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CancelQuora

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Re: CancelQuora

#31

Post by WhowasFired »

theodric wrote: post #26

Somehow I ended up on Quora's spam list, and despite my many requests, they refuse to unsubscribe me. What I see come through as the subject of those daily e-mails is a constant trickle of inflammatory pseudo-questions, and not infrequently paedo-/incest-adjacent ragebait, intended to provoke engagement. Someone or some algo that someone owns is curating this crap and believes that it's OK that it goes out as the "fa…

> inflammatory pseudo-questions, and not infrequently paedo-/incest-adjacent ragebait, intended to provoke engagement

This exactly

Re: CancelQuora

#33

Post by pyeri »

jfengel wrote: post #10

Huh. Interesting perspective. Quora has tried to reinvent itself several times, and coming to it during the pandemic has missed most of them. Quora was founded by a bunch of Facebook refugees hoping to replicate the model of attracting a lot of users, [magic], profit. They were particularly intent that [magic] was not going to be "show ads to eyeballs", and they tried lots of other things. Turns out there was a reaso…

Sans the monetization debacle, it's an extremely good platform for authors. It also has some unique content value. It's like a twitter but for those who want to read more detailed and rigorous content in the form of answer posts.

Such platforms work best when they're left on their own to work organically with a little bit of moderation for obscenities, hate speech, etc. In general, the platform takes care of itself as the best quality answers typically command the most upvotes/views (though I've seen a great bias towards political content relative to technical and other non-political topics in this regard).

The makers absolutely ruined it though when they introduced that paywall, they should have explored other monetization options, there are plenty of them.

Re: CancelQuora

#34

Post by hdarshane »

Quora probably had the most beautiful mechanism of all these Web 2.0 Social apps. you ask a question, and then there's a good chance it reaches an authority in that particular subject and is subsequently answered. that's incredible.

it's not even about the monetisation part. imo it all went downhill when they started to allow incredibly low-quality content onto the site. I open my feed and it's filled with stuff like "what's your favorite food" "what scares you" "what are some common tech hacks etc. etc" it's incredibly annoying.

I'm still pretty hopeful about Quora and I think they can still turn this around as there's a sizeable population of subject experts on the website who keenly answer questions and share insights.

Quora's one of these counter-intuitive cases when a product could've been better off with a dozen or so people working on a shoestring budget instead of raising venture capital and trying to do 10 things at once as they in fact did.

Re: CancelQuora

#35

Post by bogwog »

IshKebab wrote: post #24
wayfinder wrote: post #13

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.

Spammy low quality websites in a large proportion of searches isn't a Google problem? I'm sure that will reassure them when someone comes along with a search engine that solves that problem and people start moving to it from Google. "Not our problem!" they'll say as their traffic dwindles.

Realistically, the only thing that's going to affect Google's market share is government intervention. So, cross your fingers that the DOJ wins their lawsuit (https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/google-is-clearly-buying-it...)

Re: CancelQuora

#36

Post by lolinder »

sparcpile wrote: post #4

Before Stackoverflow, they were pretty good. Once they started the anti-pattern of requiring registration to view answers, the quality went down hill pretty quick. In the last few years, my workplace added them to their blocklist. I didn't realize that one of the reasons was Quora is very spammy with emails.

> Before Stackoverflow, they were pretty good.

Stack Overflow was publicly available two years before Quora was.

Re: CancelQuora

#37

Post by chollida1 »

cj wrote: post #9
chollida1 wrote: post #5

Oh, wow I dind't know Quora was still around. My experience with quora is probably like most peoples. - You find out about quora - read some interesting questions and get some answers that provide new insight and mental models that update how you think - find some interesting and famous people replying to questions taht you read. - Day 2 find out that there are just only so many interesting questions that can be aske…

> If that site ever takes venture capital they'd be in trouble They were in the 2014 YC batch [0] (after already raised $100m). After YC their total funding jumped to $220 million. [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch

Oh, wow, ouch.

Re: CancelQuora

#38

Post by jdietrich »

wayfinder wrote: post #13
skilled wrote: 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.

The problems that people blame on Google are also problems for Bing and DuckDuckGo and everyone else. I'm a DuckDuckGo user, but I don't believe that I'm getting meaningfully better search results than I would with Google; the internet just has a pervasive problem with signal-to-noise with no obvious solution.

Re: CancelQuora

#39

Post by brookst »

vasili111 wrote: post #27
sparcpile wrote: post #4

Before Stackoverflow, they were pretty good. Once they started the anti-pattern of requiring registration to view answers, the quality went down hill pretty quick. In the last few years, my workplace added them to their blocklist. I didn't realize that one of the reasons was Quora is very spammy with emails.

Adding the requirement to register in order to see the answers I think was major mistake. I remember multiple times coming to quora from google and after just closing the page because of it.

This. It’s a short term strategy that blew up the long term. I submitted a bunch of answers to Quora way back when, but learned to avoid clicking links to the site because of sign in hassle. Which meant I was never on the site, so I stopped writing new answers.

Classic case of a company not understanding their value prop and accidentally destroying it.

Re: CancelQuora

#40

Post by ericflo »

Whenever I think of Quora, I think of their giant party in SF around a decade ago, which stands out in my mind as the height of that era of tech.
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