How Quora died

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 contributions for granted. Stops caring about attracting contributors. Then focuses on revenue. Then makes changes to the platform that kill contributions, in pursuit of revenue.

And they miss so many obvious ways to placate and delight their contributors. "It'd be nice to have a mod tool that does X" shouldn't be a 3-year back burner ask.

Maybe make it harder for your company to footgun your golden goose?

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 certain baseline, generally above where Quora is, and hasn't seemed to decline over the years.

A lot of Wikipedia entries have become extremely partisan, and kept that way by moderators who are deeply invested in certain narratives. I find it very disappointing that no countermeasures have been taken- afaik Wikipedia still works exactly like 20 years ago, a barebone wiki governed by a lot of obscure, complex and unstructured politics.

Granted, it might be the best possible way for an open-source encyclopedia to work. It is after all an incredible success. It's just pretty bad in some parts.

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.

Then again, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

;-)

The majority of the world is conservative. Technically the majority of the US is conservative.

There are not really left wing people in US politics. Democrats are center-right. Some of that is the legacy of Bill Clinton and "triangulation".

So it would be centrist/moderate then, certainly not leftwing?

Not if the Overton Window is out of whack. Reality could conceivably be to the left or to the right of what we consider the extremes.

What we label as “centrist” isn’t guaranteed to be the “actual” center of reality’s spectrum of ideology.

At least, the internet does. Providing labor el gratis apparently goes against their purview, after all. But they sure will complain about free labor

Not saying you do, but that certain folks believe this shows just how deep the capture of mainstream media and education by the left goes.

Or, your Overton window has shifted.

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

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

As one example, I wrote this comment a few weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974614

But to expand a bit, for example I'm annoyed at many of the entries calling their subject "conspiracy theory/ theorist". Not that conspiracy theories and their believers don't exist, but at this point it has become a highly pejorative and judgemental term to frame ideas and narratives that need to be stigmatized rather than explained. Passing judgements should not, in my view, be the primary focus of an encyclopedia entry.

Are any of the details that you were upset they included in her bio (e.g. that she's a contract scientist running a small business) incorrect or irrelevant? They certainly don't seem irrelevant to me, obviously they should explain what kind of scientist she is and what she does for a living — are you just mad because they happen to make her look like a less prestigious scientist and/or reliable source then you would like her to be?

Also they pretty clearly note that her doctorate in interdisciplinary studies focused on mammals as its subject, what would you have them do? Claim that her doctorate was in something it wasn't, instead of interdisciplinary studies, just to make her look better, because a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies with a focus on some particular thing is "essentially equivalent" in your mind to an actual doctorate in that thing? Or claim she focused on evolutionary biology, when not even her own blog bio claims it was about "evolutionary biology" (she implies it was about zoology or another similar field)? Why do you say evolutionary biology should be listed then? Is it just to make her sound better?

Likewise, why wouldn't the criticism section be mostly filled with what she's been criticized about the most? If most of her other work was unremarkable or solid and nobody criticized it, but she's gotten a lot of criticism for her climate change views, why wouldn't that dominate the criticism section?

And if she hasn't had much notable work outside of her business, books, dotgs, and polar bears, I'm not sure why you would expect her career or education sections to have a ton of other stuff? That's the stuff even herself bio on her blog focuses on. Like you look at the headings of her non-criticism sections and decry them as if they are obviously lacking or derogatory or something but if that's all her notable work is about, why wouldn't they be like that?

Like, your entire criticism seems at least to lack citations of why the material you are upset about shouldn't be there, and without them it really appears like you're just upset that a factual article about someone you are to some degree sympathetic with makes them look worse than you'd like.

Honestly this is my problem with a lot of people's complaints of bias. A lot of it boils down to "the facts make my side of the issue look bad, can you emphasize/deemphasize some facts for me so both sides seem equal?"

People seem to think that truly unbiased reporting makes all sides of a controversy seem equally correct and equally to have a point, but that is simply not true. Unbiased reporting is reporting the facts of the case, and if that happens to show that one side of a controversy is more correct than the others, then so be it. The job is to report the facts as best you can, and misrepresenting the facts and skewing their connotation or interpretation to make it look like a side of a controversy that doesn't have much going for it is equal to a side that has more of the facts on their side just in order to make everyone look equal would actually be biased, not the other way around. I'm not claiming the mainstream news media reports the facts of the case well, they don't, but they also fall afoul of this problem: on whatever issue the mainstream news media has decided they are going to be "impartial" on, every time they publish an article that is even slightly supportive of one side of the controversy, they feel it necessary to post an article from the other side of the controversy, even if that second article is a completely factually false, incoherent screed that has no facts or logic on its side, and treat it on supposedly equal footing in the name of impartiality. Or anytime they report on the issue they feel the need to use unnecessarily strained language to circumlocate around calling things what they actually are in order to prevent people from coming to the obvious conclusion the facts would lead them to, because that would make one side of the narrative be obviously more correct than the other, and you can't have that.

Ok, can you explain what is a contract scientist as opposed to a scientist? Susan Crockford on her blog defines herself as "a zoologist with 40 years of experience" and "former adjunct professor at the University of Victoria"- that sounds like a scientist to me, without any need for further qualifiers.

She also has a consulting company that specialises in identifying bone fragments of North American fish, birds and mammals- the clients are mostly universities, museums and park/ forest services. I don't see references on the company's page about searching in "the scat of wild animals for ... items", which seems at one time very specific and vague. Curious choice. (*)

More, just on the lede: "she is a blogger"- no, she also runs a blog, as many scientists do. "her blog posts on polar bear biology which are unsupported ..."- imprecise, we don't yet know what those posts are about- and yet we already know that they're "unsupported by the consensus". Ah, by the way- this is just wrong: consensus is not a support for anything- you might go with or against the consensus, certainly not look for its support.

The "Early life and education" section fails to mention the title of her doctorate thesis, but instead dedicates half of its seven lines to a completely out-of-context, minute controversy about what one "Lars Olof Bjorn" thinks of one line of one article by her in 2009.

Career section "Business" ends (after two lines) with the following sentence (again, at the same time very precise and vague): "Since the start of her career, she has worked primarily through paid contracts for specific work on a variety of topics". What is it even supposed to mean? You know, that would also apply to me. "Paid contracts" indeed, for "specific work" on "a variety of topics".

In the "Books" section, only one book is cited (Google gives me 5 or 6) and again, half of the space is dedicated to the criticism from a single person.

The "Polar bears" section is basically entirely dedicated to a controversy- and still we don't know anything about what Susan Crockford claims about polar bears, why she does it, what are her points, how does she go against the "consensus". Nothing.

I'll stop here. A cursory read is enough to understand that there has been no attempt whatsoever to approach this subject with a minimum of detachment- the entry almost reads like a parody, or a satirical piece. If you don't see it, I'm sorry, think it's a problem.

* If I can pinpoint what feels wrong with these statements, is the constant oscillation between extremely vague ("a small business", "other items", "known for posts about polar bear biology") and curiously precise ("contract scientist", "in the scat of wildlife", "gained her interest in elementary school") etc.

So climate change, is it surprising the thread went bonkers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford

What ever I answer in this case the easiest reaction will be; for you will be to judge me and lump me together with what you cal activists, and for those activists it will me easiest to put me in the same conspiracy theorist group as you. This is not a problem with Wikipedia, this is a human problem.

While I also think that article is abysmal, it does give context what to expect from people posting stuff by her. The biggest problem with your complaint is that you are not linking to an alternative, just do a fast draft on Wikipedia remove everything that you feel is not relevant and link that. Sure it will be reverted but that is probably because you first draft will not be a good article, those are evidently very hard to write when people think so differently about something.

This is not a problem with Wikipedia, this is a human problem.

Wikipedia could be an excellent attack vector for sorting out human's heads at scale.

Wikipedia is great for non political, non-controversial topics, such as sciences. I wouldn't trust it on active politicians or other figures of public interest.

One major problem is that you need to submit references to back up any claim. PR companies can easily buy an article in a fringe news site and them modify Wikipedia with a reference to that article. It is almost impossible to roll back.

I once tried to update a company page to state they were going through redundancies. I was personally affected by this, and had internal emails to back this up. However, lacking a public reference it was rolled back.

Which is how it works. It is an encyclopaedia, not a breaking news site.

The problem is that PR companies can push out whatever they want, where as an ordinary individual with personal knowledge of a topic, can't. It means many Wiki articles on person or companies, are often glorified advertisements, rather than encyclopedic entries.

A blog post can be sufficient reference.

The point is that Wikipedia isn't original research. You updating the page on the basis of personal knowledge isn't the way it is supposed to work.

Yes, I am not necessarily disagreeing with this approach. The problem is the imbalance. A PR company can buy a news article, link it and update a Wikipedia page. It means the balance is in favour of big corporations and wealthy individuals.

Elsewhere in this thread people complain that the balance is all left wing.

corporations are bipartisan pretending to be partisan. I'm liberal and don't doubt liberal-facing companies can and do do this.

I added Dimon as short name for Dmitry in RU, referenced YT video with 40M views were Dimon was short name for Dmitry, video was named "He is not Dimon" for person with official name Dmitry, who was prime minister of Russia. I am Dmitry too btw, I know Dimon is also in Belarus.

Was reverted as that was not reference to some book or sciene article.

Never contributed after that. May be one or 2 graph theory improvements.

Wiki denies realitity.

And for math i use only 10% of my math requests.

That seems to usually root cause to asshole editors.

   - Thing done
   - Editor makes a judgement call
   - Turns out to be a bad call
   - Editor refuses to admit mistake
   - Things escalate

Nobody writes blogs anymore, so that doesn't seem like it'd help.

Actually it is really hard if you work for a company and you need some amends on Wikipedia.

Imagine your quite large company has a small guitar shop on the other side of the globe that has the same name.

You just want a disambiguation so nobody thinks your company is this little guitar shop. You can't just edit it yourself, you need to find a Wikipedia expert and bribe them to somehow help with your plight. It is easy to imagine that a vast PR company will wave a magic wand, but it is not always like that.

Just a few links to companies that advertise to clean up your company profile on Wikipedia.

https://www.wikiexpertsinc.com/get-free-wikipedia-consultanc...

https://www.legalmorning.com/cleaning-up-a-company-wikipedia...

And a writeup on how those companies are usually scams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

That is all far too American for me!

I've thought a two/three-lens Wikipedia split was needed to handle this, because each brings its benefits.

I remember when nascent Wikipedia had user-contributed content, and the niche articles were way more interesting and detailed. Though at the cost of inaccuracy.

Now, the submarine PR being backfed into it makes cited content pretty beige.

Something like (1) a non-reader-visible, upstream Wikifacts + (2) a community-driven, laxer Wikiprototype + (3) an authoritative, cited Wikipedia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019573

An amusing discussion where the OP says Wikipedia is here to stay, and every answer is downvoted, most of them flagged. All of them voicing concerns of some validity.

This is super representative of that happens on Wikipedia.

I have show dead enabled here. There is a shocking amount of irrational negativity in that thread, even for HN.

It is well-known that people radicalize when they are excluded from political process.

Wikipedia is notorious for excluding ordinary contributors from the process. Anybody can revert your change and that takes precedence over what you did, and there is no obvious appeal process for you, but de facto there is for the well-connected long-time editors. They can always gather some cavalry and run you over.

So they should probably do what Stack Overflow tried to do, and explicitly say that new users / infrequent contributors have to receive more care, that needs to be provided by veterans / frequent contributors, as well as provide mechanisms to do so.

Otherwise it is not a wikipedia that everyone can edit, rather a wikipedia written by a cabal who is also contains a large number of biased people, often getting direct or indirect funding from maintaining that bias.

StackOverflow also raises the bar for becoming a contributor. You can't start commenting until you have some upvotes on answers or questions for instance.

I think these things turn out to be a bit important.

StackOverflow simply discourages contribution. Which saves me time that I might otherwise spend submitting thoughtful answers on StackOverflow.

Wikipedia is in the business of paying secret writers for content to sway opinions, politically. Of course they have jumped the shark, they’re basically working for agencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Surely we can trust Wikipedia about this topic /s

Wikipedia is extremely hard to edit these days, and some of the other language Wikipedias are dominated by ill intended accounts. The Portuguese language Wikipedia is censored by mods that work for local politicians in Portugal. It’s virtually impossible to add corruption cases to their page.

So now you have this bizarro world where English language pages on Portuguese politicians have corruption scandals but Portuguese language do not.

English Wikipedia is just as easy to edit these days as ever.

Wikipedia is doing fine because it is not advertising supported.

It's only accurate if the view espoused in the page, matches what the gatekeeping moderator believes.

I like Wikipedia and think it is still one of the better user contribution sites on the web.

However, having been a long time contributor to [Current Events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) (fought over because of news relevancy), there have been waves of sock puppeting and attempts to constantly revoke all edits from certain users, that often make you not want to contribute.

There is also this editorial talking about spending that makes some arguments about current issues with Wikipedia. Namely, that there's a lot of money going in, and not a lot of requested feature development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Yeah, it's probably more accurate to say

Every for-profit contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark

Quora had one, William Gunn. He was laid off, along with the entire human moderation staff and practically all of the user-facing developers.

Quora had been going downhill for quite some time before that, as they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content and were grasping at straws. But that was the point where they appear to have pivoted entirely towards AI and continued the human generated content side on minimum life support.

they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content

This sort of thing should be a nonprofit. When it was good, it was literally making the world a better place.

Possibly the Library of Congress would be a good steward for such a platform. Something to make it resistant to enshittification.

How about Wikimedia?

Wikimedia is a non-profit that operates like a for-profit when the yearly round of donations comes around. They literally hoard money[0].

I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception.

[0]: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/

I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception.

I will always downvote a comment when someone writes something like this. It is irrelevant to the conversation and screams insecurity.

100%

Based. It is r*ddit-tier passive aggression. This place is not much better, but we should still resist this type of crap when we can.

That's so Reddit, this here is Hacker News.

Downvoted your comment immediately, as unnecessary and hostile. Parent just made a comment that knew would be unpopular and expressed that.

It's also tinged with a "People can't handle the based truth I'm laying down" attitude, which is annoying to read.

Interesting reference. Non profits cannot hoard money. I believe it becomes taxable and they can lose their non profit status (i am not an expert)

Though, hoarding seems like a mischaracterization. Per the article linked, the cash burn rate is on the order of $100M/yr, having $150M in the bank is 18 months worth of funding.

The biggest gripe I read in the article is the "high" expenditure rate and how necessary it is. It seems like reasonable people may disagree on whether that spend rate is excessive.

If the expenditure rate were lower, I'd agree it would be hoarding.

Citation needed for your claim about hoarding money, which is refuted by simple observation of the many, many endowments that exist.

I guess I can't see the reasonable argument that it is necessary when you look at the growth rate of their spending.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...

If they kept expenditures low and hoarded, I would actually be fine with that and happy to contribute. I see nothing wrong with forming a large endowment for a project like Wikipedia.

I think the distribution requirement is specifically for private foundations, not public charities.

There are no limits on a nonprofit's ability to raise and maintain cash reserves; there are limits on how and to whom funds can be disbursed and (to a lesser extent) the kinds of activities that can be used to generate funds. But a nonprofit can sit on an endlessly-growing hoard of cash if that's what they (and their donors) want to do.

I'm fine with that.

One person's hoard is another person's endowment. To-mah-to, to-may-to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment

the yearly round of donations comes around

The what? I cannot visit Wikipedia without seeing a donate bar, even when I close it every time. "Year-round" maybe.

Wikimedia is not a platform.

Their sister Wikicities / Wikia / Fandom (also relying on MediaWiki), and now owned by Texas Pacific Group, is however, another example of a platform getting enshittified.

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.

Post Elon, they are not-turning-a-profit.

Are their losses greater or less than pre purchase. I know revenue is down, but I wonder how the cost cuts affected margin.

They made a profit in 2018 and 2019 ($1.2bn and $1.45bn according to SEC filings) but not in any other year.

Presumably they could have done Elon’s massive firing spree at any point in time and become profitable overnight?

Don’t forget the massive amount of new debt that needs servicing.

They will, but it would likely need restructuring the debts and the cap table, and would not be Elon's Twitter anymore.

Yes, if the business was different, it would be different.

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.

known to censor content to be more advertiser-friendly

And now it’s know to censor content to be friendly to autocratic governments.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88xqnv/elon-musk-censors-twi...

Obviously your post has nothing to do with Twitter being for-profit before the acquisition and Musk prioritizing profit less than his predecessors, but I'll bite.

By complying with government regulations when displaying content in their respective regions to avoid getting the entire network banned there, right. While this hit piece from a notoriously biased outlet would like to equate this with ye olde Twitter's regular practice of of suppressing or deleting content worldwide at the whim of the US government, it's obviously more transparent and fair to comply with censorship locally and provide a reason for the missing content. Reeks of "it's okay when we do it".

Twitter being for-profit before the acquisition and Musk prioritizing profit less than his predecessors

Being unable to turn a profit is not the same as not prioritising profit.

If he’s so unconcerned with making a profit, then why weasel out from paying rent, the fired employees, and all the rest? Why be so adamant about a payed subscription? Why complain of advertisers leaving?

More importantly, why does a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” kowtow to an autocratic government if he’s not even concerned with profit? And why does he keep banning his own critics?

ye olde Twitter's regular practice of of suppressing or deleting content worldwide at the whim of the US government

Disputed by his own lawyers.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer...

this hit piece from a notoriously biased outlet

Here are eight more sources and a study. Surely they won’t all be “notoriously biased outlets” writing hit pieces, or is the definition for that “writes something negative about Musk”?

https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/twitter-censorship-increases-u...

https://www.thestreet.com/technology/twitter-promised-to-fig...

https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-...

https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte...

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-twitte...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

https://censortrack.org/study-twitter-censorship-shockingly-...

Thanks for the laugh.

You're going to entrust making the world a better place to... the US government?

Sure. Much better than to VC backed startups anyway.

We're going to have to agree to disagree.

The US has done terrible things in the too-recent future in the explicit name of making the world a better place.

At least, that rationale triggers my gag reflex.

Isn’t a lot of what the US government does decided by capital anyway?

Kind of.

There is a lot of money in lobbying for certain things.

Companies generally don't want political outcomes per se via lobbying outside of their own niche interests.

Much more impactful are dedicated lobby groups.

For exmaple, there's a particular country that I'm not allowed to mention here under duress of being banned that has a lot of moneyed lobbying.

Like when the sugar industry lobbied and the US government told everyone fat is bad for 50 years?

Did the government say that sugar is good?

How exactly was quora ever making the world a better place?

Marc Bodnick was the original “community manager” and frequent contributor. He’s now working on his own social net, the first-ish of which (Telepath) already flopped.

I have no experience running a site centered on user generated content, but it seems to me that the biggest problem/threat to any of them is the people who start showing up once it gains traction and becomes more popular.

Early users are a different band of the population, on every successful platform from StackOverflow to Uber they create a particular culture which is impossible to maintain as the general public arrives in large numbers.

In what way were early users of Uber different from the current users? Are you saying the drivers used to be better?

A car ride isn't 'content'.

It can be. Have you been in cars that have small snacks, karaoke, or some other sort of entertainment setup?

Not sure about what OP was saying but, for a brief time when Uber was still new, before UberX launched in mid-summer 2012, their only service was black cars. Drivers had limousine licenses, and were merely filling time in between other gigs they had booked traditionally.

To me personally, no, not better, but at one time the phrase “ride share” had a lot more meaning than it does today. People would creatively decorate their cars for example.

A StackOverflow question I asked 13 years ago (and which someone else answered 13 years ago!) was deleted just last month for being off-topic.

All the mods’ accounts were years younger than both the question and answer. Even weirder, the mod who initiated the deletion first tried to answer the question. He only voted to delete it after I commented that the question already had had an accepted answer for 13 years.

StackOverflow seems to have perverse incentives for bad moderation.

Fortunately it's so terrible I was easily dissuaded from ever answering anything.

There should be something you can do about such blatantly misaligned incentives…

What would be a platform that is NOT contributor-driven ??

Facebook: social over random content. Streaming services: commissioned content. Arguably non-monetized YouTube: where its used simply for its utility of serving video.

Yes, but all of this "content"* comes from contributors, who else ??

Streaming services (you mean 5he likes of Netflix ?) are arguably not platforms, because they are much closer to distributors or even publishers (rather than just editors, sometimes), with all the extra legal issues and contract-signing that come with that.

*"content" is really corporate-speak, I would hate my works to be called that :

https://craphound.com/content/Cory_Doctorow_-_Content.html#1

Netflix. The New York Times.

Maybe make it harder for your company to footgun your golden goose?

As someone who has started a "content contributed by users" website recently (golfcourse.wiki), I've thought long and hard about why the enshitification creep happens. I really think it happens because most of the people who start these businesses either need to take venture capital to survive, or are looking for a way to sell the business to retire rich af.

I thought long and hard about a monetization strategy, and I've got a few in my mind that don't suck. However, to achieve those goals, the project has to stay a side project and it has to run on a shoe string budget.

Call me an optimist, but in the long run, I think we will replace our enshitified websites with more open ones, the slow but steady growth fediverse shows this is happening, it's just that it won't happen fast enough for most of us to be satisfied consumers.

I just think we are looking at this through the lens of consumers, not generous creators. I occasionally help edit Wikipedia, and it looks like about 10,000-to-1, at best, people who contribute to my dumb little site. If we're all willing to waste a bit of time we can build some pretty cool sites, but there always needs to be a way for users to capture that good if the company turns evil instead of the company trying to capture the users for profit.

I see it as, well, a sort of mexican-standoff relationship that Wikipedia has built for itself (for lack of a better term). Basically, we won't enshitify the website because you'll just copy-paste it, but you won't copy-paste it because you know it's a waste of time right now. If you don't need to squeeze revenues, that's a very good relationship for long-term success.

Everyone is talking about enshittification these days, but hardly anyone is doing anything about it (including myself). Thanks for doing something about it. Do you have a blog post with your thoughts on monetization?

I have a blog, but not a blog post about that: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/

That's a good idea though. The main idea, since it is a golf wiki, is to provide tournament services to clubs. My understanding is that most of the cost of operating tournament services is due to licensing agreements with the the governing bodies, but if clubs are willing to provide their data themselves, that's not necessary, and I can charge orders of magnitude less than the competition.

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!

lol, lmao even. Reddit is literally the worst website on the internet and has slid so far downhill as to be nothing but a place to see the latest astroturfed memes. Any interesting discussion is buried underneath regurgitation and repetitive comments and all subreddits converge to be differing shades of r/politics. The users are actually the worst, they are the most argumentative people I’ve seen on any platform and I’ve been on Internet forums since the late 90s.

Perhaps VC backed businesses aren't really ideal for these type of sites.

YouTube does very well ? .

Its almost as if user-created-content sites are un-MBA-able... in the way that MBAs are cloned to measure only certain metrics in a soulless gaze toward a self-exit from the growth hocky stick launching pad they are attempting to build on bad faith and anti-patterns...

Reddit is a cluster that manages to ONLY keep going because of how agressive mods can be about their positions, but as we have seen time in, time out, MODs positions get molested by ADMINs and ADMINs posing as MODs. MODs on the take.

The point being that when Reddit IPOs - there are undoubtedly mods who have/are/will-be compensated/profit when IPO hits.

Sounds a lot like Reddit.

Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way.

The one exception would be Craigslist

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.

There's a toggle on top left that's by default set to "all related", as in answers to the question asked + a bunch of answers to things you're definitely not looking for, but are tangentially related.

If you switch the toggle to "answers", you only get answers to the question.

Sure ... but 99 out of 100 users just say "weird" and leave.

And that's "How Quora died".

I'm not here to defend Quora, but my speculation is that Google's preference for long-form content is equally to blame.

Basically the same reason as recipes that start with a long life story: Google prefers pages with lots of content, even if 10% of it is actually useful to anyone. So a page with 50+ "answers" is preferable to a page with two actual answers.

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.

You could make the same argument for search or many other products - but it doesn’t hold in practice. If the commercial closed one is more powerful and/or convenient people will not choose freedom. There’s a reason these companies are getting drenched in investor money.

I can think of a thousand ways that they could get that convenience edge against open models. For instance, when LLMs are personalized based on your own history, chats etc people won’t give those conveniences up. And that data would not be accessible to the open models, at least not seamlessly.

Exactly this.

I was recently involved in a decision of whether or not to make a nascent community SEO-friendly, which meant significant changes to the UI and reduced UX. In the end the conclusion was "f... SEO, let's build something good instead and have users come back because of that".

Keep fighting the good fight. This is the hill to die on.

They most likely also prefer titles that get clicked.

But the best results are those where the user uses the back button and clicks something else. They must not click back within n seconds of course. The user has to spend a minimum amount of time on the almost useless page.

I got this feeling looking for many things. I know there are pages but get many results very very close to what I was looking for.

Dubious reversal of key words where "how to turn a car into an airplane" becomes "how to turn an airplane into a car"

Then people start making perfect SEO pages like "how to style css with html"

"how to style css with html"

I was intrigued by the idea of such a page, but unfortunately your comment is apparently the only mention of that phrase on the internet.

@6510 should sell that precious internet real estate

I occasionally visit quora off of search results because I kinda got used to parsing out what I wanted, but never knew about this toggle.

I literally cannot understand how anyone thought intermixing related questions and answers together is in any way useful or beneficial to their users, especially when the default is set to ON.

Can people not really understand this? Some of those related questions are dupes, other times they are paths to rabbit holes. ycombinator does the same thing. When you guys see posts that come up that have been here before, you post links to previous discussions. I saw this recently specifically with the links to articles on Martin Couney (I had a hard time finding that because the article is so poorly worded).

Even Reddit has linkability to detect the URL and show you an 'other discussions' lens (for Old Reddit).

Granted, this is a slight taxonomy difference of 'other discussions' of the same exact topic, vs other discussions related to your topic. But I think it's a useful and helpful feature.

The problem is that there's no continuity between what is related and what is an answer to the question asked. Related answers are intermixed with real answers at the same level. You can only tell something is a real answer by the absence of bold text and presence of light grey text.

The link upthread isn't a good example, because the question is so basic it's easy for them to have a lot of related (duplicate) questions and answers. When the topic requires more nuance or is more specific, then the related questions and answers really aren't related at all, and they just add a bunch of useless noise.

hackere news isn't a question / answer site. I don't come here with the same expectations that I do when I go to something like stack overflow or quora.

Ironically, if I do a google search for something and ycombinator comes up in the results, the link is directly to the comment that is relevant- not to the top level of the article with all of the related sibling comments. If anything, from that perspective hacker news is actually a better question and answer site than quora.

That, and I have seen AI answers in the mix too, often wildly wrong or completely off topic.

So you look for a question, and all the answers are not even relevant, and often completely off topic or wrong.

Seems wild to put a bunch of “related” answers that are relationship advice, movie questions and other things when you look up things like programming questions.

I can understand the rabbit hole thing. Never thought about that. That they think of themselves as TikTok and not stack overflow or Reddit.

Yeah, this is the main problem I have with Quora. You go to a thread to look for answers to a question, then find the platform has merged in a bunch of answers to related questions alongside the ones I'm actually there to read.

For example, I found this random question just now:

https://www.quora.com/How-does-blockchain-technology-work-11

About half the answers there are actually to that question. The rest are to questions that are about the same thing but with different wording:

* 'How does block chain technology work?' * 'How blockchain technology works?' * etc

or to related but not quite identical ones:

* 'What is blockchain technology and how does it work?' * 'What is blockchain technology, could you explain it in an easy way?' * 'What is a blockchain?'

So you'll see a lot of answers... which may or may not actually be for the question you were interested in. Or which may explain it in a weird way, since the actual question they answered was worded very differently.

At least with StackOverflow you know that the answers are all related to the same question.

I really fail to understand how a company can consciously guide itself to degrade so badly. Like these were actual decisions of meetings and the results of a ton of work of teams to implement. And it destroyed the site.

Product of too much VC, probably.

Product of middle managers, the cause of nearly all corporate problems.

Middle managers pursue the CEO's vision. They aren't steering the ship.

That's your theory, anyway.

Either the CEO sees what’s going on and is fine with it mean it is their vision, they are putting their feet up and don’t care, or they are not fine with it and have no control over the company.

Seems bad any way you look at it.

they are not fine with it and have no control over the company

something something "all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way"

In some places, the "vision" is sufficiently vague that all sorts of dumb decisions can be justified by it.

Or the CEO is so stupid that he only listens to his direct reports, who all tell him everything is under control. And when they tell him not to "micromanage" he listens and backs off.

You can't make any universal statements about this.

i.e. "bad" CEO. I don't really think the reason matter.

Can't see a something like "show answers to related questions directly under a single answer to the intended question" being a middle-manager decision.

You can't? How do you think it happens in a fairly large company, then?

More likely, it's a product of not making money and of trying to find a way to make money and not go out of business.

At least with StackOverflow you know that the answers are all related to the same question.

I don't know, most StackOverflow answers I run into are "closed as duplicate of <not my question>" or "closed as duplicate of <how would I have solved my problem 8 years ago with only the tools available then>"

Or gods forbid, someone had a slightly open ended question.

Slightly open-ended doesn't seem to be a problem for me on SO. Where I've really had a problem is the admins not reading the question properly then closing it as already answered elsewhere. I find that screeching like a banshee gets it apologetically reopened. Bit frustrating but a flawed SO is better than no SO at all.

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.

A/B tests are likely involved because no human would suggest those changes in earnest, but what metric could those tests have improved!?

Either it’s a series of unchallenged false positives, or there’s a lot about web interface that neither I nor they understand, but I would challenge the idea that is the result of a well-informed A/B testing culture. It’s the output of a thousand monkeys running a thousand tests a day for three years, and releasing anything that hits the green line.

ad views, and paid subdcriptions, and retention of subscribers.

Answers per question?

I feel the same way about Amazon.com. It feels cluttered and messy. Most the opt-ins / opt-outs have to be read closely to make sure you're not being suckered by some dark pattern.

If you visit Amazon often enough you kinda get used to it. But a new vistor imho would be shellshocked.

I remember fondly this paragraph from the famous google platform memo:

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.

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.

This is the reality. Not just in Quora but all tech companies. A/B testing is used to determine how to squeeze more and more engagement, in small parts of the app. And over time the app becomes an ad factory with unrelated posts because apparently people are more engaged when they are lost and unable to find any information.

Seems like jobs after LLMs still have a chance sob

Couldn't agree more. It's easy to see this user hostility increase slightly, over and over across a period of years, each time having some idea that there is some short-term metric that is positively affected.

Considering I rarely understand what I'm even looking at with the mish mosh of answers, and I'm not willing to create an account, I've outright blocked Quora in my browser.

As an aside, I think the extreme enshittification of Quora basically highlights every single problem with VC-driven, growth-at-all costs, "metrics and data driven" tech platforms (as an aside, the reason I put square quotes there is not that I think metrics and data are bad, but I think most companies are not honest that they're optimizing for metrics and data that are easy to gather, while the fuzzier but actually more critical concepts of user trust and sentiment get ignored over time). I mean honestly, is there any single employee at Quora that thinks that what the site became is anything but a total shit show?

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.

Yep. As a UI/UX specialist, it’s nothing short of a nightmare. I can’t decide if it’s purposeful (they’re trying to kill the site), negligent (they can’t hire or retain talent, or who they have is making bad decisions), or just full of corporate/organizational bloat (basically all decisions made by non-engineers such as stakeholders or investors designed to maximize profit and ad space).I am leaning towards bloat.

I think it’s just a really logical way for them to monetize. If the UI was good you’d never click on (or likely even see) an ad.

I’d bet they just tested it and found that’s how they make money.

People complaining about the site wouldn't pay for the site they say they want.

That’s probably true and for a long time Quora was of sufficient value that I would have said it was worth it.

Anymore that’s not the case. Answer quality has gone down drastically and the percent of Google searches that end up there has gone up.

Google really ought to de-index them. And don’t even get me started on Pinterest.

Quora is the only site that I actively block to make sure that I don’t go there by mistake.

It has to be the worse site on the internet.

nah i think pinterest is even a notch worse

pinterest can be better if you are actually there to use it (ie not directed from search traffic)

Quora and Pinterest... one has cornered the text-based SEO-spam segment, other has cornered the SEO-spam image segment.

Reddit is the same way if you don't go to old.reddit.com. You see that there are N comments, but you only get to read the first few, and suddenly you're looking at an entirely different post. Every time I accidentally go there I get confused by it. There is no chance anybody asked for this, it's so stupid it had to come out of perversely chasing some metric.

That behaviour is complete madness. And old.reddit has pretty much the perfect interface for computer usage anyway. Why they won't just label it "desktop style" and call it a day is beyond me.

And often when you expand comment replies the comment you were looking at disappears and you have to scroll around to find it again. It must be deliberate, there's no way you accidentally make something work that poorly.

I’m not sure what their business model is, I assume ads, so I always wonder what good the login wall does and making the UX so horrible. I too only ever get there from a Google search too, much like Wikipedia, but with Wikipedia I’m usually going to make a few clicks once I’m there as the related link exploration is natural. I assume quora could get more clicks out of me if it wasn’t so awful. They’ve instead taught me to never click past the initial Google link, my bounce rate is 100%.

It seems like such a missed opportunity. Even when I compare to my stack exchange usage, I’m not a registered user, I’m only ever consuming information, but I click around and they benefit through ads.

I’m not sure what their business model is

Probably also email harvesting and any associated segmentation they get with your reading history, since it's required to sign up to read anything.

Biggest difference is Wikipedia isn't ad driven and the information on there is actually interesting, naturally drives you to explore. My bounce rate is 100% and I rarely click a Quora link if I can help it. 1% useful 99% noise.

I agree with StackExchange, sometimes the random things on the sidebar grab my attention, whether it's some random travel question, workplace, about writing/sci-fi, etc.

Pinterest is another spammy site. Same with Quora. Like what is the model here? Spam SEO, drive ad revenue? In my experience Yahoo Answers was 10x more interesting than anything Quora offers, but maybe I and others like me are the exception and companies like Quora are actually getting eyeballs with their UX and business model and that's why Yahoo Answers isn't a thing anymore.?

Google sending traffic to Quora, one ad-based business to another, with user being secondary and content on both being incentivized by ad clickthrough rates, is a dying paradigm. It had a good run though but I do not imagine it will be missed.

Google needs to nerf their rankings. It's essentially a near-useless click bait website for ads. Any new site with such horrible signal to noise ratio would never get such a priority in results. I can't imagine any other website linking to it, so I can't imagine how Quora remains so high anyways, even if page rank is long gone.

The single change they made that killed the platform was changing the dropdown default from "answers to the question" to "answers to related questions".

Absolutely insane.

I bet whoever suggested this insanity got promoted because “user engagement” went up. Users becoming more confused.

feel like this was somewhat recent. i didn’t use quora much already, but this is the change that took me from using ever to never using

That used to not be the case, and the site design was more reasonable. But now, I completely agree with you.

Installed uBlocklist, and both quora and pinterest are on it, never have to see them in results again.

I’ve never used Quora because of this, and also it has always looked like a scam website.

You know those pages you find on google that are just SO/Wikipedia articles copied? That’s what Quora looks like lol

It’s a UX trainwreck

That’s exactly my experience so I just avoided quora, for some reason the question I was looking at had many answers to different questions below, after scrolling a bit downwards something resembling a connection with the question in the form of an answer would be found but… it’s too much trouble.

Quora also comingles ads with content, and the ads look almost identical to content. Quora has become unpleasant and unusable in the past decade, and I only end up there on accident.

I just logged in out of curiosity, and I have an avalanche of “notifications” that are just pathetic — “Dark Psychology Facts posted in a space you might like: ‘Can a human win in a battle with a hyena?’”

I think it's an attempt at question deduplication where they had more confidence in that matching algo than they should have. It usually conflates two questions with similar words but very different meanings.

Yeah, the login wall made me always close the tab. I am just assuming there is still a login requirement with Quara so I still automatically close the tab.

This is the result of stickiness being more important than utility.

Don't blame LLMs, blame the registration requirement.

This is one of the kinds of product that people will skip if they can't evaluate it frictionless.

This is what always stops me at quora’s door.

Me too.

I've a simple but strict set of security rules for whether I'll use a website.

- it does not want to run javascript

- that I can access it over Tor without being blocked

- that it will work in a text based browser like elinks

Despite the protestations by idealogues that no such sites exist, HN meets all those requirements, as do dozens of useful sites I regularly use.

If and only if I get to evaluate the quality of a site based on those requirements, I may eventually register, with nothing more than an email, in order to post replies.

Quora fell off that list long ago. More recently so did StackExchange.

Often I find that things break as soon as Cloudflare proxies are involved.

I can 100% guarantees you that Quora didn’t die because of people who didn’t want to run JavaScript or be able to access it over Tor.

Surely my absence played no pivotal role in their downfall. I didn't even know Quora had "died". How sad. RIP Quora. But a tjpnz said:

"They're also driving away contributors with more altruistic motivations"

Now, I can agree with that, because I see a very strong alignment between the set of people who strongly uphold their own values and have self-respect, and those who stand up for the rights of others and have something to give.

The "walled garden" internet basically drives away people who give a fuck.

One other way of saying “drives away people who give a fuck” could be saying those people are self-aggrandizing, self important, always yelling at the top of their lungs about their zealotry telling everyone at first opportunity about how they turn off JavaScript and don’t contribute the much to the discussion

I liken people like this to the Amish. They balk at modernity as being incompatible with their beliefs. So they withdraw from the world and live life as they see fit.

What they don’t do is go around all the time yelling at people telling them how their lifestyle is wrong or constantly telling other people how they don’t use certain technologies.

That really flipped your wig didn't it?

I'm intellectually curious, what you're so deeply invested in that was just threatened?

He’s right, people who always talk about they don’t use sites that require Javacript adds about as much to the conversation as people who show up in television conversations and say “I haven’t owned a television in 20 years, do people still watch TV?”

Forget about me for a moment.

Does Javascript really mean something important to you?

Not running JavaScript in 2024 is like putting a speed governor on your own car that limits you to going 35 miles an hour.

It serves no useful purpose

It serves no useful purpose

No useful purpose to who?

What purpose do you have for removing functionality that has been part of the web since the 90s?

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 otherwise.

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 any more susceptible to Zero day exploits than the number of other exploitable parts of the OS that you also don’t have any control over.

And even if you only run open source software, how long was the OpenSSL bug in operating systems before it was discovered?

Do you use your mobile’s messaging system? That’s been one of the primary targets of exploits that will target you directly.

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.

If we stick with that analogy, then since HN requires no Javascript, it's more like we're having a discussion on a radio show, and I am saying "I don't really watch much TV", no?

What I hear is that Javascript is a means of speed and power to you. And for you, forgoing that power would serve no useful purpose. Do I understand that correctly?

What I am wondering is, do you think that for other people, they should, maybe even must, feel the same way? Even if they are very pleased just listening to the radio?

Well, how many people do you really think disable JavaScript and want to browse the web over Tor?

It's not completely unrelated I think.

It's hard to me to see how a site with a vision like Quora (had) can continue existing for long after they start ignoring accessibility issues.

Sounds like I should be looking for a Stack Overflow alternative too.

(I'm suspecting that this might be related to the recent issue of better accessibility also making it easier to abuse for neural network based abusers, and it certainly looks like a hard problem to solve for the most popular websites.)

Accessibility is important. But it doesn’t relate to success of a company. Besides, modern screen readers and even accessibility affordances on modern cell phones - at least iPhones - don’t struggle or care whether the site uses JavaScript

But it doesn’t relate to success of a company.

I am wondering what you mean by "success" of a company here? Is that purely financial success? Or rate of growth or something like that?

Financial success or rate of growth

Right and those are good things. Noble things. There's nothing wrong with making a few pennies and jobs for others.

But they are not the only things that define the success of a person, or a company. WOuld you agree?

This is not what users seem to say ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39211037

Sounds like I should be looking for a Stack Overflow alternative too.

SO went to hell when they started demanding ready to copy paste answers instead of 'teach the man how to fish' answers.

You must agree that for almost every web-based product, designers and product managers can safely decide to completely ignore all people who have requirements like yours without it ever affecting their success.

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, there are some that do. Moreover, those sites seem to self curate as being of very good quality. So I am happy that there are thoughtful, intelligent people out there who "get it". When they stop, so do I, and just move on. It's not personal and I'm not invested in them.

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 :)

You're not even 1%, maybe .000001%

It’s not 1%, more like 0.005%.

Not only can they ignore such users, they have to.

And yet here I am, the annoying fly in the ointment of your hypothesis, no?

One thing I like about HN is that they make the same amount of money off of me whether I run JavaScript or not. I imagine we can agree there...

Oh indeed. What a wonderful training set this will make one day when it's sold. We'll be too sore to sit down in the morning, but right now at least we're getting a reach-around.

Given that HN has a public API to export all the conversations nobody needs to wait for that day to make it into a training set. In fact, I would be extremely surprised if it hasn't already been trained on.

Hmm I was going to say something about Stallman-like fanaticism, but then I remembered Stallman proved to be mostly right...

Richard is most concerned about injustices toward people that take away their freedoms. I am most concerned about the security of people and how software makes them insecure in order to profit from, or abuse them. These are proximate but different.

It is a bit worrying that both freedom and security are thought 'fanatical' by some.

It is a bit worrying that both freedom and security are thought 'fanatical' by some.

Because those are your grandpa's and your dad's causes, respectively. The operative word for this generation is "consent."

Manipulate someone into giving Consent and you can do whatever the hell you want to them. They asked for and agreed to the abuse!

It all starts with clicking "I accept."

My skin crawls anytime I see someone bring it up; it's a red flag that someone is trying to apply BDSM protocol negotiation to an otherwise-simple interaction. Attorneys do this shit too. People only ever do it at all when they're trying to rewrite the rules in their favor.

It all starts with clicking "I accept."

You don't have to click 'I accept'. If the dialog is too complex to figure out what you're accepting, click reject or close the page.

If there is no obvious reject (even if there is a hidden one) just close the page and never come back.

In all honesty I think grandpa's and dad's causes were getting home with all their arms legs still attached, but I hear you. Once the sound of trumpets fades and the flags are folded, it's hard to get out of your head what has been internalised so deeply. Yeah they're just words, usually uttered by men who've sacrificed nothing.

But hey, this thing about "consent". Jolly interesting. Because not a single person I've met born after 2000 really has the capacity

I do not mean that in a disparaging way, but I do mean it in a serious legal sense. I don't think that in the 21st century the vast majority of adults have the capacity to consent to digital contracts. It started with EULAs, and has since plunged the entire legal profession into degeneracy. It's total failure to protect the lives of common people from technology predators is shameful.

They're also driving away contributors with more altruistic motivations. There are a few niche subjects for which I can offer a semi-useful perspective. But I'm not going to do it if Quora build a big fucking wall around it. When they started introducing that I deleted my account. Fuck them.

I blame what the other comment says, the UI mixing in answers to other questions.

I was an active contributor to Quora in the mid-10's -- my answers gained some 3m views. It was really something back then, as many people have fondly reminisced about the era. There were so many great writers who brought so much understanding to whatever crazy stuff they were passionate about by writing for free on Quora. You had diplomats, chefs, former propaganda writers, people living through violent conflict, doctors, teachers, scientists, physicists, astronauts and the list goes on. Quora from that time truly helped me understand the world better.

AI might have driven the final nail in the coffin but the one decision which was truly an inflection point was starting a program that would pay for asking X amount of questions. The platform was cool because of people who wrote ANSWERS -- to the point where the original question sometimes became even tangential to the actual answer but you'd learn so much nevertheless. Quora not only ended the top-writer program for those people it started offering monetary incentives for asking the most inane bullshit questions as long as they got the views. It is truly baffling to me how something that holds so much genuine value can be driven into the ground while making decisions left, right and center (and the whole community trying to tell you exactly what you're doing) that destroyed everything of value in the Quora process. The older answers are still there, but the community magic has utterly evaporated.

I guess it's pretty normal for folks who have seen this happening in BBS/Usenet era but regardless of all of Quora's faults (the tone-moderation of the language was always a bit overboard in IMHO but I don't think it led to the downfall -- it was always there and writers worked around it) it is genuinely disappointing to see every successive platform try to build something of value only to falter and disappear because we just can't seem to keep anything good around.

I rage quit Quora some years ago publicly here on HN, I dont recall now the exact reason (something to do with unwanted profile/content/privacy change or some such...

It was quite a while back, but I have never really gone to quora since, especially since its basically a paywall (I also never go to NYT unfortunately because their paywall is so BFY;TW I cant stand it.

Wow what is that acronym?

Because Fuck You; That’s Why

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFYTW

Somehow having an acronym with a semicolon actually makes a vulgar rage explosion seem controlled and even educated.

Where did we all go so Wrong?

Venture capital is where we rent wrong. they are to startups what PE is to developed companies.

BFY;TW - "Because Fuck You; Thats Why"

How do you expect the New York Times to pay its reporters if they do not charge? Internet advertising is not a large money maker for a lot of sites. Also, if people will not pay for news, unethical corporations and unethical governments will, and our "free" news will be propaganda. My main point is people on the Internet cannot have it both ways. We either pay for high quality content or we accept we are going to get clickbait, astroturf, propaganda, fake news, etc.

StackOverflow has the same problem, prioritizing question askers instead of answerers.

As a result, the site is now "welcoming" to new users asking low-quality questions, but actively hostile to what the answerers and mods would like. While they're the ones left to clean up the spam.

And when the low-effort questions are closed that then drives away the question askers too, because all the "nice" onboarding didn't tell them their question should actually be well-researched. Their expectations of getting help now clash with reality and they end up hating the experience.

But all this drives views and "questions" in the short-term and management is so clueless it's hopeless. See e.g. the recent mod strike due to the AI policy issues, where they initially wanted to prevent/ban mods from deleting low-quality AI content from serial ChatGPT spammers.

As someone that has asked a lot more (quite good) questions on SO, than has given answers, and almost all my SO rep. is based on those questions, I can report that my experience has been that I've been treated somewhat barbarously, by high-score mods. Just the mere fact that I was asking a question, made me "lesser," in their eyes. This could be rather infuriating, because I actually sorta know my stuff. One of the things that I know, is that I don't know a lot of stuff, and appreciate finding out, from folks that do.

For that reason, I learned to bite my tongue, when they sneered, and appreciated the answer, which was often quite good.

I haven't really done much there, in years. I still get upvotes for my questions, years after I wrote them. At some point, people just stopped answering my questions, and I usually ended up posting my solution, when I figured it out on my own.

I feel that Quora has turned into the same thing that LinkedIn Groups have become: A haven for ad-scammers and "SEO" people.

One of the things that happens on both platforms, is that someone asks a specific question, and ignores sincere, legitimate answers, but rewards the "shill" "answers," where a particular product is recommended as the "solution."

I dumped every LI group, after encountering these folks, and I never really warmed to Quora, because, I guess, I came late to the party, after these people had started their games. I realized the platforms were worthless to me.

I won't go, where I'm not wanted.

I can't imagine getting paid for either answers or questions. They both take so much time and brainpower, that I can't believe that the income would be at all worthy of the effort. I think that SO actually did a good job on "gamifying" the Q&A process. I may have issue with the inevitable status games, but I learned to just keep my peace, and appreciate the help.

Check my recent submissions, I agree. The mods were just as bad as, if not worse than, the administrators on SO. It was actually the mods that drove more people away imho (from conversations with other high rep contributors).

lol I just typed an answer to the top level question, pressed Submit, then saw yours haha. Cheers. It felt great to leave that hellhole a few years ago. I was a (admittedly lowly chump) top 1% contributor with an account for over a decade.

Quora really captured lightning in a bottle around that time. I used to get a weekly (daily? Can't remember) email from Quora and I would read just about every question in it. I came to look forward to the emails. I've never had that experience with any other other newsletter.

As a daily destination, Quora is no longer usable for me, no need to repeat what others already said. But the digest still surprises me and the posts are often good, even if it's a rewritten Wikipedia entry. It's like a user-generated "wonders of the past/world" newspaper for me. Daily was too much, but weekly is ok. I'm not sure whether every e-mail send it personalized, but at least in some way it looks like dependent on what I clicked before.

Fascinating and confirms my suspicions. The point when the questions popping up in my feed were obviously not genuine is when I lost interest in Quora. The worst was how it'd always show me variations of questions fetishizing working at Google. Seriously every single Quora digest email had some variation of a question like "What is the best thing about working at Google?" Unsubscribed and don't miss it.

My newsletters always had one-two of those and then another that was always like "what's the hardest part of how nobody in society respects you for having a 160 IQ?"

the most inane bullshit questions as long as they got the views

StackOverflow fell into a similar trap with reputation on controversial or highly upvoted question farms. The problem was further compounded by a ridiculous Triage queue system that could issue account suspensions and bans for honest opinions and feedback if your answers did not align with the prevailing groupthink of a few elite arbiters there.

Not that different from what happened somewhat to HN. Read my name backwards.

It is truly baffling to me how something that holds so much genuine value can be driven into the ground while making decisions left, right and center (and the whole community trying to tell you exactly what you're doing) that destroyed everything of value in the Quora process.

It's crazy that the operators of a website like this could understand so little about what made it special, but I guess all they understood was engagement metrics.

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 about adding webpages of individual questions, for SEO purposes.

I remember the day they announced to the top writer forum that they were killing incentives for good answers and starting to incentivize engaged question askers. Overnight, you got bots posting questions about trivial math problems (literally just multiplication in most cases). The top writers disappeared.

What hurts the most: I deleted my account. At some point it became undeleted. I don't have the ability, as far as I'm aware, to kill it. My profile lives on to enrich the people who betrayed the writers. Kind of sad, but it was all about engagement. Ad dollars.

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.

Why aren't science journals the same? Why do I still have to pay some middle man?

My high level speculation is curation. There actually is (or should be?) some sort of peer review system by people for that journal. That labor is valuable.

Also, simple grandfathering. I imagine once upon a time Science journals was a literal term. Easier to keep the same hook if your users were used to it in another medium.

There was a time when it made sense to have both done by the same entity. Time for a devorce. One does the work the other collects the reward??

It is actually very rare to pay the reviewers. The standard is that peer review process is done by senior scientists as volunteers.

Because academics care more about which journal a paper is published in, rather than the content of the paper.

I don't know. I'm not in academia or doing research, but from the outside looking it, it seems like a racket.

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

How long does one need to be in the EU to have/exercise that right?

E.g., could an American issue a deletion order during a layover in a European airport?

I believe you just need to be a European resident, although how you define that is the crux. Realistically if you have a way to prove an address you reside at in Europe, that should be sufficient.

I do not live in the EU.

What hurts the most: I deleted my account. At some point it became undeleted. I don't have the ability, as far as I'm aware, to kill it. My profile lives on to enrich the people who betrayed the writers. Kind of sad, but it was all about engagement. Ad dollars.

This sounds horrific and ironic when Quora's founder is on the OpenAI board with a role to supposedly oversee ethics. But, after all he was the CTO of a company that pioneered putting tracking pixels everywhere, so this is just typical silicon valley stuff.

exactly lol. quora is shit, poe is shit. it's like everything he builds and touches eventually evolves into a cancer to the society.

if you'll put drug cartels on one end of a spectrum, he'll be on the opposite end where everything he did sure is legal but definitely monetized and ruined the same amount of lives.

I wouldn't call it horrific (though I guess others might). I'm inclined to think it wasn't intentional. It certainly doesn't keep me up at night, and it's not like I regret anything that I posted on the account. I just find it disrespectful that I'm prevented from expressing my dissent around the company's reversal of its original premise.

Not only Quora, but many other sites including the various "stackexchange" sites started declining I would say from about 2018, so this is not a phenomenon attributed to llms. IMHO I attribute this to the following: a) The overuse of social media conditioning users to provide short answers, rather than long thoughtful write-ups, b) Most topics have been saturated to the limit c) lack of interest from the new generation d) Bad management and moderation.

I think stack exchange’s moderators killed that site. Common complaints were how antagonistic they were toward new users. Hard to grow or sustain a user base if you turn out all the new ones.

Yeah it's a really big problem with StackOverflow. The mods are all crazy. I can't find it now but the StackOverflow Devs proposed actually fixing (or at least improving) question closing by allowing the asker to reopen their question once. I can't remember the exact details, but it sounded like a good first step. Downvoted to hell by the existing mods of course.

They're a bit screwed because they rely so much on volunteer mods but the volunteer mods are crazy...

Doesn't sound like either of you know how SO works. Very little is done by mods, mainly it's votes by normal users. Like I could be voting to close something as a duplicate, off topic etc with my privileges. It's the community doing this, not moderators.

And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework or doing very little effort themselves before asking. Why do these people deserve others spending their time helping them if they can't even bother to search or formulate something coherent?

And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework

I don't think anyone objects to closing those questions. That's not really what this is about. My questions are very clearly not asking for help with homework and trivial "how do I write a for loop" or "it doesn't work" questions. Still get downvoted/closed frequently. Most often:

* It gets closed as duplicate because there's a vaguely similar - but different - question. Or sometimes there's a completely different question with an answer that incidentally also answers my question.

* It gets closed as too vague or not clear because it's simply outside the domain of expertise of the voter. It's clear to people that know what I'm talking about.

To be clear when I say "mods" I don't exclusively mean people with official mod power. It's also people that moderate for fun - those that trawl the new questions. Let me know if you have a better name for those people.

You can tell it's them because you very often get a couple of downvotes immediately and then if you check back a month or two later it will have been upvoted by many more people that actually had the same question and arrived there via Google.

Feel free to drop links to your said questions. Often it's just vague allegations with little evidence.

Getting something closed as a duplicate shouldn't be taken as a slight. It's often good that various formulations of a question then can point to the same answer. Or if the answer to the other question answers yours, isn't it just good that you and other people will be directed there? It's a Q&A site, not a forum. Which question stands doesn't matter except for feelings.

Same with your vague or clarity. It's Q&A, not a forum with back and forth discussions. It's just not a right fit. You might think that's not how you'd like the site to be, but it is how it is. It's not overzealous moderators closing it.

Not the person you replied to but StackOverflow is ridiculously hostile to new users including formerly me. I have over 2k points on HN and much more on reddit. I've spent much more time on SE than on HN but I don't even bother contributing because the times I tried it, it went nowhere.

I've been on StackOverflow for almost 15 years now, with 100k reputation (mostly from old answers). I can tell you that I routinely run into examples of what GP described while searching for answers - it happens quite often that search engine produces link to an SO question that is about the same exact thing I'm investigating, and it's a well-written question covering the details and various explored avenues... and it's closed as "duplicate" of something that isn't actually relevant.

And the site is dying as a result. That fact alone makes your point moot.

It's in my real name so I don't want to link any of my questions, but I'll start keeping a list for when this comes up next.

That’s great. You haven’t addressed my point: who do you think is asking questions about their homework? A community needs a steady influx of new users to remain vital. You’re not going to get that with _often incorrect_ references to duplicates.

Fact is, nobody wants to go to Stack overflow anymore for answers because the experience sucks. And they don’t mind using ChatGPT. Thanks for all the training data, Stack!

The internet is a wild place, but there was a time it seemed tamed, Google fixed search and got rid of mail spam with Gmail, FB and Twitter got the feed right, ads became text-only with Adwords instead of animated gifs, ExpertsExchange, SO and various interesting personal websites and blogs had answers and were fun to read.

But just like with antibiotics, bugs were trained on it and they got stronger finding the exploit until spam, scam and greed destroyed it once again. Sigh!

You are missing the elephant in the room, the incentives that drive shit content: SEO. Both quora and stack exchange – as businesses – are downstream of Google search in particular. Their main goal is to appease PageRank. All else follows from that.

Seems like every time I land on Quora it's just a bunch of people bragging about their IQs while simultaneously lambasting neo Nazis, all while missing the juicy irony of their entire worldview.

I avoid Quora.

Most smart people I know oppose neo Nazis. That's not a very controversial position.

So you don't see the irony of people raving about how innately superior they are because of their IQ but hate on people whose core tenant was being innately superior?

"Smart" is very much a function of the work you put in, though of course not the only factor. I don't feel the need to have to explain this more than I have.

Edit: I have to ask... what about the smart people that don't oppose them? What's their deal?

I find anyone bragging about their intelligence to be intolerably obnoxious.

100% of the smart people I know oppose Nazism. It seems there are too many politicians around who are objectively intelligent but are a bit comfortable with at least some of the Nazi Party’s ideas.

"We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare." That's one Nazi Party idea according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program). I would say you are not that intelligent if you oppose that just because "Nazism bad". If you oppose racism it's pretty clear that you don't in general support Nazism. But opposing Nazism doesn't mean that you even oppose racism, maybe your smart friends just don't like that particular German codified version of racism, it's pretty pointless statement without some analysis. Just like US was back then against Nazism and ultimately even went to war with them while simultaneously being openly racist.

Granted, many of the Nazi ideas revolve pretty obsessively around the concept of race, but looks like at least in one case they were even explicitly not racists: "We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race." And that's another idea I basically fully agree with. IMO death penalty should be reserved only for the most serious cases, but society needs to be extremely harsh to career criminals and their ilk, they laugh at lenient punishments.

I think the upvote/downvote model for evaluating content is fundamentally not a good one, and this deficiency is the root problem for a lot of sites (Reddit, Quora, etc.) that were founded around the same time, circa 2005-2012. It lends itself too much to groupthink, popularity contests, and self-promotion.

X/Twitter has a million other problems, but I do like their new Community Notes of fact-checking claims. It's essentially anonymous and somewhat immune to self-promotion.

Going forward, a better path for FAQ-type sites is probably something similar to that model. The hard part is how you get users to answer questions while removing the self-promotion and gamification/scoreboard incentives.

It's possible that AI might just destroy this space entirely, but I still think you need some form of human fact-checking in order to avoid hallucinations.

Anyone who shares an article or news which has been community noted gets an immediate downvote in recommendations for me.

Community Notes could just be an expansion of a good tweet to clear up some ambiguity.

The up/down feature tends to create echo chambers that eventually exclude half the population. Reddit is worse at this because of excessive moderation combined with doomscrollong incentives.

I think the upvote/downvote model for evaluating content is fundamentally not a good one

This is why the bump model that 4chan uses is superior. You can sort threads by activity, but all posters display with equal weight, and you must utilize critical thinking to evaluate each and every post (unless it is from a trip user whose authority you trust in a particular domain), not some little number that pushes them to the top or sinks them to the bottom. There are (You)'s, but that can indicate consensus, disagreement, controversy, or something else, and you need to sus that our for yourself.

Consensus-based truth models are frankly shit for most types of topics. Heck, even for scientific topics, the peer review model has been shown to be completely bankrupt.

Quora seems pure clickbait at this point. Unfortunately, because it didn't start that way, now anything still relevant on that site is burried under the weight of the nonsense.

I get random emails from them about "popular" questions like "why has Javascript replaced C++?" Seems like ragebait.

One thing I noticed back when I browsed Quora a lot is that most the answers were in direct opposition to the question being asked. It’s like clockwork.

Q: why is running so good for you

A: it actually isn’t good for you. <insert justification>

Q: why do so many people run when it’s so bad for you

A: it actually is really good for you. <insert justification>

Every single question seemed to be this way. It probably reveals a lot about human nature, but it really turned me off to know I was just reading knee jerk reactions to questions rather than anything accurate.

All this to say, yes, ragebait is the lifeblood of Quora.

For programming questions, the answer is always "it depends" even if it doesn't really depend.

Quora was never as great as yahoo answers

At its peak it was considerably better than Y!A. They started with Silicon Valley luminaries (their friends) and that attracted a lot of other well educated users, especially scientists and philosophers. A lot of genuinely great content was generated.

I believe Q&A sites will inevitably degrade as the low-hanging fruit is picked early. ("How do I lose weight?" "Explain relativity" "Is God real?") It can start with great answers, but it quickly becomes repetitious. Y!A probably also had a similar phase, but by the time most people heard about it, it was already famously dumb.

Quora followed a similar path. It actually lasted longer than one might expect, in part because they threw a lot of money at it. But it is now much worse because it's better known and a more visible target to trolls and spammers. Plus it's reputation for paying people, which attracts vast amounts of minimum effort, much of it automated. (And not paying any more, but that doesn't stop people.)

Yahoo Answers was greater because it was so bad. Quora wasn't good enough or bad enough. Gotta go one way or the other.

If you're a fan of trolling you should check out Quora now. There are some real full time professionals.

This is what happens when you gatekeep replies / lurking.

Remember StackOverflow...

An odd takeaway. The article seems to imply that most of their issues stem from spam and low effort questions/answers. Both from users and their own AI. More gatekeeping might have been the solution here.

By making it harder for people to use the site casually, you tip the balance in favor of spammers and away from people who actually have an interest, and therefore usually some knowledge, on a given subject.

This article amounts to concern trolling with a barely veiled agenda for censorship. Its "users are fleeing" claim is an attempt at wish fulfillment.

The key to using Quora couldn't be easier: don't search for or read topics that you don't want to see. Human inquiry will always be delightfully messy except in the view of those who have pathological control complexes.

Even if you go to Quora for stuff you want, it's useless cause it shows answers to unrelated questions. I agree the article is bogus though, reminds me of all the "Twitter is dead ever since Elon Musk bought it" ones.

That's useless because it starts recommending you nonsense once it thinks it's learned what you want.

I just opened the front page and the 3rd item was a space called "True Love Conquers All" with relatable-Facebook-meme-style writing and an image of a woman giving birth in the backseat of a car.

I find the answers on Quora to be way too try-hard. It feels like LinkedIn growth style BS stories.

Yes, the first screenful is motivation to read the answer or some personal unrelated crap.

This is exactly it. Even at its height, it felt like everyone was trying to build a brand and a following, and that was the primary motivation for the answers.

Well, the revenue sharing probably didn't help much for sure. I've seen dozens of sites and platforms add that as a feature, and as unfortunate as it is, this almost always backfires. People see 'make money contributing to this platform' as 'free cash for spamming!' and the quality often falls off a cliff. You need really strict rules and a good moderation team to keep a platform under control in this situation, and that's rarely the case for services like Quora.

You can see the same issues cropping up on Medium with its partner program, on Twitter thanks to Twitter Blue and revenue sharing, and even to some degree on the likes of YouTube and Twitch (though they're so massive that the scammers don't really stand out/do as well). Put money on the table, and the scammers will come out of the woodwork to try and get as much of it as they can, quality content be damned.

Edit: I also suspect part of the issue with revenue sharing programs is that they don't offer enough to incentive genuine experts, but offer enough that if you're utterly desperate and local costs of living are low, you're incentivised to spam for it.

Yeah, the comments to any viral post on Xitter now is just blue checkmarks spamming memes in order to get likes and eyeballs on their junk content, and thus make money.

Any large film/music/video games twitter account post gets spammed by AI bots and I mean literal AI bots that occasionally give the game away with "you have run out of credits" or "I don't understand this prompt" messages. Also a bunch of them just retweeting their own posts that have nothing to do with the original in an attempt to farm engagement for their older stuff

Apart from how most internet companies get worse when money comes into play.

I find that most of social media went south around the time of Trump's election and the heavy partisan moderation that followed it.

Quora further seems to have been taken over by Chinese paid writers.

The worst is that Quora paid its own users to spam the service with questions they didn't actually need answers to.

You think you're helping a real human, with a real human need, and then you see he's asked not only what museums you recommend in your hometown, but also what museums you recommend in 400 other small towns from all over the world, and what restaurants you recommend for 400 other random small towns, and then what local radio channels you recommend for 400 more etc.

No mention of Quora founder at OpenAI? https://archive.is/xsK8S

> His position on the [OpenAI] board has also raised eyebrows because Quora has been in increasingly direct competition with OpenAI’s best-known service: ChatGPT ... Shortly after OpenAI launched ChatGPT a year ago, Quora introduced Poe, a platform that allows people to ask questions from various AI chatbots, including ChatGPT.

I’m still surprised that D’Angelo didn’t get as much scrutiny in the OpenAI mess, especially as the only board member still in place. Seems obvious in hindsight that Quora continuing to fail can only be saved by leveraging as training data for the next thing. And OpenAIs ambitions threaten that.

So, the fourth paragraph of the article is supposed to demonstrate the decline of Quora. It has a number of links.

One of those links shows a UI that's fairly obviously Reddit! [1] Another is to genius.com's lyrics to some song[2] which don't seem to have anything to do with anything the author's complaining about.

Of the links actually relevant to Quora, one is about an obvious joke[3], which the author either doesn't understand or pretends not to.

What's left is a case of spam[4], that the article links twice. I'd suppose because it's the only evidence the author has of low quality questions on Quora.

While Quora is a horrible website, I'd say the evidence shows Slate is worse. Their reporters can't even find genuine evidence of Quora's low quality. They show us Reddit instead.

[1] https://twitter.com/3DrakaiNa/status/1743993622737863056 [2] https://genius.com/23826656 [3] https://twitter.com/Zeronelite/status/1743449094360596802 [4] https://hollywoodactress02.quora.com/OMG-KING-CHARLES-SHOCK-...

[3] is, as far as anyone can tell, an insane person and not a joke. They've posted literally hundreds of questions involving atheists, christian babies, and nonsensical situations.

i dont trust the founder

Who

Tangentially related, since the CEO of Quora is on OpenAI's board.

I recently had an interaction w/ OpenAI's community that left a sour taste in my mouth. Asked one question, some smarty guy tried to "XY problem" me, I clarified this is not an "XY problem" and my question is quite clear and specific and eventually one mod was involved, other mods ganged up on me and removed all my posts because "they were violating guidelines". I complained about that sort of abuse, but guess what? The same mods that run the forum run the "forum about the forum" section, lol, so they had their fun again. Left a note there, in case some actual OpenAI employee/investor cares, telling them "this is how StackOverflow died".

I'm sharing this here because if they are taking a page from Quora's playbook, well ... good luck? I'll never bother myself again with the OpenAI community and that's exactly why I stopped being involved with Quora and StackOverflow in the past. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about the forum's demise in a couple months from now.

GitHub Copilot must be trained on all those XY answers and can be just as insufferable.

Quora has never been a good resource. It was always designed to trick users into clicking through from a SERP with snippet content that isn't on the landing page when you arrive. It is the same business model as Pinterest. The amazing thing is that Euro regulators have for years been trying to favor this business model, trying to force Google to rank these types of sites highly under the banner of competition, when what the users really want is for these sites to disappear from search results altogether.

I'm not sure I fully agree, I've found some useful things, but I like long form content that expands beyond what's on Reddit comments and occasionally you hear interesting stories.

The problem I have is, the content I usually see is essentially the regurigation of youtube videos stealing from imdb's trivia section: "Top 10 things you didn't know about $film!"

Quora does the same thing for clicks in a way, and it ends up being misleading.

I'm waiting for the inevitable counter-culture pushback against AI, where suddenly humanity realises how valuable it's "pure, non-AI polluted" content bases are/were, as a unique and critical data class in their own right.

This doesn't matter, it's not a real problem for AI and can be used to improve them. It's already happened though, because it's the first thing people think of.

The UI isn't really mentioned directly in the article, and is another major problem.

It's optimised to keep you reading. But you don't want to keep reading, you just want your original question answered.

Unfortunately, they style all the page components the same, and you are forced to read to see if it's an answer to your question, a 'related question', or something irrelevant (like the ChatGPT example given).

On top of that, it cuts off most of the answer(s) anyway 'below the fold' of the fragment it's contained in.

Example where I googled 'quora van dimensions': https://www.quora.com/Is-there-much-of-a-height-difference-b...

1. AI component

2. Relevant answer, but arguably a lazy one that assumes that it's a post 2020 model (instead of 2013-9). Also does not address the person's question for 'in the UK' (people answering should advise if model differs between the UK & US). Also assumes that the asker has not already looked at that spec sheet.

3. Fairly related / useful context, I suppose.

4. A 'related' question's answer, for "What is the height of a standard 53ft. semi trailer?". (Seriously?!)

5. A 'related' question's answer, for "How tall can your load be above the cab on a flatbed 2016 Ford F550?" (Seriously?!)

6. 'Related questions'

7. Answers to completely different questions.

The UI is hostile to the readers' needs.

So that, along with the poor quality responses mentioned (usually some business consultant giving vague pointless lists or pointing to some SaaS offering) means that "Site:old.reddit.com" or niche related websites is usually a more direct path to an answer to me.

Quora isn't a great place to get answers. It's better as a source of mindless, faintly informative entertainment. At its best it's a bit better than your ordinary content farm because it's not as click-baity; the users are volunteers who just want to write. "Recreational typing", as one prominent user puts it.

Quora had all the opportunity to invest in AI for LLM based on user responses. It didn't. I wonder if other sites will go down this way side.

What is Poe if not exactly that?

Twelve years ago, Quora was a Silicon Valley darling and notoriously had one of the more difficult interview processes. How far they’ve fallen.

I must have missed this honeymoon period with Quora, I only ever remember it being as “that shitty site that tries to make me log in to view answers”. I treated it like that old “Experts Exchange” site, and just visually moved past it every time I saw it in search results.

People in this thread speaking fondly of Quora has come to a complete shock to me to be honest. I thought everyone else also considered it just a spam site. Today I learned.

Is it dead? It and reddit (and stackoverflow) are the main "human typed" results I still get

(yes I'm aware they're spending some resources on displaying an AI answer at the top).

Of course never really liked quora's forced login thing and how it seems to have removed parts of questions that answers are still referring to and how it mixes answers to different questions in front of the current one

It appears that Quora's pages are SEO optimized now, to the detriment of human users. Basically you can optimize for ad revenue and not have human user experience degrade significantly.

Quora is great if you like to read thoughts of people with fringe ideas and those who are mentally ill. There's a decent sized gangstalking group on there.

Quora is thriving! It appears on almost every search I do on Google. More than a few years ago. I understand that their quality is terrible but in a economy of focus and SEO they are doing incredible well.

If you publish a well written article and adding all the SEO capabilities that you can, you will almost never appear before Quora.

Seems to me it's all about money. They all gotta make it somehow, and if ads are the plan, than it's going to reach this state eventually. User-funded services seem to fare better, but they rarely grow as large. I don't think there's any other easy solution though.

Nonprofits may not be looking for the mega-exit, but they still need to pay the bills somehow, so most of the same forces still apply. They are also more likely to draw partisan ideologues who are naturally more enthusiastic about having a way to put their thumbs on the scales of the discourse despite lower pay and no chance of that lucrative mega-exit.

Government-funded things have too many of their own issues. Practically impossible to start, execute, or pivot fast enough to compete with startups, and subject to political turf wars and overhead. Naturally, nothing much comparable to such sites has sprung out of that.

It's very evident how bad it got the moment you go to a question. Here's their layout:

[ Question ]

[ads]

[related questions]

....scroll farther...

[related questions]

[actual answers]

Like WTF?! Whose decision was this?

I was a 'Top Writer' for a couple of years (pre-monetization). I loved it as a motivation to research topics I was interested in and practice writing. Eventually I lost interest, but I still get occasional search results from Quora with information that is otherwise difficult or impossible to find online.

Perhaps in an alternative timeline we might be regularly typing "[some query] quora" into search engines, but Reddit seems to have filled that much-needed gap more successfully.

Whenever a search leads me to a question/answer on Quora I'm inevitably hit with a Sign In popup that blocks the whole screen. Feels obnoxious and I just back button away.

Quora never lived as far as I'm concerned.

It was always touted as some better, savvier alternative to the StackExchange network but it was just clogged up with crummy answers to bad questions. They made it extremely difficult to see the actual content and would make it near impossible to follow threads/discussions without making an account (which would in turn spam you)

The fact that it was SEO-optimized up the wazoo and always clogged up search results didn't make it any better. For that reason I have "-site:quora.com" seared into my muscle memory when searching.

What a low quality work. Of course the publicly open Q&A site would have some low-quality questions and answers. Of course most of questions of general interest will be asked early, and of course some of the newer questions would regard current events, and some of the answers - oh horror! oh depravity! - will feature opinions that differ from the one the author of the article holds. Of course there would be trolls and fakes - have you been on the internet anytime lately?

I don't know if Quora is doing well or not. Maybe it is dying. Maybe it is flourishing. What I am sure of it that this article didn't help me any in understanding which of those is true, despite the length of the piece.

Quora is a good example of how artificial scarcity goes wrong. If you're not restrictive enough, you can't make a profit. But if too restrictive, then the business will starve itself. When it becomes too restrictive/extractive over time you have enshittification.

I briefly enjoyed contributing to Quora, but then they added a paid tier, “spaces”, and all that spammy content. Now, as someone who created a few of its popular answers, I never want to see the site again. I’ll probably get rid of my account too. It’s almost as if they explicitly didn’t want me there, and did everything to achieve that.

I have some very good opinion of this. I work in big tech and I might be a canonical example of some users who no longer find Quora interesting. From 2012 to about 2014 I was absolutely hooked to Quora spending anywhere between 2 to 4 hours every day. At that time I was a young professional in my early 30s, newly married and just at the beginning of my tech career after grad school. I used to love the questions posted on the forum which seemed very relevant to me e.g. how to build a career in tech, dating/relationship advice, tourism advice etc. I was hooked.

Fast forward 10 years from then. I am a 40 year old middle aged guy. Still working in tech albeit at a Senior level; with one school going kid and have a mortgage. I still visit Quora occasionally but am hard pressed to find any content that is interesting and appropriate for my age. It seems that they are still showing me questions which were mostly relevant to my younger self 10 years back and not now. There is practically no content or discussion in that forum that can attract and keep a 40 year old middle aged guy. Its just that I evolved but they didn't. Not to mention the fact that they also became more annoying with all these "promoted", "relevant" questions intermixed within the same page. I think their lack of ability to evolve over time absolutely finished the product. My two cents.

Before folks jump on the business model aspect, one should keep in mind that many (all?) online communities go through a similar growth curve. Wikipedia included.

But this article goes into the details of what makes this feel different. Quora is aesthetically much worse than it ever was.

Quora is the spammiest large website, for sure. Depending on your query like 80 % of responses are scams from India and/or SEO fluff bullshit and self promotion.

From personal experience, the main Quora experience is their Digest e-mails; less than a third are relevant topics.

And there are now constant "Edit:" updates on answers addressing the trolls and hateful responses, further dampening my interest in answering questions.

Where have all the internet forums gone?

One of the first casualties caused by ChatGPT which explains the massive down-round from being valued from $1.8BN to $500M.

Would need more than just Poe to justify than billion dollar valuation.

Quora merging “all related” answers onto the same page is one of the most annoying things about it. I switch it to “Answers” 100% of the time.

In its "golden age" (say 2014) Quora was a pleasant place to write answers. But it was often an unpleasant place to ask questions.

I don't think it died. I get answers from Quora or Reddit for most of my questions. Nowadays, Google is also pushing forum websites.

The amount of questions being asked and answered is drastically reduced after GPT. So as a platform, it has died but still has the same amount of reach. They integrated AI. We have to see where this heads.

It would not be a bad thing if it just went and died but it's still here making Google search results a wasteland.

It is a sad thing to me to see such a great resource just end up trash.

Thanks to ublacklist for hiding the damned thing.

Their UI has long been more focused on getting you to click on other questions and/or ads rather than seeing the answer you want, and they do it by making it really hard to tell which is which. They intersperse a sponsored question that has nothing to do with yours between the top two replies.

I guess that’s probably the only way they could really monetize but it sure is annoying.

Once they started monetizing things got worse. Financial incentives led to people gaming the site, which always leads to crap content.

You need a low barrier to entry to get free content, but then that makes it easy to pump full of crap. But you need that content to get users and monetization <shrug>.

Quora has handled that much worse than, say, reddit. But reddit doesn't allow their users to monetize their content, which keeps the spammers at bay.

Quora was a nice example on how an extremely shtty UI can still become successful if the app was useful enough.

It’s insane how much people can put up with if it scratches their itch enough

I think everyone here is missing that the founders created this to make money. They didn’t found a non-profit. And it turns out, people don’t actually want to pay for this, and having taken rich people’s money the only way to pay for it is the slide into Ads and that inevitably leads to this garbage. Why are people surprised?

Quota was once a very good website. I spent a lot of time contributing and answering questions.

Then the email spams started happening pushing digests of irrelevant and in some cases harmful recommendations.

Then the increasingly asshole-oriented designs around serving up search results and blocking the content unless you signed in or registered.

Then the Q/A quality digressed massively to the point where it became less and less useful. There were also changes to the design that merged questions, answers, and recommendations into a largely incoherent mess where I was never really sure what I was looking at or why.

Not wanting any further association with the dumpster fire Quora was becoming, I ended up deleting every one of my answers and comments before deleting my account entirely.

Now I take pains to block Quora results from my searches and never click on a Quora link if I come across it. It seems like I’m not missing much based on the terribly awful “innovations” mentioned in this article.

venture capital hub Andreessen Horowitz blessed Quora with a much-needed $75 million investment

Most shocking of all is that anyone would dump more and $1 or two on Quora at this point.

I was a super enthusiastic Quora user for a long while. This is the first time I actually took the time to _close_ an account a few months back, because I was so frustrated with the turn this whole thing took.

The downward slide on Quora started with the 'Top Writers' program, which created an elite tier of contributors who were anointed and then privileged by the platform, rather than voted on by the members. This created an aristocracy who could now guarantee high visibility for even mediocre answers, whilst hugely disincentivising everyone else - especially first time contributors - to even try and make a response.

A commentator made the point elsewhere - this type of platform should be a non-profit, maybe a community owned platform.

This awkward thing was never usable? It a bad clone of Stackoverflow.

And Stackoverflow works. But it needs a new owner which has a clue what it is about. Even better - the old owners and creators buy it back :)

SO lost a little through the initial AI-Hype but probably most people know already the AI is feed with SO. And SO needs humans with new knowledge. So the main problem are the new owners. Why they did even removed the job adds linked to the questions. That made sense :(

There are some interesting answers on quora. But so many stupid questions posted by trolls. The signal to noise ratio seems to drop every month.

Co-founders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever were both early Facebook employees

Where have I come across the surname D'Angelo before? Oh yes - he's on the board of OpenAI, and was the only board member at the time Altman was sacked (according to WP).

Didn’t we see this coming when they required you to log in to view content? Did everyone forget experts exchange?

The UI has become HORRIBLE compared to when I discovered 10 years ago. Answers of other questions are on the same page that the main question, it's hard to even find comments / answers to some answers. And the constant loggin nagging is horrible.

Quota is synonym of internet junk spam in the same vein as pinterest or yelp (a little less for yelp maybe)

This can't be a commercial activity. It has to be the Wikipedia model. If it supposed to make a profit, all that baggage comes into play.

Imagine if your local library was run by entrepreneurs.

They’re all in on Poe now. They’ve collected years of QA data.

Typical american crud bs.

Make an app get VC money and jump ship to cool new tech.

Had great potential but sadly went tits up.

I wonder why no good CRUDs come from europe. But then i remember they are busy moping.

As a business it was never that alive to begin with - like most startups based on eyeballs.

I never liked the site... It's always a game... Oh that's answering a different question...

Dead? It's still the top 28th most popular website, above tiktok. [1]

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/

I think Quora died because the premise was flawed: that high quality repositories of words would have a strong ROI near indefinitely.

Now it is clear there is a new thing in our world (LLMs), and turns out repositories of well crafted words will be irrelevant.

Almost no one saw this change coming (or at least, not how quickly this change would come).

There is nothing Quora could have done to change this fate.

I love a good necroscopy (incidentally, R.I.P. Brian Lumley) on communities as they wither and die. I've been watching since Usenet and IRC. There's a rhythm to this kind of thing, a kind of hype cycle for communities, but overall, I have one ur-metric which outshines them all: look for the hubris.

Communities, once they reach a certain size and collective history, gain a kind of self-reflectiveness. They get meta. And right around then, you will find someone at the helm who will not remember the earliest days and fail to grasp what brought everyone together. They've forgotten the face of their father and left the riddle of steel on the battlefield. What they'll decide is, well, it's me. I, or rather what I represent, make it great. The moderation team, the steering committee, the management. This is never true in any community I have seen. It's always the individuals, maybe some interesting weirdos, or the ones with a lot of time on their hands, the lonesome lusers. They will ultimately be regarded with disregard, viewed as churnable units, cogs of cognition, replaceable. This is always wrong, and it is always a lesson learned in slow motion, after the egomaniacs have fled toward their next call to greatness.

See also Google: I knew they were embracing the dark side when Quora not only went unpunished for search cloaking but seemed to get even more solidly rewarded with high search weight.

Quora is, I think, part of the reason that OpenAI has a big lead over their rivals. Quora has, specifically for training language models, very high-signal data, when compared to Reddit, twitter, gmail, and Meta’s platforms. And OpenAI is afaik, the only AI lab with a license to Quora’s data.

Quora has long been a world leader of SEO and dark UX patterns — it was never as valuable to users as its Google ranking would indicate — so it’s hard to mourn its demise. But yes, it does stink to see the quality of information going down while the quantity grows at an ever-increasing exponential rate.

It’s profound to me how many good ideas there are online that aren’t sufficiently profitable. Reminds me of the fundamentals of the “old Web” full of altruistic endeavours.

Quora is basically unreadable now. The layout is so confusing.

I wish Google would put Quora out of our misery at this point.

Yahoo Answers dead, Quora dying, StackExchange struggling with AI spam and mod rebellions. Meanwhile [Ask MetaFilter](https://ask.metafilter.com/) just turned 20 and keeps on trucking. Smaller scale obviously (human-scale, I'd say), but untroubled by the exploitation and greed of the bigger sites, and still delivering best answers to questions every day. Hopefully more of the internet shifts back to this communitarian model as the pitfalls of the big VC-driven platforms become more apparent.

Some potentially interesting information I've just checked that might give a new perspective:

From an SEO standpoint, Quora is currently at one of its peak levels.

- It has reached 267 million organic visitors per month: https://i.imgur.com/899g3Jm.png

- Quora's organic traffic is quite diverse https://i.imgur.com/JfbYKH1.png

Google's helpful content update has increased traffic for sites like Quora, Stack Overflow, and Reddit. In many instances, I believe this boost lacks justification.

Quora's user experience is not intuitive. Although they removed the signup wall, which impacted their bounce rate and caused millions of organic visitors to leave their site shortly after clicking on a Quora result in a search engine, reading an answer on Quora now feels overwhelmingly disorganized.

I remember creating account there with pseudo-name for a few years. The admin there one day gotten extremely hostile and request me to give then real biodata. I didnt even consider to contribute anything not even simple comments. Just being quiet user. I would even pay annual subscription to have the site access but not contributing like E. Britanica site. Regardless, I have been extremely detrimental to that website with maybe running a multi year hostile anti-Quora campaign across the world. Quora just made an unnecessary enemy user with me. All I wanted just like HN, probe in, read, and maybe comment a bit maybe once or twice a year. Instead their admins turn very hostile threatening to remove my account simply for not giving them real biodata.

The real name policy meant that after trying to answer a question once I was done with it. I think it'd be interesting to move the question/topic style into something run more like Wikipedia.

I remember someone asking a question on Quora around 2015: "How long do you think Quora would last?" Someone answered that it probably would not last more than the next 5 years. I forgot what were the actual reasons he gave, but it gave me such an uneasy feeling that Quora could die in the next 5 years. Looking back at it now, it's probably around 2015 that it started becoming what it is today - SEO spam.

I used to like Quora, but it's gotten unuseable. I ask questions once in a while, and no one answers them. My "Notifications" today include:

Why did the Beatles use a Stratocaster for electric guitars?

What is the best essay writing service?

What are the major challenges of writing an essay?

What is a poem for you?

Should I sell my Squier CV 50s Strat for an Ibanez S521?

Do you count time spent thinking about what you are going to write as time spent writing?

Is it important for a writer to write what he feels?

What is the process of writing a book without having anything written down beforehand?

Do guitar players prefer single coil pickups or humbuckers?

Which rock musicians do you think could've been better than they actually were?

New Quora insult: "Quora exists to make NextDoor users look smart"