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How Quora died

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Re: How Quora died

#201

Post by smsm42 »

What a low quality work. Of course the publicly open Q&A site would have some low-quality questions and answers. Of course most of questions of general interest will be asked early, and of course some of the newer questions would regard current events, and some of the answers - oh horror! oh depravity! - will feature opinions that differ from the one the author of the article holds. Of course there would be trolls and fakes - have you been on the internet anytime lately?

I don't know if Quora is doing well or not. Maybe it is dying. Maybe it is flourishing. What I am sure of it that this article didn't help me any in understanding which of those is true, despite the length of the piece.

Re: How Quora died

#202

Post by davidguetta »

The UI has become HORRIBLE compared to when I discovered 10 years ago. Answers of other questions are on the same page that the main question, it's hard to even find comments / answers to some answers. And the constant loggin nagging is horrible.

Quota is synonym of internet junk spam in the same vein as pinterest or yelp (a little less for yelp maybe)

Re: How Quora died

#203

Post by thriftwy »

asveikau wrote: post #157
thriftwy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019573 An amusing discussion where the OP says Wikipedia is here to stay, and every answer is downvoted, most of them flagged. All of them voicing concerns of some validity. This is super representative of that happens on Wikipedia.

I have show dead enabled here. There is a shocking amount of irrational negativity in that thread, even for HN.

It is well-known that people radicalize when they are excluded from political process.

Wikipedia is notorious for excluding ordinary contributors from the process. Anybody can revert your change and that takes precedence over what you did, and there is no obvious appeal process for you, but de facto there is for the well-connected long-time editors. They can always gather some cavalry and run you over.

So they should probably do what Stack Overflow tried to do, and explicitly say that new users / infrequent contributors have to receive more care, that needs to be provided by veterans / frequent contributors, as well as provide mechanisms to do so.

Otherwise it is not a wikipedia that everyone can edit, rather a wikipedia written by a cabal who is also contains a large number of biased people, often getting direct or indirect funding from maintaining that bias.

Re: How Quora died

#204

Post by recursivecaveat »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #150
baxtr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure this is the result of a heavy A/B testing culture. Every single idea was probably increasing an important KPI. The page in it’s entirety got destroyed over time.

I feel the same way about Amazon.com. It feels cluttered and messy. Most the opt-ins / opt-outs have to be read closely to make sure you're not being suckered by some dark pattern. If you visit Amazon often enough you kinda get used to it. But a new vistor imho would be shellshocked.

I remember fondly this paragraph from the famous google platform memo:

> Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.

Re: How Quora died

#205

Post by nonrandomstring »

nottorp wrote: post #90
nonrandomstring wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I've a simple but strict set of security rules for whether I'll use a website. - it does not want to run javascript - that I can access it over Tor without being blocked - that it will work in a text based browser like elinks Despite the protestations by idealogues that no such sites exist, HN meets all those requirements, as do dozens of useful sites I regularly use. If and only if I get to evaluate the qual…

Hmm I was going to say something about Stallman-like fanaticism, but then I remembered Stallman proved to be mostly right...

Richard is most concerned about injustices toward people that take away their freedoms. I am most concerned about the security of people and how software makes them insecure in order to profit from, or abuse them. These are proximate but different.

It is a bit worrying that both freedom and security are thought 'fanatical' by some.

Re: How Quora died

#206

Post by at_a_remove »

I love a good necroscopy (incidentally, R.I.P. Brian Lumley) on communities as they wither and die. I've been watching since Usenet and IRC. There's a rhythm to this kind of thing, a kind of hype cycle for communities, but overall, I have one ur-metric which outshines them all: look for the hubris.

Communities, once they reach a certain size and collective history, gain a kind of self-reflectiveness. They get meta. And right around then, you will find someone at the helm who will not remember the earliest days and fail to grasp what brought everyone together. They've forgotten the face of their father and left the riddle of steel on the battlefield. What they'll decide is, well, it's me. I, or rather what I represent, make it great. The moderation team, the steering committee, the management. This is never true in any community I have seen. It's always the individuals, maybe some interesting weirdos, or the ones with a lot of time on their hands, the lonesome lusers. They will ultimately be regarded with disregard, viewed as churnable units, cogs of cognition, replaceable. This is always wrong, and it is always a lesson learned in slow motion, after the egomaniacs have fled toward their next call to greatness.

Re: How Quora died

#207

Post by BlueTemplar »

ethbr1 wrote: post #127
BlueTemplar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a platform that is NOT contributor-driven ??

Facebook: social over random content. Streaming services: commissioned content. Arguably non-monetized YouTube: where its used simply for its utility of serving video.

Yes, but all of this "content"* comes from contributors, who else ??

Streaming services (you mean 5he likes of Netflix ?) are arguably not platforms, because they are much closer to distributors or even publishers (rather than just editors, sometimes), with all the extra legal issues and contract-signing that come with that.

*"content" is really corporate-speak, I would hate my works to be called that :

https://craphound.com/content/Cory_Doctorow_-_Content.html#1

Re: How Quora died

#208

Post by bmm6o »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #43

I find the answers on Quora to be way too try-hard. It feels like LinkedIn growth style BS stories.

This is exactly it. Even at its height, it felt like everyone was trying to build a brand and a following, and that was the primary motivation for the answers.

Re: How Quora died

#209

Post by throw__away7391 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #7

If your core business product is content contributed by users... I'm turning to the opinion that you need a C-level ombudsman- / dean of contributors-type role. Whose sole job it is to (1) figure out what contributors are thinking and want & (2) advocate for them inside the company. Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Management begins to take contributi…

I have no experience running a site centered on user generated content, but it seems to me that the biggest problem/threat to any of them is the people who start showing up once it gains traction and becomes more popular.

Early users are a different band of the population, on every successful platform from StackOverflow to Uber they create a particular culture which is impossible to maintain as the general public arrives in large numbers.

Re: How Quora died

#210

Post by TulliusCicero »

asveikau wrote: post #41
ethbr1 wrote: post #7

If your core business product is content contributed by users... I'm turning to the opinion that you need a C-level ombudsman- / dean of contributors-type role. Whose sole job it is to (1) figure out what contributors are thinking and want & (2) advocate for them inside the company. Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Management begins to take contributi…

> Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Do you think Wikipedia has jumped the shark? Obviously not perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than Quora in terms of accuracy. It's been around for a very long time and it doesn't seem to me like quality has decreased. Edit: to be clear and re-iterate, I never said Wikipedia was perfect, just that it has a cert…

Yeah, it's probably more accurate to say

> Every for-profit contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark

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