Quora still exists, and it’s now worth $2B • Hacker News Board

Re: Quora still exists, and it’s now worth $2B

#11

Post by bdcravens » Thu, May 16, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

Maven911 wrote: post #2

Just to take a pulse, but am I in the minority that finds Quora to be a great great resource to learn on a variety of topics ? I know HNers are often critical so wondering what others think. Some say Quora's time has well faded and it is no longer used as much, but I'm not sure about that..

If you're trying to find a technical answer, it's not the best. But on other topics I'm blown away at the depth of some of the answers.

Re: Quora still exists, and it’s now worth $2B

#12

Post by byte10010001 » Thu, May 16, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

7373737373 wrote: post #6

Maven911 wrote: post #2

Just to take a pulse, but am I in the minority that finds Quora to be a great great resource to learn on a variety of topics ? I know HNers are often critical so wondering what others think. Some say Quora's time has well faded and it is no longer used as much, but I'm not sure about that..

It's nice to get very quick, in-depth answers by experts. But the forced login - why should one freely contribute knowledge if it is siloed by a company? - ads, frequent clickbait/opinion/irrelevant/crazy/advertisement-style answers and irrelevant notifications ruin the experience for me.

Just use ‘?’ at the end of url to bypass login. Where is the forced element?

Re: Quora still exists, and it’s now worth $2B

#13

Post by stebann » Fri, May 17, 2019, 12:20 AM UTC

Quora is garbage now... When I wanted to find answers for some political concepts (not political or ideological opinions) and information about other societies I found it completely biased, even from people who claim to be "experts".

Re: Quora still exists, and it’s now worth $2B

#14

Post by brad0 » Fri, May 17, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

prepend wrote: post #4

I do not understand how quora gets its answers but it still frequently shows up in google results with the best answers. Most recently the answer to me trying to find the mythical Bezos memo [0] “web services or you’re fired” that Yegge referenced. [0] https://www.quora.com/How-did-Amazon-successfully-grow-inter...

I feel like that top answer has a lot of things wrong with it.

The first AWS service was SQS in 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#History

The wiki also says that AWS changed direction after a paper was written about reworking the retail compute infrastructure. It had a small section saying that they could sell excess compute as part of the rework.

After that paper came out they relaunched AWS in 2006 with S3, SQS and EC2.

Re: Quora still exists, and it’s now worth $2B

#15

Post by aprik0 » Fri, May 17, 2019, 4:26 AM UTC

Quora was one of my favourite platforms before... But nowadays, I just find the platform to be flooded by self promotional content marketers.

Its difficult to find objective answers without being pitched by somebody on their company's own products and services.

Re: Quora still exists, and it’s now worth $2B

#16

Post by 7373737373 » Fri, May 17, 2019, 8:55 AM UTC

byte10010001 wrote: post #12

7373737373 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice to get very quick, in-depth answers by experts. But the forced login - why should one freely contribute knowledge if it is siloed by a company? - ads, frequent clickbait/opinion/irrelevant/crazy/advertisement-style answers and irrelevant notifications ruin the experience for me.

Just use ‘?’ at the end of url to bypass login. Where is the forced element?

Open access should be the default and require no workarounds, which only a tiny minority will know or use.