Live data from Hacker News

Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

exquora.thoughtstorms.info

11–20 of 145 posts

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#11

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.

Totally agree. I used to browse the site and now I block it from my search results.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#12
post #7

Is there an industry term for users who are responsible for contributing valuable content in exchange for nothing that could be legally classified as actual compensation? Or for a business whose revenue and valuation depends on said type of user? Something Awful is the first example of such a business that comes to mind, and Reddit is the biggest modern-day equivalent. Give your moderators power (however feeble that…

Basically all of social media is like this. You provide content to Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, whatever because you want people to see it. There is an edge case where you make money by getting famous, but usually people are just doing it for attention, same way they are for anything else. Why do people write answers on StackOverflow, Quora, whatever? They want people to read their answers and think they're smart.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#13
post #7

Is there an industry term for users who are responsible for contributing valuable content in exchange for nothing that could be legally classified as actual compensation? Or for a business whose revenue and valuation depends on said type of user? Something Awful is the first example of such a business that comes to mind, and Reddit is the biggest modern-day equivalent. Give your moderators power (however feeble that…

Basically all of social media is like this. You provide content to Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, whatever because you want people to see it. There is an edge case where you make money by getting famous, but usually people are just doing it for attention, same way they are for anything else. Why do people write answers on StackOverflow, Quora, whatever? They want people to read their answers and think they're s…

I wonder if there is a curated collection of stats somewhere on the lifecycle numbers on social media ventures?

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#14
Quora is pretty terrible these days. Tons of low quality spammy answers, annoying forced sign-in prompt for viewing certain questions and answers.

Same for stack overflow and related sites. A lot of long-term contributors but no payoff, no recognition. I guess you can put in on your resume.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#15
post #7

Is there an industry term for users who are responsible for contributing valuable content in exchange for nothing that could be legally classified as actual compensation? Or for a business whose revenue and valuation depends on said type of user? Something Awful is the first example of such a business that comes to mind, and Reddit is the biggest modern-day equivalent. Give your moderators power (however feeble that…

Basically all of social media is like this. You provide content to Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, whatever because you want people to see it. There is an edge case where you make money by getting famous, but usually people are just doing it for attention, same way they are for anything else. Why do people write answers on StackOverflow, Quora, whatever? They want people to read their answers and think they're s…

Admittedly this is one explanation, another could be that people simple like helping others.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#16

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.

Just another VC-backed zombie company. maybe it will be acquired by yahoo, google, or Microsoft and put out of its misery.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#17
post #10

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.

is it spam email? the unsubscribe link brings me to my email prefences with a single option, on or off.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#18
post #7

Is there an industry term for users who are responsible for contributing valuable content in exchange for nothing that could be legally classified as actual compensation? Or for a business whose revenue and valuation depends on said type of user? Something Awful is the first example of such a business that comes to mind, and Reddit is the biggest modern-day equivalent. Give your moderators power (however feeble that…

In some sense, the people doing "unpaid work" can be seen as trying to improve their own brand, name, or following. Very few of these influencers are able to monetize directly through this type of work though, unless it's through some sort of medium that does revenue sharing, like Youtube.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#19
post #10

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.

I think calling this a "dark pattern" is unnecessarily uncharitable given that you can control per-space email/notifications in your user settings already. Additionally, each space's email takes the form of "-space@quora.com", which is trivial to filter on.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#20
post #7

Is there an industry term for users who are responsible for contributing valuable content in exchange for nothing that could be legally classified as actual compensation? Or for a business whose revenue and valuation depends on said type of user? Something Awful is the first example of such a business that comes to mind, and Reddit is the biggest modern-day equivalent. Give your moderators power (however feeble that…

yea Web 2.0
Post reply on HN