Yahoo Answers dead, Quora dying, StackExchange struggling with AI spam and mod rebellions. Meanwhile [Ask MetaFilter](https://ask.metafilter.com/) just turned 20 and keeps on trucking. Smaller scale obviously (human-scale, I'd say), but untroubled by the exploitation and greed of the bigger sites, and still delivering best answers to questions every day. Hopefully more of the internet shifts back to this communitarian model as the pitfalls of the big VC-driven platforms become more apparent.
How Quora died
331–340 of 427 posts
Re: How Quora died
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads ruin everything. No respect for power users, plain greed. Is there any parallel to Medium?
I think medium had the right idea but I don't think the business model was really solid. Substack got it right: people want to pay creators to write, not a company to broker access to creators. Instead of pivoting, they seemed to double down.
Why aren't science journals the same? Why do I still have to pay some middle man?
Re: How Quora died
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're going to have to agree to disagree. The US has done terrible things in the too-recent future in the explicit name of making the world a better place. At least, that rationale triggers my gag reflex.
Isn’t a lot of what the US government does decided by capital anyway?
Kind of.
There is a lot of money in lobbying for certain things.
Companies generally don't want political outcomes per se via lobbying outside of their own niche interests.
Much more impactful are dedicated lobby groups.
For exmaple, there's a particular country that I'm not allowed to mention here under duress of being banned that has a lot of moneyed lobbying.
Re: How Quora died
#334Re: How Quora died
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And that’s how Google search will be overtaken by GPT with ease. Yes if the LLMs are designed to give you the best results. Right now, it’s a honey moon phase for consumers, when there’s a fierce competitive race. But just like any other tech its deployment and realization is governed by incentives. If we get an entrenched LLM monopolist I don’t think it’ll be any different from a search monopolist. Perhaps worse.
It's going to be hard to become entrenched with open source LLMs in the wild.
You could make the same argument for search or many other products - but it doesn’t hold in practice. If the commercial closed one is more powerful and/or convenient people will not choose freedom. There’s a reason these companies are getting drenched in investor money.
I can think of a thousand ways that they could get that convenience edge against open models. For instance, when LLMs are personalized based on your own history, chats etc people won’t give those conveniences up. And that data would not be accessible to the open models, at least not seamlessly.
Re: How Quora died
#336I was a top writer for two years (and got a pretty sweet jacket out of it). I was a multiple knowledge prize winner for my answers (which paid out enough for me to report it on my taxes!). Here's the nugget from the article that's the core reason: > that “was all about trying to come up with questions that would draw in more views and more people,” she said—not about incentivizing high-quality answers. It was all abo…
Given you now live in the EU you could try exercising your right to account deletion.
I do not live in the EU.
Re: How Quora died
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think medium had the right idea but I don't think the business model was really solid. Substack got it right: people want to pay creators to write, not a company to broker access to creators. Instead of pivoting, they seemed to double down.
Why aren't science journals the same? Why do I still have to pay some middle man?
I don't know. I'm not in academia or doing research, but from the outside looking it, it seems like a racket.
Re: How Quora died
#338I 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…
StackOverflow has the same problem, prioritizing question askers instead of answerers. As a result, the site is now "welcoming" to new users asking low-quality questions, but actively hostile to what the answerers and mods would like. While they're the ones left to clean up the spam. And when the low-effort questions are closed that then drives away the question askers too, because all the "nice" onboarding didn't te…
As someone that has asked a lot more (quite good) questions on SO, than has given answers, and almost all my SO rep. is based on those questions, I can report that my experience has been that I've been treated somewhat barbarously, by high-score mods. Just the mere fact that I was asking a question, made me "lesser," in their eyes. This could be rather infuriating, because I actually sorta know my stuff. One of the things that I know, is that I don't know a lot of stuff, and appreciate finding out, from folks that do.
For that reason, I learned to bite my tongue, when they sneered, and appreciated the answer, which was often quite good.
I haven't really done much there, in years. I still get upvotes for my questions, years after I wrote them. At some point, people just stopped answering my questions, and I usually ended up posting my solution, when I figured it out on my own.
I feel that Quora has turned into the same thing that LinkedIn Groups have become: A haven for ad-scammers and "SEO" people.
One of the things that happens on both platforms, is that someone asks a specific question, and ignores sincere, legitimate answers, but rewards the "shill" "answers," where a particular product is recommended as the "solution."
I dumped every LI group, after encountering these folks, and I never really warmed to Quora, because, I guess, I came late to the party, after these people had started their games. I realized the platforms were worthless to me.
I won't go, where I'm not wanted.
I can't imagine getting paid for either answers or questions. They both take so much time and brainpower, that I can't believe that the income would be at all worthy of the effort. I think that SO actually did a good job on "gamifying" the Q&A process. I may have issue with the inevitable status games, but I learned to just keep my peace, and appreciate the help.
Re: How Quora died
#339Earlier 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.
Based. It is r*ddit-tier passive aggression. This place is not much better, but we should still resist this type of crap when we can.
Re: How Quora died
#340I 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…
> the most inane bullshit questions as long as they got the views
StackOverflow fell into a similar trap with reputation on controversial or highly upvoted question farms. The problem was further compounded by a ridiculous Triage queue system that could issue account suspensions and bans for honest opinions and feedback if your answers did not align with the prevailing groupthink of a few elite arbiters there.
Not that different from what happened somewhat to HN. Read my name backwards.