem.

It's quite profit-perverted: the overarching goal is to conflate in the mind of engineers the idea of "hackers" - a group that traditionally is interested in the inherent joy of hacking and is skeptical of business-types - with the goals of venture capitalists and the lives of founders. It's not very explicit, and obviously I nonetheless find value here, but if you've ever seen someone build a technically interesting project and thought "Hey, they should get some seed funding and work on this full-time," then the HN gambit has been successful.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#228

Post by felixg3 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

Antrikshy wrote: post #155

yamrzou wrote: post #55

I used to enjoy Quora, but it lost its charm and I quit once my feed became mostly filled with questions such as: - As a software engineer, what makes you roll your eyes every time you hear it? - What did your mother say that made your jaw drop? - What can I learn in one minute that will be useful for the rest of my life? Those open questions just feel clickbait-y, with no real value added. I occasionally see questio…

It's like r/AskReddit with a slightly different audience.

FTFY: It's like r/askReddit with a mostly South Asian audience. My wife is Indian and used to be the quora top writer for 2014, afaik. The audience is quite dominated by Indians.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#229

Post by qrbLPHiKpiux » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 2:11 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #73

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…

> 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…

> If you want a thriving internet, fix that.

If you want a thriving internet, get out of the way. Too many big companies and governments are trying to force us to see only certain things.

Stop that! Back to the early 90's.

Re: Layoffs hit Quora

#230

Post by claydavisss » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 2:21 PM 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…

This is just tech being reset to the rational expectations of any other industry. How many new businesses outside of tech can get a decade of runway to exit or show a profit? Quora et al are just the beginning and there is a lot of deadwood to be cleared out. The expectations of the last decade - that you could just get a company to a reasonable point of maturity and then just wait to be acquired - are no longer valid.

Instead of bemoaning this reality check we should all be grateful that so much of the world's wealth was redirected into overcompensating us for unproductive work for so long. How many of us are paid over $200k to perform unprofitable work? Its crazy! But its been going on so long it has become accepted as the norm.

Larger/profitable tech giants surely recognize there is no need to rush in an acquire startups for a premium...they will soon all be on the clearance rack...no one believes the valuations these companies and their VCs assign themselves anymore. Quora valued at $2 billion? I doubt they could get an offer for more than $100 million at this point.

Interestingly since so much of the deadwood never made it to IPO, this culling could end up being a nonevent to investors. They'll stay invested in AAPL and MSFT and not miss Bay Area private startups imploding.