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CancelQuora

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Re: CancelQuora

#41

Post by brookst »

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.

Google created the problem by rewarding sites that have content farmed (now ChatGPT generated) 5000 word essays on the history of flour before every bread recipe.

Google created the SEO mess that makes non-redddit sites undesirable for most searches.

Re: CancelQuora

#42

Post by jfengel »

pyeri wrote: post #33
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 a…

Quora requires a lot of moderation. It has become a popular site for white supremacists, child pornographers, and others. They've fired almost all of their human moderators and appear to be doing it exclusively with automation.

They do almost no moderation within the spaces, and many of them are devoted explicitly to racism. There is also a ton of explicit hate-speech trolling, much of it apparently coming from 4chan.

Re: CancelQuora

#43

Post by chefandy »

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…

Not directly related, but adjacent to quora likely turning into an AI dispenser: I knew that it would generate a whole bunch of crap through existing channels— like the ones that were being fed by SEO-driven writers or fake product reviews on YouTube that are just a slide show of product shots taken from Amazon and their descriptions read in a text-to-speech voice— but I hadn't considered that it could make really low-quality previously impossible business concepts juuuust barely profitable enough to be worth it to someone. I imagine we're going to see brand-new paradigms in spam that we never imagined would be worthwhile.

Is there anything stopping phone companies from training models based on your voicemail messages? Imagine if data brokers started collecting and selling them? Sure the whole fraud thing is a an obvious problem, but how about your best friend's voice on a voicemail saying "I've got something of life-or-death importance to tell you. Call me back when you get this message at nnnnnnnnn," and when you call, it's your simulated best friend breathlessly answering "OH thank god you called back. Please listen carefully: You're in grave danger every moment you spend in your home without a reliable security system, and here at... " And probably some even weirder than that.

I've already started seeing low-quality bulk-generated images pop up in my image searches... That's a problem I didn't forsee a couple of years ago.

Re: CancelQuora

#44

Post by brookst »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #22
m1r wrote: post #7

The site has ZERO moderation. Everyday I find open calls of violence against specific groups and blatant misinformation.

Why do you return to it every day then?

“This food is terrible, and such small portions!”

Re: CancelQuora

#45

Post by scbrg »

lolinder wrote: post #36
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.

Perhaps non existence was Quora's peak. After that, it was founded and everything went downhill from there :-)

Re: CancelQuora

#46

Post by shauryamanu »

brookst wrote: post #39
vasili111 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just like what Meta is doing currently whether with Whatsapp channels and trying to add similar features to all its apps.

Re: CancelQuora

#47

Post by spamizbad »

I can remember when both Quora and Stackoverflow (Stackexchange) were first on the scene, and it was interesting to see that battle unfold.

For me, it was the first time I noticed a cultural division between capital and labor. If you spoke to builders, Quora was a non-entity or seen as a joke; whereas Stackoverflow was a productivity supertool. However, when talking to VCs, influencers, and people "up the food chain" they saw far more potential in Quora. They didn't look down on Stackoverflow, but they just saw it as another tool, like a screwdriver: very useful, but it was nothing more than a better mousetrap.

I suppose ultimately the Quora crowd was both right and wrong. Right in recognizing Stackexchange's influence ceiling but wrong in recognizing Quora's reach and impact. And I think, in part, it's because Quora needed something that Stackoverflow had in spades: Quality content and a less hostile interface. Quora truly inherited the crown of Yahoo Answers, but unfortunately took all of its warts (low quality content) with it.

Re: CancelQuora

#48

Post by jfengel »

hdarshane wrote: post #34

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…

A lot of the lowest-quality questions came from a period when they were paying people to ask questions. People of course flooded it with questions designed to attract that kind answer, which is precisely what Quora wanted because it drives engagement.

They replaced it with a bot which actually does a better job, in my opinion, despite also having a ton of howlers.

Re: CancelQuora

#49

Post by shauryamanu »

philihp wrote: post #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.

Sponsored questions are really spammy.

Re: CancelQuora

#50

Post by jfengel »

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…

Those are all from the same person, or a small cadre using the same pattern. They brag about it to each other on a subreddit. Such questions get a huge amount of attention, and Quora's algorithm mistakes that for users wanting to see more of it.

There is nobody curating it. It's all automated.

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