Live data from Hacker News

Why Not to Use Quora

waxy.org

91–100 of 209 posts

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#91
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Essays on essays being written on irrelevant, hell even if you decide to skip and scroll past any answers that look like ebook you can't scroll enough to skip to the precise and meaningful answers.

This is my go-to example of the type of hilariously terrible Quora answer that plagues the site: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-learn-competitive-programming... 90% of that "advice" could be copy pasted onto any "how do I learn something", and the remaining two sentences related to competitive programming are so vague that he links to the wikipedia page on "Algorithms" and the wikipedia page on "Programming Language"…

This answer looks to be written by an AI.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#92

All philosophical views aside, there are some really core issues that got me to stop using Quora and unfortunately the case to stop using it is made by the site itself: * The content quality has deteriorated significantly since the site's inception. The content is far cheaper than before and far less interesting in very obvious ways. * Moderation systems have not done a good job of growing the site as a community. Th…

I’m actually surprised at how bad their ML model is. Funny to see someone else mention how overfit their model is. There’s literally no content discovery, it’s the same extremely specific topic. But you know what? I’ve also noticed this phenomenon on YouTube, maybe there’s something to it from an advertising revenue perspective.

A coworker of mine was recently sharing an encounter with an engineer at Quora to me. The gist of it was that the Quora engineer was saying that they've built the best engineering team in the entire industry -- that they're the 'smartest guys in the room'.

Both my coworker and I were impressed by the gall of such a suggestion and then began to wonder how much self-deception and double-think must be occurring, culturally, within a company for its employees to be suggesting such a thing to others.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#93
post #91
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my go-to example of the type of hilariously terrible Quora answer that plagues the site: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-learn-competitive-programming... 90% of that "advice" could be copy pasted onto any "how do I learn something", and the remaining two sentences related to competitive programming are so vague that he links to the wikipedia page on "Algorithms" and the wikipedia page on "Programming Language"…

This answer looks to be written by an AI.

Yes. Apparently from an 'Idea machine'

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#94
post #70

Quora was great years ago, but now it’s just a glorified Yahoo Answers full of Indians giving non-answers and fake stories in broken English.

Yet you have the Indians to thank for your username: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru

How is the etymology of "Guru" relevant to this discussion?

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#95
post #36

Quora was great years ago, but now it’s just a glorified Yahoo Answers full of Indians giving non-answers and fake stories in broken English.

This bizarre racism seems quite off-topic.

This bizarre racism where nobody states what's blatantly apparent because it can be misinterpreted as racist and people claim racism so as to seem not-racist seems quite off-logic.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#96

Does the root cause of all these problems with quora come down to being vc funded and needing high revenue numbers and growth rates? Imagine quora was a site driven by the community... It's a conundrum, only a vc funded site can reach such scale, have great growth etc but when the time for monetization comes, everything starts going downhill. A site driven by a foundation for example, rarely ever gets to any sort of…

TBH, I'm actually quite impressed that Reddit has lasted as long as it has and is still as vibrant as it is. Yes, of course there are tons of cesspool and misogynistic/racist/tribal areas, but I've found that I still like and frequent my niche smaller subreddits, my city subreddit (tons of trolls there but they are always downvoted and good content bubbles up) and the larger "eye candy" subreddits like r/aww. My gues…

Reddit was ruined with the redesign. Its buggy and slow. I get stuck on a loading screen on mobile for about 20 seconds before the page loads and half the time just shows an error. The desktop version also keeps logging me out randomly and forgetting I opted out of the redesign.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#97
post #57
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bizarre racism seems quite off-topic.

He absolutely 10000% correct, it is not racism. Quora is 98% Indian (or similar region country people) asking fake questions to "market" their crappy service. It is incredibly obvious if you ever visit once. (Probably will be your first visit because you didn't notice it.)

Not just people marketing their services but people marketing themselves.

People post questions about themselves and then proceed to answer those questions to build an online presence.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#98
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bizarre racism seems quite off-topic.

On one hand I feel the same reaction you have to the parent, phrased this way it sounds like he/she is denigrating a whole nation. On the other hand, there was something that happened here that we should probably talk about. A few years ago some of the topics (especially human-relationship subjects) experienced a sudden surge of content from people from India. I know many smart and erudite Indians, and these new user…

If you're okay with pointing out that statistically Indians are much more likely to make stupid answers, what's wrong with saying statistically blacks are much more likely to commit crimes.

Choose both or none.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#99
I really don't see why not choosing to archive their data for privacy reasons is that big of a deal. I personally find it much better than having everything stay forever. I've always found the notion that everything must be shared with the whole world quite strange.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH, I'm actually quite impressed that Reddit has lasted as long as it has and is still as vibrant as it is. Yes, of course there are tons of cesspool and misogynistic/racist/tribal areas, but I've found that I still like and frequent my niche smaller subreddits, my city subreddit (tons of trolls there but they are always downvoted and good content bubbles up) and the larger "eye candy" subreddits like r/aww. My gues…

Reddit was ruined with the redesign. Its buggy and slow. I get stuck on a loading screen on mobile for about 20 seconds before the page loads and half the time just shows an error. The desktop version also keeps logging me out randomly and forgetting I opted out of the redesign.

I only use old.reddit.com, I agree I hate the redesign on mobile.
Post reply on HN