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Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

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Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#41

Post by xenihn »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #39
xenihn wrote: 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…

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.

How were Prodigy and CompuServe making money off your posts?

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#42

Post by wyclif »

fault1 wrote: post #9
freedomben wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It basically was the anti-Yahoo Answers. Over time, it became just like Yahoo Answers.

There should probably be a Zawinski-like law for this. "Over time, all question-and-answers sites attempt to expand until they become Yahoo Answers."

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#44

Post by eric4smith »

Good move.

Sometimes contributing like that is good for society though. It’s guys like him that makes it possible for us to search for the answers to things and actually find them.

But if you’re a creator - Quora especially has no rewards for anyone.

That amount of time is best spent creating portable content that can be put into any platform and these days that’s mostly video.

Just think if he made a video answering questions on quora for the last 10 years - the outcome would be vastly different.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#45

Post by tuyguntn »

I quit Quora as well.

For the reasons:

* Promoting marketing/ad related non-sense, buy my products, they are awesome answers.

* Sign up wall, sometimes I want to quickly check answers using incognito mode so it doesn't affect my feed.

* Engagement driven product. Tell your PMs thank you! Instead of being just useful, at some point it became read more answers, upvote more thing.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#46

Post by pizza234 »

smoe wrote: post #22
freedomben wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What killed Quora for me was their push towards canonical question/answers, not allowing for any context to a question, ridding it of a lot of the nuance that made many discussions actually interesting. Now there seems to be just more and more rehashing of the same questions that have already been beaten to death waiting to get merged together. I was somewhat active for a while writing answers, but every time I wante…

> What killed Quora for me was their push towards canonical question/answers, not allowing for any context to a question, ridding it of a lot of the nuance that made many discussions actually interesting

I've stopped using Quora because of that move, too. I remember it was actually done in two parts - first they limited the context (to something like 300 characters, I think), then entirely removed it. Sigh.

The new anti-feature of blending different questions/answer is... one of the worst functionalities I've ever experienced. I guess they're trying to focus on the addict/timewasting audience at the expense of the more balanced one.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#47

Post by Gigachad »

shoto_io wrote: post #5
notacoward wrote: post #2

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 th…

"Engagement-driven" product development is a very poor choice. You might be optimising for the short-term and your personal product manager performance review. But other than that it will slowly kill your product.

Reddit has been "slowly killing" their product for a long time now, and it's bigger than ever. Problem is this stuff actually does work if you want to mass market.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#48

Post by pimlottc »

xenihn wrote: 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…

I believe the insider jargon is “dumb fucks”.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#49

Post by haolez »

Karunamon wrote: post #19
haolez wrote: 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.

But sometimes the spaces are really weird, like "games-for-vegan-musicians-space" :D

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#50

Post by redis_mlc »

ALittleLight wrote: post #12
xenihn wrote: 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…

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