AI Ruined Quora

I cannot remember a time when quora was not broken, so AI certainly didn't ruin it.

The UI and their login popups have always been horrible enough that I try to avoid them. But in addition to that, most specific questions - the ones that would benefit the most from a nuanced human answer - get answered with generic copypasta. My impression is that Quota tried gamifying the process of answering... And they succeeded, to their detriment. Now people keep answering questions that they have no clue about just to make their presumed importance score go up. It's a bit like those grifters that order a ghost-written book in their name so that they can already claim authority before they learn a new skill.

From my point of view the underlying problem here seems to be that someone in Quora product team feels that the best way to drive engagement is to predict what the user might want to know about and then spam them with it, rather than letting them discover on their own or use their feedback.

I stopped using Quora 8 or 9 years back, because despite how much time I spent curating the feed I was served, the questions always seemed to veer back into the questions on life experiences, `write a short story in 3 lines` or about relationships. This was most probably due to topics like these being a fad in India during the time and often received a lot of answers or upvotes.

Every time I marked an question as something I was not interested in, because of the topic, Quora assumed that I did not like the author's answer and then proceeded to show 5 other questions the author has responded to. I assumed it was because of some bug on their side ignoring my preferences of topics, until I spent a week in Dubai and saw most of the questions in my feed match the topics I marked as interested.

Quora ruined Quora. And it started well before the advance of LLMs.

I actually blacklist the entire domain from kagi search results.

Going into the article, I was expecting that Quora used AI to answer questions. Instead it uses AI to ask questions. That's pathetic and fascinating at the same time.

It's pathetic because it shows there aren't enough people asking questions to keep the site alive, which means it's already dead and exists only in a kind of zombie fashion.

But it's fascinating because it begs the question, why are people taking time out of their busy day answering pointless questions devised by a bot that doesn't know anything (and that isn't even interested in the answer)?

Quora is now a content farm where contributors work for free. That's horrible... and, in a very practical way, genius.