How Quora Died
How Quora Died
The once-thriving site used to answer our most specific questions. But users are fleeing.
“Why Do So Many Music Venues Use Ticketmaster?” “What’s It Like to Train to Be a Sushi Chef?” “How Do Martial Artists Break Concrete Blocks?” If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.
If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.
I disagree, the best place for such answers used to be Reddit, and Stack Exchange for the techy stuff. Quora always felt like cancer for some reason and I never really used it.
I think it's so fucking stupid how it it always defaults to "similar questions" instead of just showing us the actual answers.
Just another example of throwing as much shit at an audience to drive up "engagement."
Another social media site which followed the enshittification paradigm. This playbook has played out so many times until now. Start it with "good intentions" as a for-profit startup. People join and volunteer their time because the founders say all the right things and the site culture is so new and exciting. Once the site gets popular though, all the fancy talk from the founders goes out the window.
When will people learn this lesson? Don't ever volunteer your time on a for-profit proprietary social network. You will get rugpulled! We are all the value in all these sites. Why do we let them control our interactions, ffs?!
PS: Would be interesting to get a fediverse version of Quora. Or Maybe we can make something using Lemmy communities instead.
This is the classic mission mismatch. The people are there for a community. The company is there for a profit.
The wikimedia foundation is a foundation whose mission is in line with the people who add to Wikipedia. So there isn't a conflict
Quora was just Ask Jeeves 2.0… Both relied on human “experts” and neither could figure out a long term monetization plan.
Modern Quora reminds me a lot Yahoo! Answers when I was a kid - it's mostly a trolling playground. You can technically get some useful info out of it, but odds are that you won't be able to sort it out.
I'm from the firm belief that anyone using a chatbot to directly reply questions either 1) never interacted with chatbots enough to conclude the obvious (that their answers are often unreliable crap), or 2) doesn't care about reliability at all.
BNBR is never enough to create a nice and respectful community. You need to go a step deeper and analyse why and when users are hostile towards each other.
“The A.I. thing, the terms of service issue, has been a massive drain of top talent on Quora, just based on how many people have said, Downloaded my stuff and I’m out of there,”
One thing that corporate social media struggles to understand is that not all the users have the same impact in a platform. It's extremely easy to take a mildly unpopular decision that only pisses off 0.5% of your userbase, and the platform becomes ruined because that 0.5% were damn important.
But even then, there were issues plaguing Quora that would continue to fester. First, an anonymous former Quoran told me, the site started “shortening the length of questions.” The professed reason was to increase Quora’s visibility on Google, but that brevity came with a cost: It also made it difficult for users to ask the types of complex questions that could be addressed by specialists
Ah, I see they started the enshittification very early. It might've been a good LLM database, but the good quality content would be outdated by now and the more recent is infested with troll and bot garbage and AI writing. Sad.
The once-beloved forum is now home to a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical…
Oh, so like Reddit or yahoo answers, too?
Poster: <Asks some random tech question> 100 Quora replies: Hi, I'm <generic name>, creator and founder of <some failing startup/product>, here's <10 totally meaningless> reasons why you should subscribe to my product that does nothing for your question.
And here we go again: Earlier this month, the A.I.–accelerationist venture capital hub Andreessen Horowitz blessed Quora with a much-needed $75 million investment—but only for the sake of developing its on-site generative-text chatbot, Poe.
Never used it, noticed it was infected with Chinese and Russian propaganda.
I used to feel opening a Quora page was okay, and useful.
No i dread opening a Quora page. You get spammed by "do you like to login with Google". There is a AI bot on top, befor the top replay. There is a AD/sponsor spot that looks like the rest of the page, you get Related questions, then you get other answers. So now you need to think to open the page.
Yeah nah. I didn't need to know how babby was formed
for those who have no choice but to quickly look for an answer on quora, there's an alternative frontend that makes quora bearable.
@UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT@sh.itjust.works, @magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
I think it died when they started paying people For answers. People asked the most stupid questions just so they can be the top answers
I disagree, quora at the beginning was a place to find quick answers to a lot questions on many different themes, a bit like reddit. But it rapidly became full of "pro replier" just like the Microsoft forums and it was unbearable, then, my 2 cents, it was confusing because of subscription, layout, suggested q&a totally unrelated to the topic I was looking for and a lot of questions that nobody would ever even post on /No Stupid Question (I don't want to judge, but for a lot of them it was easier, faster and you'd get an immediate answer with a plain Google search)
The UI being one of the worst does not help.
Kinda sad neither the article nor comments here mention https://ask.metafilter.com/
I was very active on Quora a decade ago. In fact, they wanted to make me a partner and pay me for my contributions. I was unable to do it due to a Conflict of Interest policy at work. I can see it was a wise decision in reflection.
For me I hated Quora because of how locked down it is. Want to view another question on the site? Must register an account first! No fucking thanks. It was always nagging about creating an account.
Because of this I actively ignored Quora results anytime I googled something.
The internet sucks ass
Interesting read. Thanks.
Since when did it die? Seems like it’s still up and runny to me.
