111–120 of 145 posts
This is really sad. After Yahoo Answers shut down, only Quora, W3Schools and Pinterest are left standing as informational beacons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Answers
Pinterest does not belong in this category. It belongs in the “Internet cancer” category.
Personally I find it funny that on the same day there is an article about Quora, there is also a link for plugin for blocking search results( https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist ). Immediately, I thought, oh that would be great for the spam Quora links. Although lately I’ve seen those far less, they still piss me off every time I hit one. ;)
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
The relevant question for me is: how much bigger would Reddit be today without their shitty approach?
I never turned into an active user - mostly because I'm appalled by things like: being forced into their mobile app, for example. I just use reddit to read stuff and then leave. On HN I contribute a lot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're being downvoted for "gatekeeping" but you're not wrong. NSF has the L2 paid membership section, which is the absolute best place for information in the field - both public and insider information. Likewise airliners.net has (or had) an excellent paid option, and I can think of a few others. Requiring payment is still a good way to let those passionate about a topic self-admit themselves while keeping the masse…
If this is a one-thing event, the community usually stabilizes, but the problem with reddit is that the central premise seems to have become growth, so there's always a bunch of new faces, which makes maintaining an actual community nearly impossible. Only exceptions seem to be communities where the topic is extremely esoteric, or the moderators are super aggressive.
It might be interesting to think about ideas where creators are automatically compensated for their digital content, even if it's just fractions of a cent per view or code execution. Many authors of popular answers on Stackoverflow would probably be rich already.
When you answer on Quora, SO or Reddit, you are not only helping the community. You are helping the owners get richer. You can help the community as much by writing on your personal blog. That way you are in control and have the freedom of choosing what to say and how to say it. No rules to obey, but your own.
I hate going to quora, visit once and you suddenly start getting loads of emails - I’ve blocked it now. Won’t go back.
It pays to reflect and ask ourselves those difficult questions.