Quora was a nice example on how an extremely shtty UI can still become successful if the app was useful enough.
It’s insane how much people can put up with if it scratches their itch enough
How Quora died
111–120 of 427 posts
Re: How Quora died
#112[flagged]
Re: How Quora died
#113Seems like every time I land on Quora it's just a bunch of people bragging about their IQs while simultaneously lambasting neo Nazis, all while missing the juicy irony of their entire worldview. I avoid Quora.
Most smart people I know oppose neo Nazis. That's not a very controversial position.
Re: How Quora died
#114This article amounts to concern trolling with a barely veiled agenda for censorship. Its "users are fleeing" claim is an attempt at wish fulfillment. The key to using Quora couldn't be easier: don't search for or read topics that you don't want to see. Human inquiry will always be delightfully messy except in the view of those who have pathological control complexes.
Even if you go to Quora for stuff you want, it's useless cause it shows answers to unrelated questions. I agree the article is bogus though, reminds me of all the "Twitter is dead ever since Elon Musk bought it" ones.
Re: How Quora died
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content This sort of thing should be a nonprofit. When it was good, it was literally making the world a better place. Possibly the Library of Congress would be a good steward for such a platform. Something to make it resistant to enshittification.
Agreed re: being a non-profit. My great hope was that Elon might do that with Twitter. Needless to say, I was… not right about that.
Arguably, prelon Twitter was not-for-profit.
Re: How Quora died
#116I was an active contributor to Quora in the mid-10's -- my answers gained some 3m views. It was really something back then, as many people have fondly reminisced about the era. There were so many great writers who brought so much understanding to whatever crazy stuff they were passionate about by writing for free on Quora. You had diplomats, chefs, former propaganda writers, people living through violent conflict, doctors, teachers, scientists, physicists, astronauts and the list goes on. Quora from that time truly helped me understand the world better.
AI might have driven the final nail in the coffin but the one decision which was truly an inflection point was starting a program that would pay for asking X amount of questions. The platform was cool because of people who wrote ANSWERS -- to the point where the original question sometimes became even tangential to the actual answer but you'd learn so much nevertheless. Quora not only ended the top-writer program for those people it started offering monetary incentives for asking the most inane bullshit questions as long as they got the views. It is truly baffling to me how something that holds so much genuine value can be driven into the ground while making decisions left, right and center (and the whole community trying to tell you exactly what you're doing) that destroyed everything of value in the Quora process. The older answers are still there, but the community magic has utterly evaporated.
I guess it's pretty normal for folks who have seen this happening in BBS/Usenet era but regardless of all of Quora's faults (the tone-moderation of the language was always a bit overboard in IMHO but I don't think it led to the downfall -- it was always there and writers worked around it) it is genuinely disappointing to see every successive platform try to build something of value only to falter and disappear because we just can't seem to keep anything good around.
Re: How Quora died
#117If 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…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019573
An amusing discussion where the OP says Wikipedia is here to stay, and every answer is downvoted, most of them flagged. All of them voicing concerns of some validity.
This is super representative of that happens on Wikipedia.
Re: How Quora died
#118When 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.
I’m pretty sure this is the result of a heavy A/B testing culture. Every single idea was probably increasing an important KPI. The page in it’s entirety got destroyed over time.
> I’m pretty sure this is the result of a heavy A/B testing culture. Every single idea was probably increasing an important KPI. The page in it’s entirety got destroyed over time.
This is the reality. Not just in Quora but all tech companies. A/B testing is used to determine how to squeeze more and more engagement, in small parts of the app. And over time the app becomes an ad factory with unrelated posts because apparently people are more engaged when they are lost and unable to find any information.
Re: How Quora died
#119When 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.
feel like this was somewhat recent. i didn’t use quora much already, but this is the change that took me from using ever to never using
Re: How Quora died
#120When 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.
Yeah, this is the main problem I have with Quora. You go to a thread to look for answers to a question, then find the platform has merged in a bunch of answers to related questions alongside the ones I'm actually there to read. For example, I found this random question just now: https://www.quora.com/How-does-blockchain-technology-work-11 About half the answers there are actually to that question. The rest are to que…
>At least with StackOverflow you know that the answers are all related to the same question.
I don't know, most StackOverflow answers I run into are "closed as duplicate of " or "closed as duplicate of "