Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Quora died

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 427 posts

Re: How Quora died

#341

Post by CoastalCoder »

throwaway167 wrote: post #330
bastawhiz wrote: post #315

I 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.

How long does one need to be in the EU to have/exercise that right?

E.g., could an American issue a deletion order during a layover in a European airport?

Re: How Quora died

#342

Post by gn4d »

throwaway277432 wrote: post #259
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…

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…

lol I just typed an answer to the top level question, pressed Submit, then saw yours haha. Cheers. It felt great to leave that hellhole a few years ago. I was a (admittedly lowly chump) top 1% contributor with an account for over a decade.

Re: How Quora died

#343

Post by gn4d »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #338
throwaway277432 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Check my recent submissions, I agree. The mods were just as bad as, if not worse than, the administrators on SO. It was actually the mods that drove more people away imho (from conversations with other high rep contributors).

Re: How Quora died

#344

Post by latexr »

slily wrote: post #323
ethbr1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, prelon Twitter was not-for-profit.

Good to know a publicly-traded company known to censor content to be more advertiser-friendly and with notoriously predatory content discovery algorithms designed to elicit emotions to keep users coming is apparently not-for-profit if it happens to be unprofitable during the ZIRP period. Or is Facebook also not-for-profit? If anything, Musk is less profit-oriented. Someone looking to profit off the platform wouldn't…

> known to censor content to be more advertiser-friendly

And now it’s know to censor content to be friendly to autocratic governments.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88xqnv/elon-musk-censors-twi...

Re: How Quora died

#345

Post by dchftcs »

bastawhiz wrote: post #315

I 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…

>What hurts the most: I deleted my account. At some point it became undeleted. I don't have the ability, as far as I'm aware, to kill it. My profile lives on to enrich the people who betrayed the writers. Kind of sad, but it was all about engagement. Ad dollars.

This sounds horrific and ironic when Quora's founder is on the OpenAI board with a role to supposedly oversee ethics. But, after all he was the CTO of a company that pioneered putting tracking pixels everywhere, so this is just typical silicon valley stuff.

Re: How Quora died

#346

Post by gn4d »

keiferski wrote: post #31

I think the upvote/downvote model for evaluating content is fundamentally not a good one, and this deficiency is the root problem for a lot of sites (Reddit, Quora, etc.) that were founded around the same time, circa 2005-2012. It lends itself too much to groupthink, popularity contests, and self-promotion. X/Twitter has a million other problems, but I do like their new Community Notes of fact-checking claims. It's e…

>I think the upvote/downvote model for evaluating content is fundamentally not a good one

This is why the bump model that 4chan uses is superior. You can sort threads by activity, but all posters display with equal weight, and you must utilize critical thinking to evaluate each and every post (unless it is from a trip user whose authority you trust in a particular domain), not some little number that pushes them to the top or sinks them to the bottom. There are (You)'s, but that can indicate consensus, disagreement, controversy, or something else, and you need to sus that our for yourself.

Consensus-based truth models are frankly shit for most types of topics. Heck, even for scientific topics, the peer review model has been shown to be completely bankrupt.

Re: How Quora died

#347

Post by Glyptodon »

The real name policy meant that after trying to answer a question once I was done with it. I think it'd be interesting to move the question/topic style into something run more like Wikipedia.

Re: How Quora died

#348

Post by ffgjgf1 »

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. ;-)

So it would be centrist/moderate then, certainly not leftwing?

Re: How Quora died

#349

Post by bastawhiz »

dchftcs wrote: post #345
bastawhiz wrote: post #315

I 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…

>What hurts the most: I deleted my account. At some point it became undeleted. I don't have the ability, as far as I'm aware, to kill it. My profile lives on to enrich the people who betrayed the writers. Kind of sad, but it was all about engagement. Ad dollars. This sounds horrific and ironic when Quora's founder is on the OpenAI board with a role to supposedly oversee ethics. But, after all he was the CTO of a comp…

I wouldn't call it horrific (though I guess others might). I'm inclined to think it wasn't intentional. It certainly doesn't keep me up at night, and it's not like I regret anything that I posted on the account. I just find it disrespectful that I'm prevented from expressing my dissent around the company's reversal of its original premise.

Re: How Quora died

#350

Post by function_seven »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #348
Karellen wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So it would be centrist/moderate then, certainly not leftwing?

Not if the Overton Window is out of whack. Reality could conceivably be to the left or to the right of what we consider the extremes.

What we label as “centrist” isn’t guaranteed to be the “actual” center of reality’s spectrum of ideology.

Post reply on HN