Used Quora long back. Their feed is very hard to navigate.
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51–60 of 74 posts
Re: CancelQuora
#52Do 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.
At the beginning, Quora was heavily focused on Silicon Valley. It had a bunch of Silicon Valley VCs and other notables providing content, as friends of the founders.
As far as I could tell, that made it much prized among that set of South Asians who were either in Silicon Valley or desperately wanted to be. It led to some very unfortunate culture clashes.
Its appeal to India seems to have broadened from there, and it still seems very popular.
Re: CancelQuora
#53The 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?
There is still some very good content in and among the racist trolling and political mudslinging. Aggressive use of their self-moderation tools can keep the horrors to a dull roar.
There is enough good content to enable one to believe that there's still some merit to the site, if only they could get a handle on the abuse. Unfortunately, they've given up trying. It largely reflects American culture wars (though other cultures are also there, and bring their own culture wars).
Re: CancelQuora
#54Earlier 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.
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". S…
If you search google for "how to list folder in linux" it immediately gives the correct answer in the top result in plain text, not even requiring you to click through to the site. Reddit isn't even in the first page of search results. Typically google gives SO results for me with technical queries, not reddit. I don't want to invalidate what you said, but it's anecdotal just like my experience, maybe you could provide any actual technical queries that result in bad reddit posts dominating top 10 rather than valid posts like SO.
Re: CancelQuora
#55In the early days of Quora, it was a lot of fun. I remember asking questions and getting answers from Olympic athletes, college professors, and other true experts. I actually made friends on Quora. Then they tried to monetize it in various ways (and I don't mind paying for things!) and it went downhill fast. Just junk questions and answers, and a lot of fringe political ideas and topics, and people promoting their ML…
> other true experts
For me this was the biggest moat for Quora.
Back in the day, you could have someone who has a legitimate background in geopolitics chiming in a question and answering it with politeness and bringing sources for further in-depth reading.
And this was about in most of the categories of the site.
Looking at Quora now, I can see the same level of questions and answers as Yahoo Answers, but with the aggravation that you have "power responders" that use LLMs and lazy Wikipedia copy-pasting to chase clout in the platform.
I do not know the context of replacing content moderation, but I believe that was a not-so-good decision for the platform.
If Quora was a fountain service that serves water from several clean/reliable sources, the _only job_ that the platform should do is to ensure that people do not take a piss in the upstream water.
Re: CancelQuora
#56Whenever 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.
That reminds me of the Palantir Xmas party (2011), at some huge museum in Golden Gate Park (de Young or Asian Art, I forget :)
Re: CancelQuora
#57> 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…
I really don't know if it is:
1) Average people are really bad at separating signals and noises.
2) Quora is actually good but I somehow have been using it wrong
3) I'm old and grumpy and don't understand how the internet works anymore.
How could not Quora have a super high bounce rate and get punished by Google? It's almost impossible to find any useful information there.
Re: CancelQuora
#58> 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.
People append Reddit because Google otherwise only gives 2-5 answers from Reddit often without a way to see more.
Re: CancelQuora
#59Oh, 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…
> - You find out about quora
> - read some interesting questions
Sorry, for me it never reached point two on your list.
Re: CancelQuora
#60In the early days of Quora, it was a lot of fun. I remember asking questions and getting answers from Olympic athletes, college professors, and other true experts. I actually made friends on Quora. Then they tried to monetize it in various ways (and I don't mind paying for things!) and it went downhill fast. Just junk questions and answers, and a lot of fringe political ideas and topics, and people promoting their ML…
The interesting thing to me is I didn't really notice the monetization thing. I think it probably happened later than when I stopped using the site, because I notice now hitting it from web search you can't view anything without logging in, but that wasn't the case when I was still using it.
What you say here was definitely the draw, but that was true as an answerer, too. I don't exactly consider myself an "expert" on anything, but I was a fairly senior budget officer in the 1st CAV division headquarters before getting into software and both details of military operations and the federal budgeting process are things I had an insider view that I also see being discussed both in web forums and news media with a lot of naivete and wrong information. I was happy to answer questions about these topics, and it was nice to have the setup with your real name, official qualifications, and specific people vouching for you. It worked for a while and high-quality answers drifted to the top.
But that all changed in 2016. The US presidential election between Trump and Hillary ruined the Internet. For over a year, every top answer and most of the top-ranked members giving answers were purely partisan. The only way to get noticed and rewarded was to say something flattering to one political party and insulting to another. Nobody cared about the quality of information any more. This just didn't hit Quora. It hit the entire Internet. It probably helped ruin Twitter and Facebook as well, though I didn't care as much because I didn't really use them anyway. Really, it ruined the entire global information ecosystem. As much as news media had been going downhill ever since CNN kicked off the 24 hours permanent news cycle in the early 90s, I feel like a threshold was crossed in 2016 that made it no longer tolerable and no longer worth even bothering to consume news.
Maybe some of Quora was insulated from this and wasn't ruined until a later monetization push, to the extent they somewhat cordoned you by interest, if you managed to only follow questions on purely tech or business topics and ignore civics and world affairs. Certainly, I think this is largely what has saved Hacker News. Being the only place on the Internet I still read anything, it's interesting to observe that apparently Israel is at war and I didn't even know about it until watching football last night.