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Ask HN: What happened to Quora?

23 points by keerthiko ↗ HN
It seems full of very self-similar sexual fanfic writing prompts and responses. I rarely see domain niche questions with known experts chiming in. Is it just the "home" feed algorithm that broke, and just for me? Or is this the kind of content that is reinforced? Does anyone know what happened? The switch a few months ago felt kinda abrupt.

context: I used to frequent the site as something of a veteran in the niche of US immigrant visas for tech founders without advanced degrees. Quora helped me during the process and I have been able to help people since then. But now I can't use it for any niches I like

13 comments

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erwan
They followed in Facebook's footsteps and chased after meaningless engagement metrics, thus driving content-quality down. I don't know if they ever noticed - or cared. As long as the metrics look good these days you know, no one will ask questions.

There was a series of dubious "upgrades" to the feed algorithm which weighted popular content on the platform more than your own preferences or those of the people you followed. Overall, the content they pushed on you was to appeal to the lowest common denominator among your category of users (e.g "following Programming languages") which of course meant that it was absolute trash.

The great takeaway here is that one should be wary of playing god with feed algos. They create a web of complex feedback loops that no one actually understands. And building a product you can't understand will ineluctably crash down on you.

Sure, that might improve engagement metrics momentarily. I'm certain that at the same time, it devastate the lifetime user value, as people will inevitably get sick of being fed off detritus.

My thesis is that lots of the experts got driven away by the Linkedin-ish, clickbaity, and self-glorifying answers being aggressively promoted by the feed algo.

It's a real shame because circa 2013/2014 I found tons of excellent content there and was happy to engage a lot.

rajataghi
Absolutely agreed. 2013-2014 was the peak of Quora and one could find a lot of informative and interesting answers there. Now its just about self glorification. Even if you ask a simple question about an algo, someone will end up writing a long prose about how they struggled to understand that and then it hit them in the shower about how it actually works.
thwy12321
Honestly, it really annoys me how bad their recommendation algorithm is. The model became so over fit for me, it would only show one or two topics. It made the service completely unusable, and its not clear to me that they provide the user any way to counter act that. If they had some kind of content discovery with actual good answers, that would be great. The crazy thing is how much talent works there, who knows maybe their new model/algorithms are profitable for them. But in the long run I doubt it.
afarrell
Side note: How is that site profitable?

I remember back in 2012, thinking that their answer-discovery and UX in general were great and I asked them if they'd be willing to sell host a Q&A-board-as-a-service for a company I worked for. The answer was "no".

mslate
They get a lot of highly qualified traffic from organic search which translates to them being a high volume/high quality ad source (something rare in this world outside of Google & FB).

Sponsored Q&A's are an interesting concept but their ad revenue probably overwhelms attempts at making that their core product.

bediger4000
ha ha ha! I started not deleting Quora Digests from my in box with the intention of looking at them all at once to try to figure out why Quora was just showing me pro-Trump questions.

I have actually read a few Quora digests to click on my niche things to see if it's just specialized for me or not. I was beginning to think "not specialized", because I followed many niche questions to every pro-Trump question.

I'm just about to unsubscribe and delete my account.

baristaGeek
I log in every single day to read answers. I agree that the quality of the content has gone down, but they got me hooked (I can't consciously tell if the recommendation algorithm is "correct", if it's the UX or if it's some other factor).
keerthiko
I log in almost daily as Quora had worked itself into my reflexive "social media cycle" along with HN/twitter/fb that i trigger every so often. But for months now I just tilt my head in bewilderment at the content it shows me. I might have read one or two of these fantasy sexual encounter stories in full because they randomly popped up, and since then my feed always has several of them at the top of my feed. It seems to have overfit incredibly aggressively.
kankroc
Same here with Star Wars/ASOIAF content.

I get it. You figured I like those two things, but it's incredible that it won't pick up that I am (hopefully) not that dull.

brokenmachine
I see millions of questions along the lines of, "how can I tell if he/she likes me or not"?

I have no idea why Quora seems to have decided I'm some socially awkward teenager.

Maybe I clicked on something like that once and it has never forgotten.

thrower123
Unless you aggressively moderate to keep quality high, question and answer sites inevitably degenerate into Yahoo Answers, as the bad poisons the pool and drives out the high quality users.

If you aggressively moderate to keep quality high, you drive off low quality users, and stall out your growth.

ankit219
I was an avid quora user, but then stopped using it.

It tried to cater to everything and everyone and then suddenly became boring. Earlier, it was a Q&A website where you could get quick or detailed answers about your doubts/queries and concepts. For the college students it still works that way. But, along with that knowledge part, they tried to accommodate the opinion pieces, debates etc. framed as questions, which was a major turnoff.

Actually, I feel all the bad came at the same time. Power users were given more weightage and high visibility, turning off other's will to answer questions. Hundreds of users posted similar questions which could not be clubbed, hence repeated content, Choosing topics started having no effect since your feed will show activity from people you follow - not just the topic, With diversity of people, and the be nice policy, somewhere the dissenting opinion stopped showing up, with the popular one given preference, then (as an indian) there were a lot of cringy questions about India, and even loaded questions which were not moderated, which completely took me off the platform.