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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

#81

Post by wraptile »

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…

As an active StackExchange participant I've tried to get into Quora multiple times but the purposefully, grey-pattern-ridden UX is the real barier to entry. I still can't figure out how the darn thing works.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#82

Post by devoutsalsa »

radu_floricica wrote: post #71
Gigachad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder about that. I'm not on reddit anymore, nor is anybody I know.

I will leave Reddit in a week or so. I’m just waiting for this one potentially hilarious cat gif to load in the Reddit video player.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#83

Post by devoutsalsa »

wraptile wrote: post #81
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…

As an active StackExchange participant I've tried to get into Quora multiple times but the purposefully, grey-pattern-ridden UX is the real barier to entry. I still can't figure out how the darn thing works.

I occasionally find myself clicking on a Quora link Google search. When I did so yesterday, I found it hard to tell the difference between promoted questions/answers and answers to the actual question I was looking at. It’s like open a pack of hot dogs and trying to find an actual hot dog amongst a pack of assorted eraser colored, fleshy, slimy tubes with rounded ends.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#85

Post by spurgu »

radu_floricica wrote: post #71
Gigachad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder about that. I'm not on reddit anymore, nor is anybody I know.

Niche subreddits are still decent but the community as a whole is a cesspool.

The mistake was bringing internet to the masses, as opposed to keeping it difficult enough to be used only by passionate and/or smart people. Now that the cat is out of the bag maybe paid memberships to exclusive communities is the way to go?

Just late night riffing here after a few drinks and, might be wrong about all of the above.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#86

Post by [deleted] »

wraptile wrote: post #81
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…

As an active StackExchange participant I've tried to get into Quora multiple times but the purposefully, grey-pattern-ridden UX is the real barier to entry. I still can't figure out how the darn thing works.

[deleted]

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#87

Post by abetusk »

chubot wrote: post #79
abetusk wrote: post #62

This really makes my heart sink. It's not just that a top poster is leaving because they feel it hasn't been worth it in any real sense ("financial ... socially ... acclaim ... personal growth") but also because all that knowledge is now effectively behind a gate that will almost surely be lost within a couple decades. The Quora terms of service forbid "automated tools" and have a system that provides at least some a…

Yeah it seems like a waste, although he said he combined all his answers into a book and said it wasn't good? If the answers are good, then I feel like the e-book should be worthwhile. I'd be interested in seeing it, but he didn't link it? Why not? Personally I've enjoyed several books that are just non-linear collections of essays or excerpts from other material. It's fun to flip through even if you read the whole t…

I saw that they said they collected their Computer Science questions into a book (and "it was less than the sum of its parts") but maybe I missed that they collected all their answers?

It's good that the poster retains copyright and can do whatever they want with it but it's still not by default given to the community. Also, the answer sits in a certain context with the question, comments and other answers, which could give a lot of different perspectives on the same issue (as often happens for SO Q/As). Picking out only one answer will lose something and chasing down every participant in every question and answer to get them to consent to a libre/free license is untenable.

Sadly, HN has the same exact problem [0]. They provide their dataset in an easily downloadable fashion but the licensing terms are just as bad and so it's only a matter of time before this site and all of it's content slowly fade into irrelevance.

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#88

Post by schleck8 »

r3dblaster wrote: post #65

Quora is a cesspool of dark patterns nowadays and I avoid it or should I say it avoids me. It doesn't work without javascript at all, you can't even view any comments without an account, it's following the same pattern as LinkedIn, Facebook, even Twitter is moving in this direction. They've abused the goodwill of their legitimate content-creators to the point that most those still hanging around are trying to not-so-…

Recently I was looking for directions on how to reset an instagram account without access to the email (there is a way to do that, using a device one was logged into).

I made the mistake of clicking on the quora result. The first 5 or so answers were all obfuscated ads for some bs 'hacking' service.

That is, they would start their answers with stretching, generic phrases and then include a whatsapp number and the hacking nonsense.

I'm going to ban Quora from my search results now.

Way too much ads/affiliate marketing.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#89

Post by bongoman37 »

pimlottc wrote: post #48
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”.

I don't understand why this is downvoted.

Re: Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions

#90

Post by vintermann »

I left quora long ago because of farmed questions. I would like to help people, but I wasted a lot of time answering questions that literally no one cared about.

If a person ask me what's to see in my hometown, I'd answer. But when I see that the asker has asked the same question for every town in the atlas, I know they don't really care about the answer.

And worse, quora actually paid people for this, flooding the site with questions no one actually cares about. They were wasting a ton of good people's honest work with lies, in the hope of extracting maybe 0.01% of the value of helpful people for themselves.

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