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Quora pays thousands for posting questions

quorapartners.quora.com

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Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#91

Post by ChuckMcM »

askafriend wrote: post #78
ChuckMcM wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They realized they could make money selling high quality question/answer pairs to machine learning companies building dialog systems. As a result the more pairs they have, the more their dataset is worth. Buy questions and resell as QA pairs.

Do they actually do this as a meaningful part of their revenue stream or are you saying this in jest?

If that figure is accurate for what they are paying for questions then I'm guessing it is a big chunk of revenue. Ads don't pay that well on a site like this.

I didn't appreciate how hard it was to come up with good QA pairs for a topic until IBM Watson acquired the company I was working for (Blekko) and got to see how things got made. I isn't something you can farm out to Mechanical Turk, and without AGI it isn't something that is easily auto generated from a knowledge graph. Ten thousand questions about the insurance business and vetted and ranked answers? Solid gold.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#92

Post by vasilipupkin »

manigandham wrote: post #70
vasilipupkin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why ? What’s the difference between paying for upvotes in dopamine hits or money ?

Because people will do anything for even trivial amounts of money while upvotes are controlled by users which is self-correcting when the community and controls are well managed.

I’m proposing leaving the upvotes in the hands of users but paying users for high karma

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#93

Post by fourthark »

nikkwong wrote: post #62
manigandham wrote: post #5

$27k for 8000 questions, that's basically admitting they paid for spam. I don't see how this is a good product decision at all and the content quality has declined severely. Meanwhile being a Top Writer has done nothing for me other than getting the opportunity to buy quora branded swag from their store. Saying that this system is imbalanced and unfair seems to be an understatement.

The mind blowing fact is that they're advertising this metric as if it's a stat to be proud of. I think the average person browsing the internet would see this and instantly question the site's credibility. I would maybe understand this statistic being shared internally or in an email to partners--but published publicly on the internet? They're just looking to invite criticism and a loss of trust.

Or they just want more people in the partner program and don't care about their reputation.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#94

Post by thewhitetulip »

notacoward wrote: post #12
madamelic wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What happened to Quora anyway? It became marketing. Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup. Same with Medium. Once the startup bros say a site is good for "native marketing", that's when the begins to die.

> Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup. They break all of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high-quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they…

Same story. I quit when it became Facebook style with zero useful answers.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#95

Post by anigbrowl »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #85
anigbrowl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people pay something for their communications in the form of home internet or cell service, so I don't think the answer is just nested paywalls or the internet would be more polite than it is.

I think you miss my point slightly but in your defense I didn't make it very well. That people pay for the internet connection doesn't really have much effect on the economics. It's the payment for the production of the information or lack thereof that is driving the deleterious effects on quality of information that we are seeing. This is mostly of our choosing too! And we will continue to put up with it until we do…

Thanks for taking the time to lay out your ideas. I largely agree but I think individual-choice solutions are generally an unsatisfactory answer to what are often collective action problems.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#96

Post by kbenson »

zerkten wrote: post #69
manigandham wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can definitely have ads like Reddit or StackOverflow that work fine though. Messing with the content itself is the problem.

My impression was that the folks at Quora never got community and content the way that those two did. Stack Overflow's founders effectively provided an audio playbook in their podcast (before Jeff left) and anyone could have followed it to create a great Q&A site. This is just one demonstration of their attention to detail. They experimented with business models, and got growth on a technical platform that turns out…

> Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience.

I think that pretty much sums up how I feel about Silicon Valley and what it's come to stand for. Earlier, it was about building something cool that people used (and make a good living doing it). Then some of those cool things ended up making so much money, that now it's not about making creating, it's about making money.

The same thing happened with the mobile app stores. First it was about people making cool stuff that was useful, and then a few stories came out about how insanely lucrative some apps ended up being, and everyone wanted to make the next app and get rich.

Since this seems to be a natural emergent phenomenon with how our culture and technology interact, I guess I'm just hoping that somewhere along the lifecycle of the phenomenon it settles into a more sane paradigm where everyone isn't constantly on step X of what is essentially a get rich quick scheme.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#97

Post by netheril96 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #39
Havoc wrote: post #6

What happened to Quora anyway? When it started I recall it being super hot with crazy high quality answers. Then they started with logins being required and it all seemed to go downhill at an amazing speed.

They realized they could make money selling high quality question/answer pairs to machine learning companies building dialog systems. As a result the more pairs they have, the more their dataset is worth. Buy questions and resell as QA pairs.

It that is true, how could Quora's quality go downhill so quickly when its revenue depends on it?

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#99

Post by james_s_tayler »

anigbrowl wrote: post #95
james_s_tayler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you miss my point slightly but in your defense I didn't make it very well. That people pay for the internet connection doesn't really have much effect on the economics. It's the payment for the production of the information or lack thereof that is driving the deleterious effects on quality of information that we are seeing. This is mostly of our choosing too! And we will continue to put up with it until we do…

Thanks for taking the time to lay out your ideas. I largely agree but I think individual-choice solutions are generally an unsatisfactory answer to what are often collective action problems.

Sure. It's two sides of the same coin though. In time the collective winds up settling on a new paradigm based on an aggregate series of individual choices that reflexively effect the markets they are acting on. It's a process that naturally plays out over time.

I think we're already seeing it play out in slo-mo over the last 6~8 years. It's becoming more and more noticeable that things are shifting now.

Re: Quora pays thousands for posting questions

#100

Post by james_s_tayler »

richardbdrowley wrote: post #83
james_s_tayler wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So economics eventually kills anything that's free to consume. Well... I can't say that surprises me.

Wikipedia is still alive

So is Khan academy. The key there is non-profit.
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