How Quora died • Hacker News Board

Re: How Quora died

#41

Post by asveikau » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 4:54 PM UTC

ethbr1 wrote: post #7

If your core business product is content contributed by users... I'm turning to the opinion that you need a C-level ombudsman- / dean of contributors-type role. Whose sole job it is to (1) figure out what contributors are thinking and want & (2) advocate for them inside the company. Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Management begins to take contributi…

> Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way.

Do you think Wikipedia has jumped the shark? Obviously not perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than Quora in terms of accuracy. It's been around for a very long time and it doesn't seem to me like quality has decreased.

Edit: to be clear and re-iterate, I never said Wikipedia was perfect, just that it has a certain baseline, generally above where Quora is, and hasn't seemed to decline over the years.

Re: How Quora died

#42

Post by nonrandomstring » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 4:55 PM UTC

Wistar wrote: post #12

nottorp wrote: post #9

Don't blame LLMs, blame the registration requirement. This is one of the kinds of product that people will skip if they can't evaluate it frictionless.

This is what always stops me at quora’s door.

Me too.

I've a simple but strict set of security rules for whether I'll use a website.

- it does not want to run javascript

- that I can access it over Tor without being blocked

- that it will work in a text based browser like elinks

Despite the protestations by idealogues that no such sites exist, HN meets all those requirements, as do dozens of useful sites I regularly use.

If and only if I get to evaluate the quality of a site based on those requirements, I may eventually register, with nothing more than an email, in order to post replies.

Quora fell off that list long ago. More recently so did StackExchange.

Often I find that things break as soon as Cloudflare proxies are involved.

Re: How Quora died

#43

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 4:55 PM UTC

I find the answers on Quora to be way too try-hard. It feels like LinkedIn growth style BS stories.

Re: How Quora died

#44

Post by username332211 » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 4:55 PM UTC

So, the fourth paragraph of the article is supposed to demonstrate the decline of Quora. It has a number of links.

One of those links shows a UI that's fairly obviously Reddit! [1] Another is to genius.com's lyrics to some song[2] which don't seem to have anything to do with anything the author's complaining about.

Of the links actually relevant to Quora, one is about an obvious joke[3], which the author either doesn't understand or pretends not to.

What's left is a case of spam[4], that the article links twice. I'd suppose because it's the only evidence the author has of low quality questions on Quora.

While Quora is a horrible website, I'd say the evidence shows Slate is worse. Their reporters can't even find genuine evidence of Quora's low quality. They show us Reddit instead.

[1] https://twitter.com/3DrakaiNa/status/1743993622737863056 [2] https://genius.com/23826656 [3] https://twitter.com/Zeronelite/status/1743449094360596802 [4] https://hollywoodactress02.quora.com/OMG-KING-CHARLES-SHOCK-...

Re: How Quora died

#45

Post by matsemann » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 4:55 PM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #39

Well, the revenue sharing probably didn't help much for sure. I've seen dozens of sites and platforms add that as a feature, and as unfortunate as it is, this almost always backfires. People see 'make money contributing to this platform' as 'free cash for spamming!' and the quality often falls off a cliff. You need really strict rules and a good moderation team to keep a platform under control in this situation, and…

Yeah, the comments to any viral post on Xitter now is just blue checkmarks spamming memes in order to get likes and eyeballs on their junk content, and thus make money.

Re: How Quora died

#46

Post by MiddleEndian » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 4:55 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #24

MiddleEndian wrote: post #5

Quora was never as great as yahoo answers

At its peak it was considerably better than Y!A. They started with Silicon Valley luminaries (their friends) and that attracted a lot of other well educated users, especially scientists and philosophers. A lot of genuinely great content was generated. I believe Q&A sites will inevitably degrade as the low-hanging fruit is picked early. ("How do I lose weight?" "Explain relativity" "Is God real?") It can start with gr…

Yahoo Answers was greater because it was so bad. Quora wasn't good enough or bad enough. Gotta go one way or the other.

Re: How Quora died

#47

Post by b112 » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #41

ethbr1 wrote: post #7

If your core business product is content contributed by users... I'm turning to the opinion that you need a C-level ombudsman- / dean of contributors-type role. Whose sole job it is to (1) figure out what contributors are thinking and want & (2) advocate for them inside the company. Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Management begins to take contributi…

> Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Do you think Wikipedia has jumped the shark? Obviously not perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than Quora in terms of accuracy. It's been around for a very long time and it doesn't seem to me like quality has decreased. Edit: to be clear and re-iterate, I never said Wikipedia was perfect, just that it has a cert…

It's only accurate if the view espoused in the page, matches what the gatekeeping moderator believes.

Re: How Quora died

#48

Post by lencastre » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #4

When I visit Quora, mainly through it being a result for something I've searched for on Google, I can never quite understand what's the question, the answer, and what's an answer to something completely different. So I've never felt compelled to stay or join myself. Also, for a while I just hit a login wall, which of course makes you not click a link there the next time.

That’s exactly my experience so I just avoided quora, for some reason the question I was looking at had many answers to different questions below, after scrolling a bit downwards something resembling a connection with the question in the form of an answer would be found but… it’s too much trouble.

Re: How Quora died

#49

Post by input_sh » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #28

input_sh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a toggle on top left that's by default set to "all related", as in answers to the question asked + a bunch of answers to things you're definitely not looking for, but are tangentially related. If you switch the toggle to "answers", you only get answers to the question.

Sure ... but 99 out of 100 users just say "weird" and leave. And that's "How Quora died".

I'm not here to defend Quora, but my speculation is that Google's preference for long-form content is equally to blame.

Basically the same reason as recipes that start with a long life story: Google prefers pages with lots of content, even if 10% of it is actually useful to anyone. So a page with 50+ "answers" is preferable to a page with two actual answers.

Re: How Quora died

#50

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 5:00 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #9

Don't blame LLMs, blame the registration requirement. This is one of the kinds of product that people will skip if they can't evaluate it frictionless.

[deleted]