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How Quora died

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Re: How Quora died

#321

Post by nonrandomstring »

astrange wrote: post #308
nonrandomstring wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I absolutely do agree with that. Designers and product managers may completely ignore people like me, trample all over our needs and ignore us. Why would they care about the one percent. All good luck power to them and their values. But I am also not the least bit concerned with whether their products are a success or not. Why would I care if they do not? Yet I cannot concur that "almost every" site does. No, the…

My experience running websites tells me that ignoring people like you is actually mandatory because they'll take up all your time and have opposite tastes of contributing users.

> people like you

eeeeeeeewww! That's not a great look is it!?

^^^ delete button maybe?

> have opposite tastes of contributing users.

The people you exclude are unlike the contributing users.... yep no tautology there then :)

Re: How Quora died

#322

Post by Aeolun »

wonderfulcloud wrote: post #189
apexalpha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you point to some examples of partisan entries?

Essentially any issue that relates to politics or geopolitics tends to have a strong left wing bias, as if it is written from the perspective of the left wing against the right wing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly left wing people feel more like being unpaid editors on Wikipedia.

Right wing people are too busy earning them sweet, sweet dollars.

Re: How Quora died

#323

Post by slily »

ethbr1 wrote: post #115
allenrb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed re: being a non-profit. My great hope was that Elon might do that with Twitter. Needless to say, I was… not right about that.

Arguably, prelon Twitter was not-for-profit.

Good to know a publicly-traded company known to censor content to be more advertiser-friendly and with notoriously predatory content discovery algorithms designed to elicit emotions to keep users coming is apparently not-for-profit if it happens to be unprofitable during the ZIRP period. Or is Facebook also not-for-profit?

If anything, Musk is less profit-oriented. Someone looking to profit off the platform wouldn't be actively driving off advertisers. But I suppose that because we must all believe that Elon Bad, he must also be the evilest capitalistest person in the whole world, and everything before him was sunshine and roses.

Re: How Quora died

#324

Post by esafak »

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…

Wikipedia is doing fine because it is not advertising supported.

Re: How Quora died

#325

Post by nonrandomstring »

scarface_74 wrote: post #302
nonrandomstring wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. What I do not want or need is code that's been part of the web since about 2016-2020, which is arbitrary code execution by complete strangers. Not even in a sandboxed disposable web browser. Now I suspect you'll want to tell me how actually Javascript is perfectly safe... and that's a conversation we can save for another day for the sake of both our dignity and friendship. I'm afraid it's my job to know ot…

Well despite your appeal to authority… If you knew about that many exploits in the wild, surely you could (white hat) tell the company who created the browser or (black hat) make a lot of money by selling it to three letter agencies or private companies that sell it to three letter agencies. However, in the real world, a fully patched Android or iOS operating system - especially one that is in “lock down mode” is not…

I appreciate your sincere and sweet overtures scarface, but I'm just not that kinda javascript girl. You're right though, everything out there is riddled with holes. Let's not give up though.

Re: How Quora died

#326

Post by raydev »

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.

Reddit seems to be the exception to the rule. I and millions of others still spend a ton of time there. People have loudly griped about ads and API pricing, meanwhile I'm still finding new interesting subreddits. They seem to have monetized without destroying the UX.

I hope the forthcoming IPO doesn't ruin this comment!

Re: How Quora died

#327

Post by bastawhiz »

mgh2 wrote: post #316
bastawhiz wrote: post #315

I was a top writer for two years (and got a pretty sweet jacket out of it). I was a multiple knowledge prize winner for my answers (which paid out enough for me to report it on my taxes!). Here's the nugget from the article that's the core reason: > that “was all about trying to come up with questions that would draw in more views and more people,” she said—not about incentivizing high-quality answers. It was all abo…

Ads ruin everything. No respect for power users, plain greed. Is there any parallel to Medium?

I think medium had the right idea but I don't think the business model was really solid. Substack got it right: people want to pay creators to write, not a company to broker access to creators. Instead of pivoting, they seemed to double down.

Re: How Quora died

#328

Post by esafak »

baxtr wrote: post #79
matsemann wrote: post #4

When I visit Quora, mainly through it being a result for something I've searched for on Google, I can never quite understand what's the question, the answer, and what's an answer to something completely different. So I've never felt compelled to stay or join myself. Also, for a while I just hit a login wall, which of course makes you not click a link there the next time.

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.

In general there are two causes:

* Shortsighted metrics that don't contribute to the holistic quality of the product. Ad-supported products are especially prone to this.

* Treating a mature product just like a new one, and adding too many features instead of maintaining it and doing less.

Re: How Quora died

#329

Post by esafak »

klabb3 wrote: post #252
voisin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google prefers pages with lots of content And that’s how Google search will be overtaken by GPT with ease. People want answers, not an ad-driven algorithm’s desire for content that is long enough to support more ads.

> And that’s how Google search will be overtaken by GPT with ease. Yes if the LLMs are designed to give you the best results. Right now, it’s a honey moon phase for consumers, when there’s a fierce competitive race. But just like any other tech its deployment and realization is governed by incentives. If we get an entrenched LLM monopolist I don’t think it’ll be any different from a search monopolist. Perhaps worse.

It's going to be hard to become entrenched with open source LLMs in the wild.

Re: How Quora died

#330

Post by throwaway167 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #315

I was a top writer for two years (and got a pretty sweet jacket out of it). I was a multiple knowledge prize winner for my answers (which paid out enough for me to report it on my taxes!). Here's the nugget from the article that's the core reason: > that “was all about trying to come up with questions that would draw in more views and more people,” she said—not about incentivizing high-quality answers. It was all abo…

Given you now live in the EU you could try exercising your right to account deletion.
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