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How Quora died

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Re: How Quora died

#241

Post by [deleted] »

kstrauser wrote: post #199
mp05 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't see the irony of people raving about how innately superior they are because of their IQ but hate on people whose core tenant was being innately superior? "Smart" is very much a function of the work you put in, though of course not the only factor. I don't feel the need to have to explain this more than I have. Edit: I have to ask... what about the smart people that don't oppose them? What's their deal?

I find anyone bragging about their intelligence to be intolerably obnoxious. 100% of the smart people I know oppose Nazism. It seems there are too many politicians around who are objectively intelligent but are a bit comfortable with at least some of the Nazi Party’s ideas.

[deleted]

Re: How Quora died

#242

Post by AlbertCory »

motoxpro wrote: post #222
AlbertCory wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they are not fine with it and have no control over the company

something something "all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way"

In some places, the "vision" is sufficiently vague that all sorts of dumb decisions can be justified by it.

Or the CEO is so stupid that he only listens to his direct reports, who all tell him everything is under control. And when they tell him not to "micromanage" he listens and backs off.

You can't make any universal statements about this.

Re: How Quora died

#243

Post by Theodores »

oxfordmale wrote: post #108
multjoy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is how it works. It is an encyclopaedia, not a breaking news site.

The problem is that PR companies can push out whatever they want, where as an ordinary individual with personal knowledge of a topic, can't. It means many Wiki articles on person or companies, are often glorified advertisements, rather than encyclopedic entries.

Actually it is really hard if you work for a company and you need some amends on Wikipedia.

Imagine your quite large company has a small guitar shop on the other side of the globe that has the same name.

You just want a disambiguation so nobody thinks your company is this little guitar shop. You can't just edit it yourself, you need to find a Wikipedia expert and bribe them to somehow help with your plight. It is easy to imagine that a vast PR company will wave a magic wand, but it is not always like that.

Re: How Quora died

#244

Post by meowtimemania »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #209
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…

I have no experience running a site centered on user generated content, but it seems to me that the biggest problem/threat to any of them is the people who start showing up once it gains traction and becomes more popular. Early users are a different band of the population, on every successful platform from StackOverflow to Uber they create a particular culture which is impossible to maintain as the general public arr…

In what way were early users of Uber different from the current users? Are you saying the drivers used to be better?

Re: How Quora died

#245

Post by JSavageOne »

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…

Fascinating and confirms my suspicions. The point when the questions popping up in my feed were obviously not genuine is when I lost interest in Quora. The worst was how it'd always show me variations of questions fetishizing working at Google. Seriously every single Quora digest email had some variation of a question like "What is the best thing about working at Google?" Unsubscribed and don't miss it.

Re: How Quora died

#246

Post by civilized »

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…

> 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.

It's crazy that the operators of a website like this could understand so little about what made it special, but I guess all they understood was engagement metrics.

Re: How Quora died

#247

Post by joegahona »

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.

Quora also comingles ads with content, and the ads look almost identical to content. Quora has become unpleasant and unusable in the past decade, and I only end up there on accident.

I just logged in out of curiosity, and I have an avalanche of “notifications” that are just pathetic — “Dark Psychology Facts posted in a space you might like: ‘Can a human win in a battle with a hyena?’”

Re: How Quora died

#248

Post by scoofy »

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…

>Maybe make it harder for your company to footgun your golden goose?

As someone who has started a "content contributed by users" website recently (golfcourse.wiki), I've thought long and hard about why the enshitification creep happens. I really think it happens because most of the people who start these businesses either need to take venture capital to survive, or are looking for a way to sell the business to retire rich af.

I thought long and hard about a monetization strategy, and I've got a few in my mind that don't suck. However, to achieve those goals, the project has to stay a side project and it has to run on a shoe string budget.

Call me an optimist, but in the long run, I think we will replace our enshitified websites with more open ones, the slow but steady growth fediverse shows this is happening, it's just that it won't happen fast enough for most of us to be satisfied consumers.

I just think we are looking at this through the lens of consumers, not generous creators. I occasionally help edit Wikipedia, and it looks like about 10,000-to-1, at best, people who contribute to my dumb little site. If we're all willing to waste a bit of time we can build some pretty cool sites, but there always needs to be a way for users to capture that good if the company turns evil instead of the company trying to capture the users for profit.

I see it as, well, a sort of mexican-standoff relationship that Wikipedia has built for itself (for lack of a better term). Basically, we won't enshitify the website because you'll just copy-paste it, but you won't copy-paste it because you know it's a waste of time right now. If you don't need to squeeze revenues, that's a very good relationship for long-term success.

Re: How Quora died

#249

Post by throw__away7391 »

meowtimemania wrote: post #244
throw__away7391 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no experience running a site centered on user generated content, but it seems to me that the biggest problem/threat to any of them is the people who start showing up once it gains traction and becomes more popular. Early users are a different band of the population, on every successful platform from StackOverflow to Uber they create a particular culture which is impossible to maintain as the general public arr…

In what way were early users of Uber different from the current users? Are you saying the drivers used to be better?

To me personally, no, not better, but at one time the phrase “ride share” had a lot more meaning than it does today. People would creatively decorate their cars for example.

Re: How Quora died

#250

Post by IshKebab »

matsemann wrote: post #232
IshKebab wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vol…

Doesn't sound like either of you know how SO works. Very little is done by mods, mainly it's votes by normal users. Like I could be voting to close something as a duplicate, off topic etc with my privileges. It's the community doing this, not moderators. And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework or doing very little effort themselves before asking. Why do these people deserve others spe…

> And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework

I don't think anyone objects to closing those questions. That's not really what this is about. My questions are very clearly not asking for help with homework and trivial "how do I write a for loop" or "it doesn't work" questions. Still get downvoted/closed frequently. Most often:

* It gets closed as duplicate because there's a vaguely similar - but different - question. Or sometimes there's a completely different question with an answer that incidentally also answers my question.

* It gets closed as too vague or not clear because it's simply outside the domain of expertise of the voter. It's clear to people that know what I'm talking about.

To be clear when I say "mods" I don't exclusively mean people with official mod power. It's also people that moderate for fun - those that trawl the new questions. Let me know if you have a better name for those people.

You can tell it's them because you very often get a couple of downvotes immediately and then if you check back a month or two later it will have been upvoted by many more people that actually had the same question and arrived there via Google.

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