Live data from Hacker News

CancelQuora

interestingauthors.com

11–20 of 74 posts

Re: CancelQuora

#11
> Quora is a hunk of shit to be avoided. Hopefully it will go under soon.

Unlikely. Google recently added more than 100M search traffic to Quora[0] (and Reddit, and LinkedIn and other garbage UGC sites) because they don't know how to address the "people appending reddit" problem.

They literally threw legitimate content creators under the bus and are now _forcing_ searchers to go to Quora and all these are low-quality sites that, in the the majority of the cases, do nothing but link out to answers that are found in actual blogs/articles.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/vZXHgBO.png

Re: CancelQuora

#12

I was into Quora 10+ years ago. In fact in 2012 I made their Top Writers list. It was fun. It was exciting. It was interesting. As they added features I lost interest. I go back from time to time. I don't recognize it. Not sure if it's good or bad. Maybe I'm not longer their target market? I just feels overwhelming and less quality driven. Just me?

Same here. I was a Top Writer twice. I know one year was 2014 because they sent me a nice fleece, but can't remember whether the other was before or after. Some people here might even know me from those days. Not long after that I got tired of them breaking their own rules to promote vapid (and sometimes factually incorrect) answers over actually-good ones. I remember one guy who always posted these long meme-filled…

Similarly I was pretty active on it ~2014. I checked back recently and it looks like it's become very common to have mostly useless answers that are nothing but a ton of images with a bit of text in between. IIRC I had quit when at some point they tried to make it mandatory to install the app to access on phone.

Re: CancelQuora

#13
post #11

> Quora is a hunk of shit to be avoided. Hopefully it will go under soon. Unlikely. Google recently added more than 100M search traffic to Quora[0] (and Reddit, and LinkedIn and other garbage UGC sites) because they don't know how to address the "people appending reddit" problem. They literally threw legitimate content creators under the bus and are now _forcing_ searchers to go to Quora and all these are low-quality…

People add reddit to searches because it gives high quality answers.

That’s not a Google problem. That’s a problem with the Internet.

Your average independent website or blog puts up some heavily biased answer that is just limited to that one writer’s perspective.

Re: CancelQuora

#14
The design of Quora is awful. It's like Yahoo Answers, but instead of an inane unqualified answer, you get a dubious answer surrounded and camouflaged by answers to sponsored questions you didn't ask.

Re: CancelQuora

#16
For those of you who have been here long enough, it is indeed 2023, and we are still talking about Quora. I just wanted to post this here because I know someone is going to completely wonder if it's not a decade ago or more. Has anything changed? No, not really. You aren't missing anything.

Maybe something has changed? Younger people who were only recently made aware of Quora are being roped in, and they are learning things we've taken for granted.

But you aren't crazy, it's 2023, and you can just ignore this. You already know the story.

Re: CancelQuora

#17
post #11

> Quora is a hunk of shit to be avoided. Hopefully it will go under soon. Unlikely. Google recently added more than 100M search traffic to Quora[0] (and Reddit, and LinkedIn and other garbage UGC sites) because they don't know how to address the "people appending reddit" problem. They literally threw legitimate content creators under the bus and are now _forcing_ searchers to go to Quora and all these are low-quality…

People add reddit to searches because it gives high quality answers. That’s not a Google problem. That’s a problem with the Internet. Your average independent website or blog puts up some heavily biased answer that is just limited to that one writer’s perspective.

Google problem is that appending reddit is the only reliable way to get something different from shitty copywrited SEO trash sites. I don't know when I last saw real independent websites and blogs in the search results, probably ten years ago?..

Re: CancelQuora

#18
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People add reddit to searches because it gives high quality answers. That’s not a Google problem. That’s a problem with the Internet. Your average independent website or blog puts up some heavily biased answer that is just limited to that one writer’s perspective.

Google problem is that appending reddit is the only reliable way to get something different from shitty copywrited SEO trash sites. I don't know when I last saw real independent websites and blogs in the search results, probably ten years ago?..

I agree to this one. Google is often pointing to websites that haven’t been updated in years, or reused their content from 2008 by adding 2023 at the end of the headline

Re: CancelQuora

#19

Do people actually use Quora?

A hell of a lot of people, mostly in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh). The public perception there about Quora is that it’s a great and informative community. It’s from my experience not regarded as spam.

Re: CancelQuora

#20
post #11

> Quora is a hunk of shit to be avoided. Hopefully it will go under soon. Unlikely. Google recently added more than 100M search traffic to Quora[0] (and Reddit, and LinkedIn and other garbage UGC sites) because they don't know how to address the "people appending reddit" problem. They literally threw legitimate content creators under the bus and are now _forcing_ searchers to go to Quora and all these are low-quality…

People add reddit to searches because it gives high quality answers. That’s not a Google problem. That’s a problem with the Internet. Your average independent website or blog puts up some heavily biased answer that is just limited to that one writer’s perspective.

Reddit quite literally links out to SO and blogs for any technical query that is beyond "how to list folder in linux".

This has nothing to do with a writer's perspective but Google's inability to address basic indexing issues like understanding whether the page is actually useful in a sense that it explains the root cause of the problem, or does it say shit like "this has been answered already, just search for it".

Since they started to roll out this update I am constantly running into either:

- Useless Reddit posts with 1/2 comments.

- Useless forum posts that are locked behind registration.

It's not that there's a problem with these sites inherently, the problem is that Google is promoting pages that basic NLP could tell you is worthless because it doesn't actually provide an answer - it's a question in of itself.

---

E: I also know how to downvote and not make a comment. It doesn't exactly invalidate what I said.

Post reply on HN