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How Quora died

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Re: How Quora died

#141

Post by 6510 »

input_sh wrote: post #49
moralestapia wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They most likely also prefer titles that get clicked.

But the best results are those where the user uses the back button and clicks something else. They must not click back within n seconds of course. The user has to spend a minimum amount of time on the almost useless page.

I got this feeling looking for many things. I know there are pages but get many results very very close to what I was looking for.

Dubious reversal of key words where "how to turn a car into an airplane" becomes "how to turn an airplane into a car"

Then people start making perfect SEO pages like "how to style css with html"

Re: How Quora died

#142

Post by foobiekr »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #85
obernard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must agree that for almost every web-based product, designers and product managers can safely decide to completely ignore all people who have requirements like yours without it ever affecting their success.

Yes I absolutely do agree with that. Designers and product managers may completely ignore people like me, trample all over our needs and ignore us. Why would they care about the one percent. All good luck power to them and their values. But I am also not the least bit concerned with whether their products are a success or not. Why would I care if they do not? Yet I cannot concur that "almost every" site does. No, the…

It’s not 1%, more like 0.005%.

Re: How Quora died

#144

Post by IshKebab »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #78
yannis wrote: post #29

Not only Quora, but many other sites including the various "stackexchange" sites started declining I would say from about 2018, so this is not a phenomenon attributed to llms. IMHO I attribute this to the following: a) The overuse of social media conditioning users to provide short answers, rather than long thoughtful write-ups, b) Most topics have been saturated to the limit c) lack of interest from the new generati…

I think stack exchange’s moderators killed that site. Common complaints were how antagonistic they were toward new users. Hard to grow or sustain a user base if you turn out all the new ones.

Yeah it's a really big problem with StackOverflow. The mods are all crazy. I can't find it now but the StackOverflow Devs proposed actually fixing (or at least improving) question closing by allowing the asker to reopen their question once. I can't remember the exact details, but it sounded like a good first step. Downvoted to hell by the existing mods of course.

They're a bit screwed because they rely so much on volunteer mods but the volunteer mods are crazy...

Re: How Quora died

#145

Post by breck »

I think Quora died because the premise was flawed: that high quality repositories of words would have a strong ROI near indefinitely.

Now it is clear there is a new thing in our world (LLMs), and turns out repositories of well crafted words will be irrelevant.

Almost no one saw this change coming (or at least, not how quickly this change would come).

There is nothing Quora could have done to change this fate.

Re: How Quora died

#146

Post by CoBE10 »

I remember someone asking a question on Quora around 2015: "How long do you think Quora would last?" Someone answered that it probably would not last more than the next 5 years. I forgot what were the actual reasons he gave, but it gave me such an uneasy feeling that Quora could die in the next 5 years. Looking back at it now, it's probably around 2015 that it started becoming what it is today - SEO spam.

Re: How Quora died

#147

Post by bertil »

baxtr wrote: post #79
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.

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.

A/B tests are likely involved because no human would suggest those changes in earnest, but what metric could those tests have improved!?

Either it’s a series of unchallenged false positives, or there’s a lot about web interface that neither I nor they understand, but I would challenge the idea that is the result of a well-informed A/B testing culture. It’s the output of a thousand monkeys running a thousand tests a day for three years, and releasing anything that hits the green line.

Re: How Quora died

#148

Post by ufmace »

Seems to me it's all about money. They all gotta make it somehow, and if ads are the plan, than it's going to reach this state eventually. User-funded services seem to fare better, but they rarely grow as large. I don't think there's any other easy solution though.

Nonprofits may not be looking for the mega-exit, but they still need to pay the bills somehow, so most of the same forces still apply. They are also more likely to draw partisan ideologues who are naturally more enthusiastic about having a way to put their thumbs on the scales of the discourse despite lower pay and no chance of that lucrative mega-exit.

Government-funded things have too many of their own issues. Practically impossible to start, execute, or pivot fast enough to compete with startups, and subject to political turf wars and overhead. Naturally, nothing much comparable to such sites has sprung out of that.

Re: How Quora died

#150

Post by chiefalchemist »

baxtr wrote: post #79
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.

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 feel the same way about Amazon.com. It feels cluttered and messy. Most the opt-ins / opt-outs have to be read closely to make sure you're not being suckered by some dark pattern.

If you visit Amazon often enough you kinda get used to it. But a new vistor imho would be shellshocked.

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