I think the author is kidding himself. Eventually as he accomplishes more significant things, he will come to realize that while his quora answers aren’t “nothing”, they are pretty damn close to it.
Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
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Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
#32> I will soon be gone from Quora. Were people ever in Quora? Isn't it one more of those 'free' sites that exploit the free labor of random people to sell questionable content? I don't get how someone can get so attached to his own image that considers himself to be part of a company that he s clearly not a part of.
People like helping people, it gives them a sense of self-worth. Answering questions also can make you feel smart. Now think about how many important websites are functionally built by free labor due to this: Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, subreddits you like, this site etc. It doesn't seem sustainable does it?
Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
#33Quora 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.
I’ve found that they ignored any unsubscribe requests and the only way to stop getting multiple emails per day was to create a filter for their domain to my trash box.
Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
#34Leaving 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 th…
I was a top writer too. The part where it completely went to hell for me was when they started recklessly combining all the questions. I had a lot of answers that were thoughtful or clever and specific to the actual wording of a question but quickly became part of an irrelevant mess. Now it’s just a spam magnet and functionally useless. But it was not a single step into oblivion it was more like a series of bad decis…
Yeah, burying good painstakingly-written answers beneath crappy non-answers to different questions was not a good move in any dimension. You have my complete agreement and sympathy on that one. Personally it was the "must have a bio for each subject" thing, and the harassment from staff over it, but it could have been any of a hundred other things.
Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
#35> I will soon be gone from Quora. Were people ever in Quora? Isn't it one more of those 'free' sites that exploit the free labor of random people to sell questionable content? I don't get how someone can get so attached to his own image that considers himself to be part of a company that he s clearly not a part of.
>Were people ever in Quora?
It briefly had hn like quality to it.
Then they got acquired (I think) stuck a login wall in front of it and the spark died.
Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
#36I was a Top Writer for a couple years (a long time ago) and I found it a great way to motivate myself to research issues I was interested in and practice writing. So from a personal perspective, it was very enriching. But I relate to the author about how all of that writing doesn't exactly amount to much.
I still find it useful today to find info on certain obscure topics.
Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
#37Is 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…
It's sometimes described as 'digital sharecropping'[0]. Depending on your reason for participating you may get some economic benefit (perhaps as share or exposure for your business) while the platform both takes the bulk of any profits and completely controls the relationship. Or you may get nothing, of course, other than some magic Internet points and a faintly tarnished sense of fun. [0]: https://www.roughtype.com/…
> the platform both takes the bulk of any profits and completely controls the relationship [...] you may get nothing, of course, other than some magic Internet points and a faintly tarnished sense of fun
The magic points are a kind of worthless scrip.
Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
#38> I will soon be gone from Quora. Were people ever in Quora? Isn't it one more of those 'free' sites that exploit the free labor of random people to sell questionable content? I don't get how someone can get so attached to his own image that considers himself to be part of a company that he s clearly not a part of.
In the early days, Quora has exceptionally high quality content. I enjoyed the experts writing answers on Quora platform. It was not only just gaining some random knowledge, but it was also entertaining reading from them. I read pretty much every night before sleep during that time.
Then it gradually degrades (maybe the pressure of putting ads on to make money), the quality has gone downhill dramatically. It's been a few years, I have no longer considered answers from Quora as worthy.
Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
#39Is 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…
Prodigy and CompuServe both had forums - back when I was in elementary school (early 90s/late 80s) I used to read and post to the comic book forums all the time. Both services easily predate Something Awful.
Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
#40I'd be I interested in the authors view on assessing what effort is worth while.
I read that he is anti capitalism. That's a can of worms that I should probably be more careful not to open. But I've often questioned if being able to get someone to pay you to do a thing was a good proxy to assess if something was worth doing. It might just be my ingrained protestant work ethic telling me so. It's something I've yet to figure out.