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How Quora died

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Re: How Quora died

#361

Post by aniforprez »

matsemann wrote: post #45
CM30 wrote: post #39

Well, the revenue sharing probably didn't help much for sure. I've seen dozens of sites and platforms add that as a feature, and as unfortunate as it is, this almost always backfires. People see 'make money contributing to this platform' as 'free cash for spamming!' and the quality often falls off a cliff. You need really strict rules and a good moderation team to keep a platform under control in this situation, and…

Yeah, the comments to any viral post on Xitter now is just blue checkmarks spamming memes in order to get likes and eyeballs on their junk content, and thus make money.

Any large film/music/video games twitter account post gets spammed by AI bots and I mean literal AI bots that occasionally give the game away with "you have run out of credits" or "I don't understand this prompt" messages. Also a bunch of them just retweeting their own posts that have nothing to do with the original in an attempt to farm engagement for their older stuff

Re: How Quora died

#362

Post by joshxyz »

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…

exactly lol. quora is shit, poe is shit. it's like everything he builds and touches eventually evolves into a cancer to the society.

if you'll put drug cartels on one end of a spectrum, he'll be on the opposite end where everything he did sure is legal but definitely monetized and ruined the same amount of lives.

Re: How Quora died

#363

Post by StressedDev »

samstave wrote: post #221
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.

How do you expect the New York Times to pay its reporters if they do not charge? Internet advertising is not a large money maker for a lot of sites. Also, if people will not pay for news, unethical corporations and unethical governments will, and our "free" news will be propaganda. My main point is people on the Internet cannot have it both ways. We either pay for high quality content or we accept we are going to get clickbait, astroturf, propaganda, fake news, etc.

Re: How Quora died

#364

Post by jjeaff »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #301
stevage wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow what is that acronym?

Because Fuck You; That’s Why https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFYTW Somehow having an acronym with a semicolon actually makes a vulgar rage explosion seem controlled and even educated. Where did we all go so Wrong?

Venture capital is where we rent wrong. they are to startups what PE is to developed companies.

Re: How Quora died

#365

Post by [deleted] »

bastawhiz wrote: post #349
dchftcs wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

[deleted]

Re: How Quora died

#366

Post by johnnyanmac »

stevage wrote: post #275
oxfordmale wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

corporations are bipartisan pretending to be partisan. I'm liberal and don't doubt liberal-facing companies can and do do this.

Re: How Quora died

#367

Post by int_19h »

matsemann wrote: post #270
IshKebab wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Feel free to drop links to your said questions. Often it's just vague allegations with little evidence. Getting something closed as a duplicate shouldn't be taken as a slight. It's often good that various formulations of a question then can point to the same answer. Or if the answer to the other question answers yours, isn't it just good that you and other people will be directed there? It's a Q&A site, not a forum.…

I've been on StackOverflow for almost 15 years now, with 100k reputation (mostly from old answers). I can tell you that I routinely run into examples of what GP described while searching for answers - it happens quite often that search engine produces link to an SO question that is about the same exact thing I'm investigating, and it's a well-written question covering the details and various explored avenues... and it's closed as "duplicate" of something that isn't actually relevant.

Re: How Quora died

#368

Post by int_19h »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #276
CamperBob2 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that HN has a public API to export all the conversations nobody needs to wait for that day to make it into a training set. In fact, I would be extremely surprised if it hasn't already been trained on.

Re: How Quora died

#369

Post by StressedDev »

frabjoused wrote: post #169
CM30 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is the main problem I have with Quora. You go to a thread to look for answers to a question, then find the platform has merged in a bunch of answers to related questions alongside the ones I'm actually there to read. For example, I found this random question just now: https://www.quora.com/How-does-blockchain-technology-work-11 About half the answers there are actually to that question. The rest are to que…

I really fail to understand how a company can consciously guide itself to degrade so badly. Like these were actual decisions of meetings and the results of a ton of work of teams to implement. And it destroyed the site. Product of too much VC, probably.

More likely, it's a product of not making money and of trying to find a way to make money and not go out of business.

Re: How Quora died

#370

Post by edgyquant »

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.

How exactly was quora ever making the world a better place?
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