Quora was already ruined by low quality posts and so-called experts. Not everything is caused by AI.
AI Ruined Quora
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Re: AI Ruined Quora
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may have just joined late? Right at the start when there was artificial signup scarcity it was fantastic. Like hn great except for questions
Quora was bad when I visited it in 2021. So what year it was good again?
Early 2010s. Basically around its founding.
This is an article [1] from 14 years ago where Arrington characterized Quora with “People say they feel smarter after they use Quora” and “It’s kind of like Wikipedia [2]. This is the long tail of information”
1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchm...
2: https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/30/quora-is-really-about-a-be...
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#83Quora has always been trash. There's a reason why we append 'reddit' to a search query if we want a human opinion and not 'quora'.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linkedin also goes the quora way. Nope, it's not marketing, it's something else.
Thus, the "marketing" (with quotes). It may actually be a technique, taught in school. There's a lot of underhanded behavior in that field, especially in trying to drive talking points and corporate glossaries.
It's the UFOs. They land anytime soon :DDD.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#85I mean, while generally LLMs are ruining the internet as a whole, Quora, in particular, was pre-ruined.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quora was doomed from the start. When StackOverflow started the founders and the early community put a lot of thought and energy into not becoming one of the niche expert exchanges that already existed at that time. Now, Stackoverflow failed, but not by repeating the mistakes that already had been made. That's not something that could be said about Quora.
Why do you say SO failed? I thought it was quite successful.
Maybe I am too harsh, and measured by its usefulness[1] it is not really a failure. I was involved in the early SO community and I think it is failure compared to what it could have been.
[1] However small that may be, even I would have a hard time to argue that it is useless or irrelevant.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thus, the "marketing" (with quotes). It may actually be a technique, taught in school. There's a lot of underhanded behavior in that field, especially in trying to drive talking points and corporate glossaries.
It's the UFOs. They land anytime soon :DDD.
I know that was a joke, but the reality is almost as creepy.
I worked for a corporation that drove marketing terminology to use their glossary, and saw the thinking firsthand. It's not paranoia. In fact, it makes perfect sense, and may not even be that underhanded. They submit huge reams of text, interspersed with their talking points, to any and all publications, news outlets, whatever. Some percentage of that gets published; sometimes, verbatim, and that reinforces the glossary.
The underhanded stuff, is when they start sneaking it into places that should normally not be "infected" by this behavior (like news organizations that accept corporate dogma as news articles, and put their own bylines on corporate fodder).
AI is gonna absolutely supercharge this.
I could already do this with ChatGPT, but that's kind of clunky and primitive. Custom LLMs will make it almost completely invisible and undetectable, and create an enormous tsunami of this junk.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#88[dead]
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#89This 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'm really amused by the concept of Quota becoming a site specifically and exclusively for question-answerers. Question-askers need not apply.
Where do the questions come from? Best not to ask.
Re: AI Ruined Quora
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> … will morph into what you described. Maybe it already happened. I can only assume that this is one of several reasons why the world’s largest social media company is on the cutting edge of LLM research.
Sounds like a great start towards an ad diaspora. Who wants to advertise on a site that cannot properly distiguish between a human and a bot?
The opportunity is for the site to become the bots, and silo each user to their fake world of LLM posts tuned for them to engage with. It’s a site with of perfect knowledge of bots, which would be a perfect advertisement environment.