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How Quora died

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Re: How Quora died

#151

Post by freediver »

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.

Google sending traffic to Quora, one ad-based business to another, with user being secondary and content on both being incentivized by ad clickthrough rates, is a dying paradigm. It had a good run though but I do not imagine it will be missed.

Re: How Quora died

#152

Post by mattmaroon »

Their UI has long been more focused on getting you to click on other questions and/or ads rather than seeing the answer you want, and they do it by making it really hard to tell which is which. They intersperse a sponsored question that has nothing to do with yours between the top two replies.

I guess that’s probably the only way they could really monetize but it sure is annoying.

Re: How Quora died

#153

Post by ahoka »

Arainach wrote: post #120
CM30 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "

Or gods forbid, someone had a slightly open ended question.

Re: How Quora died

#154

Post by mattmaroon »

temporallobe wrote: post #134
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.

Yep. As a UI/UX specialist, it’s nothing short of a nightmare. I can’t decide if it’s purposeful (they’re trying to kill the site), negligent (they can’t hire or retain talent, or who they have is making bad decisions), or just full of corporate/organizational bloat (basically all decisions made by non-engineers such as stakeholders or investors designed to maximize profit and ad space).I am leaning towards bloat.

I think it’s just a really logical way for them to monetize. If the UI was good you’d never click on (or likely even see) an ad.

I’d bet they just tested it and found that’s how they make money.

Re: How Quora died

#155

Post by acdha »

See also Google: I knew they were embracing the dark side when Quora not only went unpunished for search cloaking but seemed to get even more solidly rewarded with high search weight.

Re: How Quora died

#156

Post by 1905 »

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.

The one exception would be Craigslist

Re: How Quora died

#157

Post by asveikau »

thriftwy wrote: post #117
asveikau wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have show dead enabled here. There is a shocking amount of irrational negativity in that thread, even for HN.

Re: How Quora died

#159

Post by zdragnar »

darksim905 wrote: post #138
zdragnar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occasionally visit quora off of search results because I kinda got used to parsing out what I wanted, but never knew about this toggle. I literally cannot understand how anyone thought intermixing related questions and answers together is in any way useful or beneficial to their users, especially when the default is set to ON.

Can people not really understand this? Some of those related questions are dupes, other times they are paths to rabbit holes. ycombinator does the same thing. When you guys see posts that come up that have been here before, you post links to previous discussions. I saw this recently specifically with the links to articles on Martin Couney (I had a hard time finding that because the article is so poorly worded). Even…

The problem is that there's no continuity between what is related and what is an answer to the question asked. Related answers are intermixed with real answers at the same level. You can only tell something is a real answer by the absence of bold text and presence of light grey text.

The link upthread isn't a good example, because the question is so basic it's easy for them to have a lot of related (duplicate) questions and answers. When the topic requires more nuance or is more specific, then the related questions and answers really aren't related at all, and they just add a bunch of useless noise.

hackere news isn't a question / answer site. I don't come here with the same expectations that I do when I go to something like stack overflow or quora.

Ironically, if I do a google search for something and ycombinator comes up in the results, the link is directly to the comment that is relevant- not to the top level of the article with all of the related sibling comments. If anything, from that perspective hacker news is actually a better question and answer site than quora.

Re: How Quora died

#160

Post by seahawks78 »

I have some very good opinion of this. I work in big tech and I might be a canonical example of some users who no longer find Quora interesting. From 2012 to about 2014 I was absolutely hooked to Quora spending anywhere between 2 to 4 hours every day. At that time I was a young professional in my early 30s, newly married and just at the beginning of my tech career after grad school. I used to love the questions posted on the forum which seemed very relevant to me e.g. how to build a career in tech, dating/relationship advice, tourism advice etc. I was hooked.

Fast forward 10 years from then. I am a 40 year old middle aged guy. Still working in tech albeit at a Senior level; with one school going kid and have a mortgage. I still visit Quora occasionally but am hard pressed to find any content that is interesting and appropriate for my age. It seems that they are still showing me questions which were mostly relevant to my younger self 10 years back and not now. There is practically no content or discussion in that forum that can attract and keep a 40 year old middle aged guy. Its just that I evolved but they didn't. Not to mention the fact that they also became more annoying with all these "promoted", "relevant" questions intermixed within the same page. I think their lack of ability to evolve over time absolutely finished the product. My two cents.

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