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Quora goes permanently remote-first

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Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#61

Did you know that Quora PAYS for most of the questions people ask on Quora? Like, there are people making a full time living asking questions on Quora. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/alc5hy/i_am_a_quora_pa...

Is that bad?

What's the word for that? Astroturfing?

When a company needs to generate fake content pretending to be real questions from real users.

Would you spend an hour writing a really thorough answer to a question if the person who asked the question got paid to ask it, and never reads any of the responses?

It's fake.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#62

I really hope we see some specialized remote worker residential communities in the future. Actually, I’m sure there’ll be money in building them. Imagine a small town with no cars or roads. The community has lots of events to socialize you with your neighbors. Lots of traditions and festivals. Some communities may look like Brooklyn—row houses, except just grass and trees lining the blocks. Maybe another community wo…

And perhaps when enough of these like-minded remote workers are living near each other, some of them will find that they enjoy working in the same physical location at the same time. Then some of the space in the community can be turned into hubs for in-person collaboration, or offices!

Or coffee shops.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#63

Reminder to those who aren’t aware: Quora is a rich man’s hobby business. You aren’t going to get practical knowledge from their decisions.

Why has it become such an SEO driven BS filled website if the owner doesn't care about the financials? Why can't he pay people to curate the answers and generally drive up the quality?

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#64

There's an insightful series of comments from Sid, CEO of Gitlab about why this is not likely to work over the long term: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720 It might be different for Quora given that their CEO and SLT will be remote. But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely…

I'm as big of a remote work supporter as you'll find. I'm often crucified for how anti-office I am. Having said that, a hybrid model is absolutely not remote work. It's not distributed. It's a nightmare. Every single person in the company, including executives, needs to be remote.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#65

Reminder to those who aren’t aware: Quora is a rich man’s hobby business. You aren’t going to get practical knowledge from their decisions.

Why has it become such an SEO driven BS filled website if the owner doesn't care about the financials? Why can't he pay people to curate the answers and generally drive up the quality?

They have to at least pretend it is a real business.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#66
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing they’re referring to the fact that the CEO is very wealthy [1] and has self-funded the company, and suggesting that he’s not as concerned with the financials. 1: https://www.forbes.com/profile/adam-dangelo/#657861427cb4

It's not self-funded by D'Angelo. Quora has raised several hundred million dollars, the overwhelming share of that from traditional venture capital firms. They also don't have the luxury of treating it like a hobby business, which is why they've been focused on quantity over quality for years now. They have to scale up the concept massively or find another business. In contrast WikiHow is an example of a successful k…

Wikihow is garbage though. How can you seriously claim it's focused on quality? What is this shit: https://www.wikihow.com/images/thumb/f/f5/Laugh-Step-6-Versi... ?

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#67

Did you know that Quora PAYS for most of the questions people ask on Quora? Like, there are people making a full time living asking questions on Quora. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/alc5hy/i_am_a_quora_pa...

“Growth hacking” / getting investor money

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#68
post #26

Has anyone tried using VR for work? What, if anything did you discover that worked, and what didn't? I know of some VR companies that do all their meetings in VR, whether its their own, or in a game.

Why would anyone do that? What's the point?

If you're not a perfect touch typist then it's difficult to take notes or edit a shared document while wearing a VR headset.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#69

There's an insightful series of comments from Sid, CEO of Gitlab about why this is not likely to work over the long term: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720 It might be different for Quora given that their CEO and SLT will be remote. But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely…

I'm as big of a remote work supporter as you'll find. I'm often crucified for how anti-office I am. Having said that, a hybrid model is absolutely not remote work. It's not distributed. It's a nightmare. Every single person in the company, including executives, needs to be remote.

My company has made the hybrid model work. We've had a mix of fully remote along with two physical offices. It's really not all that complex, conference rooms have to have a video conference system that is added by default to all meetings. Ad-hoc meetings can start video with a single button press and a short code/url sent over slack.

We strongly encourage employees to keep discussions in 'public' slack rooms rather than private messages. This can be noisy but allows for inclusivity. Team members are free to choose which channels to join and are encouraged configure alerting to manage the noise. Only takes a few minutes to set up.

Performance needs to be measured by work output rather than time in the office, but companies should be doing that regardless.

Face-to-face on-boarding and intros to the team are preferable so we would fly in new-hires wherever possible for the first couple weeks. Beneficial but not required.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#70

Reminder to those who aren’t aware: Quora is a rich man’s hobby business. You aren’t going to get practical knowledge from their decisions.

How is it any different from Stack Overflow or Yahoo Answers, except generalized and civilized?

About half the answers devolve into a sales pitch after a lengthy and confusing intro that seems to be written for SEO purposes only. The answers tend to be of substantially lower quality than what you'd see on SO too.

Yahoo Answers might be similar, sure, but that's not a positive comparison.

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