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How Quora died

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Re: How Quora died

#381
post #29

Not only Quora, but many other sites including the various "stackexchange" sites started declining I would say from about 2018, so this is not a phenomenon attributed to llms. IMHO I attribute this to the following: a) The overuse of social media conditioning users to provide short answers, rather than long thoughtful write-ups, b) Most topics have been saturated to the limit c) lack of interest from the new generati…

The internet is a wild place, but there was a time it seemed tamed, Google fixed search and got rid of mail spam with Gmail, FB and Twitter got the feed right, ads became text-only with Adwords instead of animated gifs, ExpertsExchange, SO and various interesting personal websites and blogs had answers and were fun to read.

But just like with antibiotics, bugs were trained on it and they got stronger finding the exploit until spam, scam and greed destroyed it once again. Sigh!

Re: How Quora died

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That is all far too American for me!

Re: How Quora died

#383
I remember creating account there with pseudo-name for a few years. The admin there one day gotten extremely hostile and request me to give then real biodata. I didnt even consider to contribute anything not even simple comments. Just being quiet user. I would even pay annual subscription to have the site access but not contributing like E. Britanica site. Regardless, I have been extremely detrimental to that website with maybe running a multi year hostile anti-Quora campaign across the world. Quora just made an unnecessary enemy user with me. All I wanted just like HN, probe in, read, and maybe comment a bit maybe once or twice a year. Instead their admins turn very hostile threatening to remove my account simply for not giving them real biodata.

Re: How Quora died

#384
post #354
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Obviously your post has nothing to do with Twitter being for-profit before the acquisition and Musk prioritizing profit less than his predecessors, but I'll bite. By complying with government regulations when displaying content in their respective regions to avoid getting the entire network banned there, right. While this hit piece from a notoriously biased outlet would like to equate this with ye olde Twitter's regu…

> Twitter being for-profit before the acquisition and Musk prioritizing profit less than his predecessors

Being unable to turn a profit is not the same as not prioritising profit.

If he’s so unconcerned with making a profit, then why weasel out from paying rent, the fired employees, and all the rest? Why be so adamant about a payed subscription? Why complain of advertisers leaving?

More importantly, why does a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” kowtow to an autocratic government if he’s not even concerned with profit? And why does he keep banning his own critics?

> ye olde Twitter's regular practice of of suppressing or deleting content worldwide at the whim of the US government

Disputed by his own lawyers.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer...

> this hit piece from a notoriously biased outlet

Here are eight more sources and a study. Surely they won’t all be “notoriously biased outlets” writing hit pieces, or is the definition for that “writes something negative about Musk”?

https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/twitter-censorship-increases-u...

https://www.thestreet.com/technology/twitter-promised-to-fig...

https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-...

https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte...

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-twitte...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

https://censortrack.org/study-twitter-censorship-shockingly-...

Re: How Quora died

#385
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Everyone is talking about enshittification these days, but hardly anyone is doing anything about it (including myself). Thanks for doing something about it. Do you have a blog post with your thoughts on monetization?

I have a blog, but not a blog post about that: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/

That's a good idea though. The main idea, since it is a golf wiki, is to provide tournament services to clubs. My understanding is that most of the cost of operating tournament services is due to licensing agreements with the the governing bodies, but if clubs are willing to provide their data themselves, that's not necessary, and I can charge orders of magnitude less than the competition.

Re: How Quora died

#386
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s just a really logical way for them to monetize. If the UI was good you’d never click on (or likely even see) an ad. I’d bet they just tested it and found that’s how they make money.

People complaining about the site wouldn't pay for the site they say they want.

That’s probably true and for a long time Quora was of sufficient value that I would have said it was worth it.

Anymore that’s not the case. Answer quality has gone down drastically and the percent of Google searches that end up there has gone up.

Google really ought to de-index them. And don’t even get me started on Pinterest.

Re: How Quora died

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you point to some examples of partisan entries?

As one example, I wrote this comment a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974614 But to expand a bit, for example I'm annoyed at many of the entries calling their subject "conspiracy theory/ theorist". Not that conspiracy theories and their believers don't exist, but at this point it has become a highly pejorative and judgemental term to frame ideas and narratives that need to be stigmatized rather…

Are any of the details that you were upset they included in her bio (e.g. that she's a contract scientist running a small business) incorrect or irrelevant? They certainly don't seem irrelevant to me, obviously they should explain what kind of scientist she is and what she does for a living — are you just mad because they happen to make her look like a less prestigious scientist and/or reliable source then you would like her to be?

Also they pretty clearly note that her doctorate in interdisciplinary studies focused on mammals as its subject, what would you have them do? Claim that her doctorate was in something it wasn't, instead of interdisciplinary studies, just to make her look better, because a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies with a focus on some particular thing is "essentially equivalent" in your mind to an actual doctorate in that thing? Or claim she focused on evolutionary biology, when not even her own blog bio claims it was about "evolutionary biology" (she implies it was about zoology or another similar field)? Why do you say evolutionary biology should be listed then? Is it just to make her sound better?

Likewise, why wouldn't the criticism section be mostly filled with what she's been criticized about the most? If most of her other work was unremarkable or solid and nobody criticized it, but she's gotten a lot of criticism for her climate change views, why wouldn't that dominate the criticism section?

And if she hasn't had much notable work outside of her business, books, dotgs, and polar bears, I'm not sure why you would expect her career or education sections to have a ton of other stuff? That's the stuff even herself bio on her blog focuses on. Like you look at the headings of her non-criticism sections and decry them as if they are obviously lacking or derogatory or something but if that's all her notable work is about, why wouldn't they be like that?

Like, your entire criticism seems at least to lack citations of why the material you are upset about shouldn't be there, and without them it really appears like you're just upset that a factual article about someone you are to some degree sympathetic with makes them look worse than you'd like.

Honestly this is my problem with a lot of people's complaints of bias. A lot of it boils down to "the facts make my side of the issue look bad, can you emphasize/deemphasize some facts for me so both sides seem equal?"

People seem to think that truly unbiased reporting makes all sides of a controversy seem equally correct and equally to have a point, but that is simply not true. Unbiased reporting is reporting the facts of the case, and if that happens to show that one side of a controversy is more correct than the others, then so be it. The job is to report the facts as best you can, and misrepresenting the facts and skewing their connotation or interpretation to make it look like a side of a controversy that doesn't have much going for it is equal to a side that has more of the facts on their side just in order to make everyone look equal would actually be biased, not the other way around. I'm not claiming the mainstream news media reports the facts of the case well, they don't, but they also fall afoul of this problem: on whatever issue the mainstream news media has decided they are going to be "impartial" on, every time they publish an article that is even slightly supportive of one side of the controversy, they feel it necessary to post an article from the other side of the controversy, even if that second article is a completely factually false, incoherent screed that has no facts or logic on its side, and treat it on supposedly equal footing in the name of impartiality. Or anytime they report on the issue they feel the need to use unnecessarily strained language to circumlocate around calling things what they actually are in order to prevent people from coming to the obvious conclusion the facts would lead them to, because that would make one side of the narrative be obviously more correct than the other, and you can't have that.

Re: How Quora died

#389

Twelve years ago, Quora was a Silicon Valley darling and notoriously had one of the more difficult interview processes. How far they’ve fallen.

I must have missed this honeymoon period with Quora, I only ever remember it being as “that shitty site that tries to make me log in to view answers”. I treated it like that old “Experts Exchange” site, and just visually moved past it every time I saw it in search results.

People in this thread speaking fondly of Quora has come to a complete shock to me to be honest. I thought everyone else also considered it just a spam site. Today I learned.

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