It had too many Indians. Not that that's absolutely a bad thing, but it was bad for me because the answers tended to reflect Indian cultural perspectives and they weren't very relevant to me.
AI Ruined Quora
21–30 of 100 posts
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#22Quora was already ruined and pretty much worthless for a very long time. When a query on google has quora, I hardly ever click on it as I know a) it won’t answer the question most likely b) I walk into this incredibly confusing ux experience.
Same. I really dislike how you open one question and it sort of mixes in answers to different questions. New reddit UI does something similar.
Because sometimes no one actually answered that question, quora just publishes many titles to index to google.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#23[deleted]
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#24[dead]
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#25Quora ruined Quora
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#26This story is really interesting for all the not-specific-to-quora parts. It’s pretty obvious that quora has a strange culture of know-it-alls trying to show off, but this AI product makes it clear that the act of showing off is the product. The answers are garbage and they obviously don’t care. The key action for sale is not finding an answer, but writing it.
What’s really interesting is that Quora product team decided they wanted to juice engagement with fake AI created posts, and real humans are complying to answer them. Questions that make no sense, and no human asked. Quora is proving (again) that people will engage in parasocial behavior with LLMs. We’ve seen AI girlfriends and companions, we’ve seen tutors, and knowledge assistants. This is the opportunity to brag - artificial students (likely cut from the same API as those tutors).
I can only assume that question-answering-users are the real market they advertise to, profitably. This would imply that this strategy is profitable or could be profitable for them. The nice thing about this compared to more personalized LLM companions like AI girlfriends is that the inference costs can be distributed across all users by sharing the questions. I would posit that there exists an opportunity to make a Twitter or Reddit clone that explicitly intermixed bots. Maybe even exclusively bots. People want to talk on the internet and told they’re special. The interaction doesn’t need to be organic.
For proof, look at all the top-level comments on this HN post with no engagement, by users who have repeated the same pattern discussed about quora.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#27Quora was already ruined and pretty much worthless for a very long time. When a query on google has quora, I hardly ever click on it as I know a) it won’t answer the question most likely b) I walk into this incredibly confusing ux experience.
Same. I really dislike how you open one question and it sort of mixes in answers to different questions. New reddit UI does something similar.
Engagement optimization. 5% of users might happen to see something that will keep them on the site, but 95% are confused and waste their time. Sites only optimize for engagement these days.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#28I always think people calling AI just ‘fancy autocomplete‘ haven’t really tried it yet.
Indeed, it's actually worse. You should only use it for stuff where factuality doesn't matter. Verifying that an answer is complete and correct is more work than consulting a reliable source in the first place.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#29Hot take: it was never good
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#30This story is really interesting for all the not-specific-to-quora parts. It’s pretty obvious that quora has a strange culture of know-it-alls trying to show off, but this AI product makes it clear that the act of showing off is the product . The answers are garbage and they obviously don’t care. The key action for sale is not finding an answer, but writing it. What’s really interesting is that Quora product team dec…
"I would posit that there exists an opportunity to make a Twitter or Reddit clone that explicitly intermixed bots. Maybe even exclusively bots."
To that I posit that Twitter and Reddit will morph into what you described. Maybe it already happened.