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CancelQuora
61–70 of 74 posts
Re: CancelQuora
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 provi…
> how to list folder in linux
More realisticly you're searching for "list folder in linux $CAVEAT_A $CONTEXT_B" and all the results are useless because one of the key words are silently dropped for each ad filled auto-generated result.
Then you'll search for "how to A in B?" And all the results are how to do the opposite ("how to B in A"). Where both directions are logical but order means something different.
Re: CancelQuora
#63> 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.
IDK how Quora is suppose to work but every time I reluctantly try to read an answer, I find the first answer too basic or incomplete, then the next answer has nothing to do with the question, but that's not user error on part of the person who wrote the non-sense answer, the site is actually designed to present a random unrelated answer in slot 2. It's like if somebody saw the hot and related questions sidebar from stackoverflow and said "what if we took this useful and interesting engagement feature and made a useless annoying version of it? " Then I don't bother checking for a 3rd answer, I just leave Quora mostly unsure of why I even bothered.
Re: CancelQuora
#64Oh, 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.
Even their only example was:
> what's something that's cool for rich people to do but trashy for poor people to do?
That's a yahoo answers/AskReddit bottom tier question that recurs weekly.
Re: CancelQuora
#65Most of us don't use Quora for anything anyways, even if we did so in the past. It's bad--what's the big deal? Why does this merit a ranty blog post like this? The post comes across as kind of unhinged.
Re: CancelQuora
#66Earlier 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.
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.
Try kagi. It's actually better, and you can reduce or even banish crap like quora from your results
Re: CancelQuora
#67Somehow 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.
But if the admins of the site cared more about integrity than pure profit, they'd put in a simple heuristic to filter this shit. So one way or another, they're culpable; and more so if this is a known phenomenon.
Re: CancelQuora
#68Huh. 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…
They always intended to sell ads for monetization, the belief that the plan from 2009 would work 10 years later (internally this was their proposed timeline) is what put them so far behind when they finally started trying to think of new ways to monetize out of semi-necessity (Adam could buy out the other investors easily if he had to). I was disappointed they weren't trying newer/creative ways to monetize much earlier.
Context: I worked at Quora from 2012-2014.
Re: CancelQuora
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But if the admins of the site cared more about integrity than pure profit, they'd put in a simple heuristic to filter this shit. So one way or another, they're culpable; and more so if this is a known phenomenon.
Oh, they're definitely culpable. But in some ways that jackass is the least of it. They know perfectly well that he'll tweak his pattern to evade any filter.
But they sure as hell could manually scan their emails. That's the really demoralizing part. They might lose a war of escalation but they don't even try in the most conspicuous places.
Re: CancelQuora
#70Huh. 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 lo…
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