Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

Leaving Quora was also one of my own better moves. Like the OP, I had also been a Top Writer a couple of times. I had many of my own fans, some of whom still follow me on Twitter seven years later. I even have the fleece. But I got sick of features coming and going, staff jerking people around, and particularly the incessant promotion of flippant intelligence-free non-answers over well thought out real answers for the sake of engagement. Many of those answers clearly violated the site's stated rules (e.g. excessive use of irrelevant images) and got shown first contrary to user upvotes which I consider dishonest and unfair to people who actually try to contribute positively. So I just up and quit. Loudly. Even as a non-user, their cozy relationship with Google to boost their search rankings pisses me off. Everyone should quit Quora.

It's been a long time since I went to Quora but they used to have some really high quality answers from real experts. Quality was always a little hit and miss but the good answers were really good.

Quora was incredible back in 2010. I would spend hours reading and writing. The highlight was interacting with some of the great Silicon Valley characters that contributed much of the early content.

Since then the site has gotten steadily worse in every way possible, while staying aloft with infinite VC money and rich founders. It's sad story of what could've been.

What’s crazy is that all that effort and skill can still be accumulated into something valuable.

Off the top of my head, they could start a YouTube channel dedicated to answering silly or crazy Quora questions/answers.

They could start a Substack accumulating the lessons they learned.

They could try developing a competitor to Quora (something very, very small for starters), since they’re familiar with the common issues the site has.

You can leverage a lot of that experience into something valuable that wasn’t immediately obvious in hindsight especially because it seems to come so effortlessly for this person. You just have to spend some time developing your business skills, knowing where to look for opportunities.

When I look back at some of the masters of their craft, it was always non-obvious connections. I’m not saying everything you do in life will be economically or even creatively valuable, but you’d be surprised at what you’d find with a little effort.

Even the art of researching and answering questions is in of itself a valuable skill that you can sell on Gumroad for $5.

Of course you’re free to move on to different project whenever you want but I figured this author should get some financial compensation for all the experience they accumulated.

That’s really the great thing about the Internet. Even the most niche fields can be valuable if you package it in the right way for others.

Quora has this nasty dark pattern where they send you spam e-mail with different senders for each "space". If you simply click on "Block this sender" in your e-mail client, it will not work, since they will send e-mails to you from new addresses. You have to block them at the domain level.

In my opinion, this is extremely user hostile for the sake of improving some metrics.