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How Quora died

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Re: How Quora died

#271

Post by boringuser2 »

RajT88 wrote: post #21
jfengel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora had one, William Gunn. He was laid off, along with the entire human moderation staff and practically all of the user-facing developers. Quora had been going downhill for quite some time before that, as they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content and were grasping at straws. But that was the point where they appear to have pivoted entirely towards AI and continued the human generated content side…

> 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.

You're going to entrust making the world a better place to... the US government?

Re: How Quora died

#272

Post by oxfordmale »

Theodores wrote: post #243
oxfordmale wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eas…

Just a few links to companies that advertise to clean up your company profile on Wikipedia.

https://www.wikiexpertsinc.com/get-free-wikipedia-consultanc...

https://www.legalmorning.com/cleaning-up-a-company-wikipedia...

Re: How Quora died

#273

Post by stevage »

boringuser2 wrote: post #271
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.

You're going to entrust making the world a better place to... the US government?

Sure. Much better than to VC backed startups anyway.

Re: How Quora died

#275

Post by stevage »

oxfordmale wrote: post #239
multjoy wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blog post can be sufficient reference. The point is that Wikipedia isn't original research. You updating the page on the basis of personal knowledge isn't the way it is supposed to work.

Yes, I am not necessarily disagreeing with this approach. The problem is the imbalance. A PR company can buy a news article, link it and update a Wikipedia page. It means the balance is in favour of big corporations and wealthy individuals.

Elsewhere in this thread people complain that the balance is all left wing.

Re: How Quora died

#276

Post by nonrandomstring »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #234
nonrandomstring wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet here I am, the annoying fly in the ointment of your hypothesis, no?

One thing I like about HN is that they make the same amount of money off of me whether I run JavaScript or not. I imagine we can agree there...

Oh indeed. What a wonderful training set this will make one day when it's sold. We'll be too sore to sit down in the morning, but right now at least we're getting a reach-around.

Re: How Quora died

#277

Post by stevage »

kranke155 wrote: post #237
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…

Wikipedia is extremely hard to edit these days, and some of the other language Wikipedias are dominated by ill intended accounts. The Portuguese language Wikipedia is censored by mods that work for local politicians in Portugal. It’s virtually impossible to add corruption cases to their page. So now you have this bizarro world where English language pages on Portuguese politicians have corruption scandals but Portugu…

English Wikipedia is just as easy to edit these days as ever.

Re: How Quora died

#278

Post by kikokikokiko »

Karellen wrote: post #269
wonderfulcloud wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially any issue that relates to politics or geopolitics tends to have a strong left wing bias, as if it is written from the perspective of the left wing against the right wing.

Then again, reality has a well-known liberal bias. ;-)

[flagged]

Re: How Quora died

#279

Post by nonrandomstring »

scarface_74 wrote: post #254
nonrandomstring wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It serves no useful purpose No useful purpose to who?

What purpose do you have for removing functionality that has been part of the web since the 90s?

Of course. What I do not want or need is code that's been part of the web since about 2016-2020, which is arbitrary code execution by complete strangers. Not even in a sandboxed disposable web browser.

Now I suspect you'll want to tell me how actually Javascript is perfectly safe... and that's a conversation we can save for another day for the sake of both our dignity and friendship. I'm afraid it's my job to know otherwise.

Re: How Quora died

#280

Post by moralestapia »

mkl wrote: post #268
6510 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rever…

> "how to style css with html" I was intrigued by the idea of such a page, but unfortunately your comment is apparently the only mention of that phrase on the internet.

@6510 should sell that precious internet real estate
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