CancelQuora
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CancelQuora
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Re: CancelQuora
#2I was into Quora 10+ years ago. In fact in 2012 I made their Top Writers list. It was fun. It was exciting. It was interesting.
As they added features I lost interest. I go back from time to time. I don't recognize it. Not sure if it's good or bad. Maybe I'm not longer their target market? I just feels overwhelming and less quality driven. Just me?
Re: CancelQuora
#3I was into Quora 10+ years ago. In fact in 2012 I made their Top Writers list. It was fun. It was exciting. It was interesting. As they added features I lost interest. I go back from time to time. I don't recognize it. Not sure if it's good or bad. Maybe I'm not longer their target market? I just feels overwhelming and less quality driven. Just me?
It has become an echo-chamber just like other sites....
Re: CancelQuora
#4Before Stackoverflow, they were pretty good. Once they started the anti-pattern of requiring registration to view answers, the quality went down hill pretty quick.
In the last few years, my workplace added them to their blocklist. I didn't realize that one of the reasons was Quora is very spammy with emails.
Re: CancelQuora
#5Oh, wow I dind't know Quora was still around.
My experience with quora is probably like most peoples.
- You find out about quora
- read some interesting questions and get some answers that provide new insight and mental models that update how you think
- find some interesting and famous people replying to questions taht you read.
- Day 2 find out that there are just only so many interesting questions that can be asked and the site doesn't have alot to bring you back.
- after a week, realize that this is a site that you'd want just a monthly summary of interesting questions and answers to read.
- after a few months realize that even that is too much as there just isn't enough interesting content being generated to keep you interested.
You start to realize that most questions aren't really that interesting.
one of the typical ones was "what's something that's cool for rich people to do but trashy for poor people to do?" and you realize very quickly that the answer is a very basic, everything.
And all the answers boil down to, the poor person does these things because they have to but the rich person can do these things and then go back to being rich.
"Wear teh same clothes for a week". If you're rich, you're toughening up and becoming stoic, if you're poor its because you have no choice.
The difference is always the rich person has a choice and can always just revert back to being rich at any time.
It's not a bad site, but its the perfect example of a site that should be 4-5 people maintaining and running from an add supported boot strapped model.
If that site ever takes venture capital they'd be in trouble as there isn't a revenue model that makes sense for such a small and niche site that I can see. They'd have to start locking answers behind a paywall or making certain "luminaries" answers pay only which would break the site.
Re: CancelQuora
#6No worse than reddit.
Re: CancelQuora
#7The site has ZERO moderation. Everyday I find open calls of violence against specific groups and blatant misinformation.
Re: CancelQuora
#8I was into Quora 10+ years ago. In fact in 2012 I made their Top Writers list. It was fun. It was exciting. It was interesting. As they added features I lost interest. I go back from time to time. I don't recognize it. Not sure if it's good or bad. Maybe I'm not longer their target market? I just feels overwhelming and less quality driven. Just me?
Same here. I was a Top Writer twice. I know one year was 2014 because they sent me a nice fleece, but can't remember whether the other was before or after. Some people here might even know me from those days. Not long after that I got tired of them breaking their own rules to promote vapid (and sometimes factually incorrect) answers over actually-good ones. I remember one guy who always posted these long meme-filled pieces of absolute garbage that would get placed above other answers with 10x as many upvotes. Because "engagement" I guess. Should have been removed per the rules, but got highlighted instead. Due to that and other issues (e.g. incessant nagging about topic-specific bios) I loudly quit in 2016 or '17 and never looked back. What a trash fire.
Re: CancelQuora
#9Oh, wow I dind't know Quora was still around. My experience with quora is probably like most peoples. - You find out about quora - read some interesting questions and get some answers that provide new insight and mental models that update how you think - find some interesting and famous people replying to questions taht you read. - Day 2 find out that there are just only so many interesting questions that can be aske…
> If that site ever takes venture capital they'd be in trouble
They were in the 2014 YC batch [0] (after already raised $100m). After YC their total funding jumped to $220 million.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch
Re: CancelQuora
#10Huh. Interesting perspective. Quora has tried to reinvent itself several times, and coming to it during the pandemic has missed most of them.
Quora was founded by a bunch of Facebook refugees hoping to replicate the model of attracting a lot of users, [magic], profit. They were particularly intent that [magic] was not going to be "show ads to eyeballs", and they tried lots of other things. Turns out there was a reason none of those other models were in use by anybody else. Some of them were truly horrifically bad (like paying people to ask questions, which produced exactly the crapflood you'd expect.)
So it's in a funny position. They spent a ton of time attracting really good writers, some of who actually hang on. But monetization turned out to be exactly the same thing as every other social media site because that's what works. They don't think of themselves as social media... but they're not really anything else.
Personally, I think the Q&A format is fundamentally limited in that the low-hanging fruit gets picked early and what's left is too specific to be answered meaningfully. StackOverflow manages it, by running itself on a shoestring, and being the definitive site for a specifically lucrative market (computer techies).
As it is, Quora's next turn is towards AI, and they may end up ditching the human beings altogether. I see no sign that they've got any particular secret sauce for AI, but they've tried everything else.