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How Quora died

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Re: How Quora died

#221

Post by samstave »

krkhan wrote: post #116

I 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, do…

I rage quit Quora some years ago publicly here on HN, I dont recall now the exact reason (something to do with unwanted profile/content/privacy change or some such...

It was quite a while back, but I have never really gone to quora since, especially since its basically a paywall (I also never go to NYT unfortunately because their paywall is so BFY;TW I cant stand it.

Re: How Quora died

#222

Post by motoxpro »

AlbertCory wrote: post #187
lupire wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle managers pursue the CEO's vision. They aren't steering the ship.

That's your theory, anyway.

Either the CEO sees what’s going on and is fine with it mean it is their vision, they are putting their feet up and don’t care, or they are not fine with it and have no control over the company.

Seems bad any way you look at it.

Re: How Quora died

#223

Post by Agraillo »

city41 wrote: post #213
krkhan wrote: post #116

I 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, do…

Quora really captured lightning in a bottle around that time. I used to get a weekly (daily? Can't remember) email from Quora and I would read just about every question in it. I came to look forward to the emails. I've never had that experience with any other other newsletter.

As a daily destination, Quora is no longer usable for me, no need to repeat what others already said. But the digest still surprises me and the posts are often good, even if it's a rewritten Wikipedia entry. It's like a user-generated "wonders of the past/world" newspaper for me. Daily was too much, but weekly is ok. I'm not sure whether every e-mail send it personalized, but at least in some way it looks like dependent on what I clicked before.

Re: How Quora died

#224

Post by denton-scratch »

> Co-founders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever were both early Facebook employees

Where have I come across the surname D'Angelo before? Oh yes - he's on the board of OpenAI, and was the only board member at the time Altman was sacked (according to WP).

Re: How Quora died

#225

Post by motoxpro »

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…

Seems wild to put a bunch of “related” answers that are relationship advice, movie questions and other things when you look up things like programming questions.

I can understand the rabbit hole thing. Never thought about that. That they think of themselves as TikTok and not stack overflow or Reddit.

Re: How Quora died

#226

Post by SantalBlush »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #54
ivanmontillam wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikimedia is a non-profit that operates like a for-profit when the yearly round of donations comes around. They literally hoard money[0]. I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception. -- [0]: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/

>I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception. I will always downvote a comment when someone writes something like this. It is irrelevant to the conversation and screams insecurity.

It's also tinged with a "People can't handle the based truth I'm laying down" attitude, which is annoying to read.

Re: How Quora died

#227

Post by HillRat »

seadan83 wrote: post #60
ivanmontillam wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikimedia is a non-profit that operates like a for-profit when the yearly round of donations comes around. They literally hoard money[0]. I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception. -- [0]: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/

Interesting reference. Non profits cannot hoard money. I believe it becomes taxable and they can lose their non profit status (i am not an expert) Though, hoarding seems like a mischaracterization. Per the article linked, the cash burn rate is on the order of $100M/yr, having $150M in the bank is 18 months worth of funding. The biggest gripe I read in the article is the "high" expenditure rate and how necessary it is…

There are no limits on a nonprofit's ability to raise and maintain cash reserves; there are limits on how and to whom funds can be disbursed and (to a lesser extent) the kinds of activities that can be used to generate funds. But a nonprofit can sit on an endlessly-growing hoard of cash if that's what they (and their donors) want to do.

Re: How Quora died

#228

Post by Luctct »

allenrb wrote: post #56
RajT88 wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

[flagged]

Re: How Quora died

#230

Post by Luctct »

hollerith wrote: post #124
Luctct wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wikipedia is non-profit and so is https://theguardian.com . Do you LOL at them, too? In fact till mid-1993, with a few unimportant exceptions (Clari-Net, early "retail" ISPs like Netcom) the entire Internet, which was already the largest network of computers by a comfortable margin, was non-profit.

Wikipedia only pretends to be non-profit and Wikipedia didn't buy anything for $4 billion.
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