$27k for 8000 questions, that's basically admitting they paid for spam. I don't see how this is a good product decision at all and the content quality has declined severely.
Meanwhile being a Top Writer has done nothing for me other than getting the opportunity to buy quora branded swag from their store. Saying that this system is imbalanced and unfair seems to be an understatement.
The mind blowing fact is that they're advertising this metric as if it's a stat to be proud of. I think the average person browsing the internet would see this and instantly question the site's credibility. I would maybe understand this statistic being shared internally or in an email to partners--but published publicly on the internet? They're just looking to invite criticism and a loss of trust.
> Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup.
They break all of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high-quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they started getting on my case for not having topic bios, even though other people's were blatantly false, for not responding nicely when their favorites were being dicks in comments, etc. So I just quit cold turkey and haven't posted since. I only go back to read sometimes when I'm super bored, and that's about it.
Exactly this. I used to love writing long-form answers but they would get shoved out of the way with either meme-filled images, copy/pasted nonsense from the web, or a few writers who have no idea on the subject but have a large following that upvotes everything including joke answers.
There's also seemingly no effort spent on stopping spam even with blatant examples reported many times. It's crazy to see questions get paid thousands while being a Top Writer means I get the opportunity to buy their merchandise.
Gonna copy and paste this below, but it's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency.
On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person.
I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks.
knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function.
Gonna copy and paste this below, but it's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency.
On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person.
I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks.
knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function.
Thank you for your time there. I end up on Quora quite a bit, at least when searching camparison based queries and the really long answers that cover a subject in (sometimes extreme) depth have been fantastic to read. I have read some answers that outperform StackOverflow, StackExchange, and UnixExchange in terms of quality and detail. I love reading answers from people that have intimate knowledge about a subject and don’t just post sourced images or links to documentation that the question asker didn’t understand the first time they read it (which is usually stated up front).
Granted, most of these posts are early 2017 and earlier.
Exactly this, for the past many years, when ever i have needed a good answer to a not-so-common problem, Stack Overflow cuts right to the chase and delivers a useful answer.
Quora is (was) open ended and allowed discussions. Most tech questions I have can't be written on stackoverflow. The most stupid one is "what book can I read to learn xxx".
Now they removed descriptions from questions, hide comments by default, so they are heading the same direction.
Stackoverflow is helpful as documentation with examples, but for engineering problems is of no help anymore. I usually have to ask in some dev chats and discuss there
Ask MetaFilter: https://ask.metafilter.com/
It costs $5 to get an account that lets you ask or answer, and they have paid moderation staff that keep answers on-topic and high quality. The signal-to-noise ratio is quite high.
I helped write a bunch of Quora's rules and policies, and I also helped create the Top Writer's program. I probably hand selected you in the first two years.
I left Quora in 2014, but your first statement feels very true to me. I can't say what they did after I left, but I saw a clear willingness to have a fuzzy interpretation of the rules for power users.
There was a time when Quora would bend over backwards to have one person from NASA write answers. I felt that wasn't really a great strategy. I always felt it would be much more valuable to have 1000 NASA employees write their best answer, and to find a way to make that happen.
This clearly didn't happen, as the one person from NASA who wrote thousands of answers is still a very active.
Full disclosure: I deleted my entire account, questions (>100), answers (>1000), and edits (>100,000) in rage in around 2015, mainly because I'm immature, but partly because I didn't want Quora to have what I made after I left. Also, I created a new account, because I wanted to feel it out to see how it was now, in case someone comes looking :P
I think it's what they're breaking rules for that makes all the difference. Helping a few writers that pump out amazing content seems to benefit everyone and is worth it if there are tight controls on exactly what's allowed.
Right now the system seems to be breaking rules that hurt writers and readers alike, with no discernible benefit other than creating tons of ad inventory and SEO inbound traffic.
This. I reported a "famous" author multiple times for violating a bunch of rules and I was retaliated against and my write/update 'privileges' suspended. Well, flunk you too, Quora.
Not to mention, the abundance of dirt quality content and insincere questions (and answers)
Instagram is good for marketing visual products and ideas. It's visual discovery.
Quora pushed a blend between Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. It was text-based discovery. I do miss the well-researched, cited, frequently updated answers of yesteryear.
Copy and paste from comment above. Knophy.com is going to have no ads and is going to promote the usage of competency and evidence of content. More details will be posted on SHOWHN in about 3 - 4 weeks when I can get my prototype live.
>It's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency.
On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person.
I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks.
knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function.
Funny thing is a lot of those ads aren't even paid for, wannabe influencers post ads now to make themselves look like they are being paid to post ads, to eventually get paid to post ads.
Next up: advertisers making deals with wannabe influencers to post ads for free, to give the influencer "exposure" to help them get paying ad deals in the future. The usual art business climate.
The actual reason could be that your business model is not sustainable. Eventually you will then be pressured into ever more desperate ways to get income. Inevitably that will include ads on the web.
My impression was that the folks at Quora never got community and content the way that those two did. Stack Overflow's founders effectively provided an audio playbook in their podcast (before Jeff left) and anyone could have followed it to create a great Q&A site. This is just one demonstration of their attention to detail. They experimented with business models, and got growth on a technical platform that turns out to have been very efficient.
Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. Looking at Crunchbase they had $226M funding compared to Stack Overflow's $68M. I know it's more complicated than those numbers, but I feel like that funding is squandered on Quora.
> Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience.
I think that pretty much sums up how I feel about Silicon Valley and what it's come to stand for. Earlier, it was about building something cool that people used (and make a good living doing it). Then some of those cool things ended up making so much money, that now it's not about making creating, it's about making money.
The same thing happened with the mobile app stores. First it was about people making cool stuff that was useful, and then a few stories came out about how insanely lucrative some apps ended up being, and everyone wanted to make the next app and get rich.
Since this seems to be a natural emergent phenomenon with how our culture and technology interact, I guess I'm just hoping that somewhere along the lifecycle of the phenomenon it settles into a more sane paradigm where everyone isn't constantly on step X of what is essentially a get rich quick scheme.
Most people pay something for their communications in the form of home internet or cell service, so I don't think the answer is just nested paywalls or the internet would be more polite than it is.
I think you miss my point slightly but in your defense I didn't make it very well.
That people pay for the internet connection doesn't really have much effect on the economics. It's the payment for the production of the information or lack thereof that is driving the deleterious effects on quality of information that we are seeing.
This is mostly of our choosing too! And we will continue to put up with it until we don't and we sort out alternative systems. You can already see things changing with some sites putting up paywalls and some people choosing to pay or some people clicking away.
It's not an easy fix in aggregate, but as an individual it's possible to make choices where the economics isn't skewing in a direction you're not happy with. The trade-off is you might not be happy to pay for what you used to get for free. Well I don't have a good answer to that other than it is what it is.
Two good examples in my life at least I can think of is paying for access to Pluralsight means I'm getting high quality, in-depth, curated tech education on demand rather than scrappily piecing together random tutorials that bug me with passive aggressive "no, I don't want to become a coding ninja" ebook offers. The being I buy and read a decent amount of high quality books as the economics is structured such that they have to provide the value upfront before I'll exchange the money and the cost to produce the book is higher than just a blog post, so it's much more in-depth and Im not being sucked into anyone's marketing funnel.
All personal choices but I've been saying for years now the economics of the internet is somewhat busted as it relates to information. You just have to be careful and don't be afraid to use economics to drive the quality up in your favor.
Then there is stuff like Khan Academy. That's just out of this world awesome. Free and insane quality.
Then again that's a case of education as infrastructure. That guy put in the work to produce that content once and it can go on teaching forever. That is the real power of the internet, but it seems that's the exception to the rule.
Thanks for taking the time to lay out your ideas. I largely agree but I think individual-choice solutions are generally an unsatisfactory answer to what are often collective action problems.
Sure. It's two sides of the same coin though. In time the collective winds up settling on a new paradigm based on an aggregate series of individual choices that reflexively effect the markets they are acting on. It's a process that naturally plays out over time.
I think we're already seeing it play out in slo-mo over the last 6~8 years. It's becoming more and more noticeable that things are shifting now.
I thought that sort of thing might be copied by more educators on more topics. Same non-profit or public-benefit corporation might run them all with some charter, license, and/or contract maximizing the availability while still making money to support content updates. Could be many doing this sort of thing.
Not really. People spend money on network/satellite TV, and that still comes with ads. Heck, they still spend money on newspapers and magazines, and those have ads too.
For most media outlets, someone paying is still someone they're gonna show ads too.
Sure, those models are among the ones you can spend your money on. And they are not the only options available.
My point still stands. It's all driven by an economics in some form or another and the more of the economics you drive the more it's possible for you to align the incentives to produce things in your favor. This is the case no matter which actor in the system you are.
Heck, you controlling the economics in terms of what you spend your money and attention on are really the only levers you've got in order to drive the supply/demand mechanism of the market. The other variables are technology and what the other people in the market are demanding as that effects what will be supplied.
If you had enough money you could pay for a one off piece of unique research if you really wanted to. These days you even get people subscribing to individuals on patreon as a model that exists.
By allowing only the following forms of advertising: YC startups looking for employees, companies looking for employees. Show HN threads are meant for "hey look I made this, I'd like feedback / this may be useful to some". Beyond that, everything that looks like an attempt to advertise (as opposed to honest suggestions) gets downvoted and/or banned directly.
HN has indirect benefits to YC, so it gets hosted and maintained. In that model, ensuring authenticity and freedom from advertising cancer works for the benefit of both the community and YC.
> ... everything that looks like an attempt to advertise (as opposed to honest suggestions) gets downvoted and/or banned directly.
That is so easy to game for a startup - Post something related, get friends/ pay for upvotes, repeat. What applies to quora's fall also applies to HN. How could HN (or any other niche community for that matter) survive that downward spiral?
HN tries to actively counter that - including by employing algorithmic voting ring detectors, and trigger-happy community willing to downvote and flag anything that smells of astroturfing :).
But I guess a big part of the reason is that HN generally doesn't want to have this kind of content here, whereas people running Quora embraced and encouraged thinly-veiled ads.
It seems advertising on crap sites with annoying blog spam is dominated by males, and I say that as a male who has considered doing that for my startup. I don't know if it's unique to men or if it's just because there seems to be more men than women founders, but that's the impression I get.
When I see a startup with a woman at the helm, it seems that advertising is a bit less aggressive, but again, that may be selection bias.
>Bro is a subculture of young men who spend time partying with others like themselves.[1] Although the popular image of bro lifestyle is associated with sports apparel and fraternities, it lacks a consistent definition. Most aspects vary regionally such as in California where it overlaps with surf culture.[2] Oxford Dictionaries have noted that bros frequently self-identify with neologisms containing the word "bro" as a prefix or suffix.[1] In a New York Magazine article in September 2013, Ann Friedman wrote: "Bro once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men."[3]
Then ProductHunt came along and did the same thing with everyone immediately hopping on the thread and patting themselves on the back for their <insert_terrible_app_here>
Most people seem to ascribe it to the login change (mid 2012 I think?) but at the same time, Quora was -exploding- in India. This came with it a big shift in the types and relevance of questions. By the start of 2013, India had more users on the site than any other country. As a heavy site user at the time, it felt like it happened overnight. For me this seems more impactful than the login change.
VC demands for growth. It could've remained an independent high-quality site since it really doesn't take much to run, but raising $226 million requires a return.
Since they've chosen the advertising model, that means increasing views at all costs to create the inventory to sell those ads. Unfortunately but inevitable.
Completely agree here and this is just more evidence that advertising NECESSARILY depletes the quality of the online experience. This is the last time I'm going to spam this post, but I'm very excited about my new website knophy.com and believe it solves all these problems. It's open source, going to economically and behaviorally incentivize competence and evidence backed content, and is going to always be free of ads and paywalls. I'll be announcing more details here shortly.
Here's a copy and paste from a different comment with some more details:
-- BEGIN COPY PASTE --
Gonna copy and paste this below, but it's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency.
On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person.
I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks.
knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function.
They realized they could make money selling high quality question/answer pairs to machine learning companies building dialog systems. As a result the more pairs they have, the more their dataset is worth. Buy questions and resell as QA pairs.
If that figure is accurate for what they are paying for questions then I'm guessing it is a big chunk of revenue. Ads don't pay that well on a site like this.
I didn't appreciate how hard it was to come up with good QA pairs for a topic until IBM Watson acquired the company I was working for (Blekko) and got to see how things got made. I isn't something you can farm out to Mechanical Turk, and without AGI it isn't something that is easily auto generated from a knowledge graph. Ten thousand questions about the insurance business and vetted and ranked answers? Solid gold.
If you look at it from a dialoging system point of view, it still works. What would give someone the impression that a dialog system was "good" ? Answer, they like the answers it gives. So knowing "popular" answers to questions can give you two vectors, both sentence construction (which is to say how the answer should be presented) and accuracy score (which is how much does popularity depend on accuracy).
The canonical example is "Siri, where can I hide a dead body?" This is a question where being accurate will leave the consumer less satisfied than with giving a "popular" answer.
That doesn't make sense with such poor quality content and spam everywhere unless they spend a lot of time on manual cleaning. Data quality is a big part of ML training so I doubt this is any real revenue, if it's being sold at all. Do you have inside info here or are you guessing?
One thing that has happened is that Quora is now dominated by users from India. That has resulted in much content that is not as relevant to audiences in the US. One would think that an answer is an answer but it turns out it’s not like that, there is a cultural element and something that works in one country doesn’t work in all others.
I was a very active early Quora user and loved the site and network. It all seemed to go downhill when Charlie Cheever left.
Not sure on cause/effect or if he exactly left because of it - but I don't think it was a coincidence that Quora went hard on spam, walled garden and monetization strategies after one of two co-founders leaves.
For a long while when search results lead me to some interesting Quora questions, I couldn't browse the site without logging in. As a result I don't even bother anymore.
I'm just as glad I never bothered with it much, instead I spent time on the so much more successful Linkedin Q&A section.
Pretty sure that got killed off at some point in their pre-MS struggles, at least on LI there was more chance of getting people with relevant experience.
I think it became more about users and less about content. What was your first crush? What was the most scary film you watched? these kind of questions are more about users and users having a forum than about knowledge.
Fact based, impartial content by people knowledgeable about the topic gave way to perception based/ meme worthy answers and later on to questions as well.
Also I agree with a couple of comments here which site India/ users from India as a factor. (Particularly around 2014 election and later).
And I think later on Quora did not have a choice but to go with the flow.
(I know this comment is also a bit generalization and perception based. :))
I remember it because of the high profile people who chose that as their medium of choice. It wasn't because it was great, it s because the founders of quora were well connected. It was suspect from the start tbh
- Quality of content has declined. You get asked a lot of nonsensical questions. On the answer side, too many quick and easy, no-more-thinking-required, answers.
- It needs to find a more specific niche. If there's a StackExchange for it, it doesn't need to be on Quora. I'm not gonna ask on Quora about how to use Python decorators. The thing they're good is though, is relating personal experiences. There's a lot of great answers to open ended questions relating to people's personal feelings about various things.
- Discovery is broken somehow. At one point I selected some topics, and now I'm in a filter bubble of my own making. I might like burgers, but that doesn't mean I should be fed burgers for every meal. Changing the topics is not the solution, there's always enough content to fill up the feed for hours.
- Cheerleading. Too many people get upvoted for being famous. Too many people get upvoted for pandering to popular opinion.
I used to enjoy getting Quora digests. I remember seeing famous people and even some of my professors using Quora.
Jimmy "your premise is flawed" Wales was famous on Quora for his shutdowns. The site slowly started turning into a platform for marketers to pump their self-help/motivational channels.
Pathetic. You rarely see an authentic answer in Quora these days. It's all self-promotion, direct and indirect advertising, fake wisdom and "life hacks".
I agree with you. Many of the popular writers seem interested in internet points.
Many of the answers have the same storytime format. The writer takes us back in time, introduces a concept that on first inspection seems wrong, and eventually gives us an example of why it is correct by using an example of someone else's misfortune.
Because they are not paying for answers, or good thoughtful in-depth answers at that, they are paying for Questions.
From my understanding, the better your question does, the more money it generates. This puts incentives on questions that are (A) most likely to be asked and (B) answers that will drive traffic to the questions.
Quora used to be more like Wikipedia, and now it's more like Yahoo answers.
The only valuable content are the answers, some that have taken hours to write and kept up to date by passionate folks who are willing to share their expertise and knowledge.
They don't pay for answers though, and this is making writers turn into unpaid workers generating money for spammers who just post questions all day. Many writers I know have stopped because there is no upside.
I wish someone would make a for profit site that is a mashup of hacker news, quora and twitter and paid people for posting content, specifically for upvotes. I would invest in this personally
Because people will do anything for even trivial amounts of money while upvotes are controlled by users which is self-correcting when the community and controls are well managed.
Sure, but the overall point is that as soon as you introduce money people will spend inordinate amounts of time to game the system. Paying for high scores will mean people doing anything they can to get upvotes unethically that will eventually hurt the community, similar to what's happening on Quora right now.
agree that there are complications but I think there are also advantages. All these sites depend on quality content and creating an explicit incentive to provide it is not so bad, is it ?
I'd be interested in knowing the thought process/analytics that inspired the idea to pay for questions, and not (highly-upvoted) answers? My main reason for joining Quora was that it seemed to be the social network that Dave Baggett [0] (at the time) was actively using.
At some point Quora become so metric driven, so focused at maintaining their growth and retention and hell knows what, that it turned into a very user unfriendly place, akin to Yelp.
No, I don't need to login. No, I don't need 50 more notifications and an email digest, no, I don't need to install the damnt app.
I quit Quora after they deleted my account by mistake - in the process of merging my two accounts with different emails, they managed to delete both - and then said "sorry, we screwed up, but unfortunately we can't undo it". All my answers were gone. I put many hours into writing those answers and I still don't understand the policy of automatically deleting all content when the account is deleted.
No it does not. When you decide to delete your account it should be up to you if you also want your content deleted. The company should not make that choice for you one way or another.
Im still wondering why Quora is allowed in google results. They're like the new expertsexchange. Plus it completely baffles me that anyone would use it for a topic that has a stack exchange.
Older Quora has excellent answers on NASA topics (thanks Robert Frost) and linguistics and police procedure, as well as many other niche topics. Google is right to recognize these standouts. Not sure about the rest.
Just putting "-quora.com" (no quotes) on the end of a search seems to do it just fine.. you could have a long list of them you copy/paste in every time, or I imagine you could write a grease monkey script to do it for you automatically every time you click "search"
I wonder what motivates Adam D’Angelo to keep on as founder and CEO after 10 years of running Quora. Here is someone who got rich off FB and could do anything. Maybe early on that “anything” was Quora but I really can’t believe that what Quora is now is anything close to what he envisioned when he first started the site. At this point it feels like a Zombie co that keeps chugging along because it has no other choice but to do so?
Quora embodies what I fear most about the idea of ever starting a VC-backed co...that once you accept money it is very hard to return it and if your burn rate is low you could just “exist” for years without actually succeeding or accomplishing much at all.
But what if this was his sole vision for Quora in the first place? It doesn't require a genius to know that everybody who worked in the new era of social media (mid to late 2000s) understood that you could create an empire from your users' free labor while doing literally nothing. Quora was built as such, Quora was made so that one website contains questions and answers about everything and exploit search engines and SEO to become one of the most popular websites for a long time.
2018 is too late already, Quora and many others came in a time when making a post viral on Facebook and Twitter was way much easier in late 2000s and early 2010s and almost for free, exploiting Google search engine was also much easier back then. Now the internet is popularity contest business, pay for exposure or see your products die.
Quora is Adam's baby. He owns most of it and has been involved as a primary investor for... I'm not sure how long. Before that he was CTO of Facebook and an early investor in Instagram. He's made immense returns on these investments. I don't have numbers, but I would bet money he could buy back Quora from investors with cash and still be a several-hundred-millionaire. With that said, why would he do anything but his pet project?
Having so much success though can also mean that you don't have as much drive to make a great product because you're already set. Not that it must be the case here, but passion is hard to maintain when it doesn't really have much effect on your life.
Also, if the site can be run completely independently (and it looks like operational costs are rather low) then why even take VC in the first place? Surely the effects of hundreds of millions requiring a return could easily be predicted as eventually causing problems?
I agree with your first point, but Adam is also one of the sharpest people I’ve ever known. It’s hard for me to resolve the idea that he’d be complacent.
As for funding, he wasn’t liquid when Quora started afaik, but also even smart wealthy people take loans and get VC.
With Quora I learned how real filter bubbles are. During the 2016 elections I used to click on a lot of anti-trump questions. The site painted me a picture that trump was a "joke" and that he no one seriously believe he had a "chance". I was genuinely chock he started winning the primaries.. and then the elections. Looking back I still can't believe that I was so out of touch with reality. I haven't use Quora since them.
Nowadays I actively try to ignore Quora when it shows up in search result. But when don't the answers are often short and wrong, or blatant self promotion.
For what it's worth, despite the very strong liberal bias on Quora, (I worked for Quora 2012-2014), they tried very hard to reduce bias from their feed algorithms and tried to remain very neutral in rankings and distribution.
I think there was a conservative chilling effect that went above and beyond what they could have done to help.
Aside, but I get all my Q&A jollies from https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ these days. The moderation is unparalleled and the questions as well as the answers are interesting. There will be unanswered questions, which is frustrating, but the quality remains high.
If we look at Quora as a marketplace connecting users in need of information and experts, then paying for questions means oversupply of experts. This is a bad sign: if a lot of people are ready to work for free, there is another incentive behind. I believe it is either marketing or vain. If so, it seems irrational to me to seek any kind of information anything on Quora.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadThat average metric is more suspicious than an indicator of scale/impact.
Meanwhile being a Top Writer has done nothing for me other than getting the opportunity to buy quora branded swag from their store. Saying that this system is imbalanced and unfair seems to be an understatement.
Then they started with logins being required and it all seemed to go downhill at an amazing speed.
It became marketing. Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup.
Same with Medium.
Once the startup bros say a site is good for "native marketing", that's when the begins to die.
They break all of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high-quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they started getting on my case for not having topic bios, even though other people's were blatantly false, for not responding nicely when their favorites were being dicks in comments, etc. So I just quit cold turkey and haven't posted since. I only go back to read sometimes when I'm super bored, and that's about it.
There's also seemingly no effort spent on stopping spam even with blatant examples reported many times. It's crazy to see questions get paid thousands while being a Top Writer means I get the opportunity to buy their merchandise.
Gonna copy and paste this below, but it's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency.
On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person.
I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks.
knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function.
If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person.
I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks.
knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function.
If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
Granted, most of these posts are early 2017 and earlier.
Everything after the comma explains why Quora is junk.
Now they removed descriptions from questions, hide comments by default, so they are heading the same direction.
Stackoverflow is helpful as documentation with examples, but for engineering problems is of no help anymore. I usually have to ask in some dev chats and discuss there
I left Quora in 2014, but your first statement feels very true to me. I can't say what they did after I left, but I saw a clear willingness to have a fuzzy interpretation of the rules for power users.
There was a time when Quora would bend over backwards to have one person from NASA write answers. I felt that wasn't really a great strategy. I always felt it would be much more valuable to have 1000 NASA employees write their best answer, and to find a way to make that happen.
This clearly didn't happen, as the one person from NASA who wrote thousands of answers is still a very active.
Full disclosure: I deleted my entire account, questions (>100), answers (>1000), and edits (>100,000) in rage in around 2015, mainly because I'm immature, but partly because I didn't want Quora to have what I made after I left. Also, I created a new account, because I wanted to feel it out to see how it was now, in case someone comes looking :P
Right now the system seems to be breaking rules that hurt writers and readers alike, with no discernible benefit other than creating tons of ad inventory and SEO inbound traffic.
Not to mention, the abundance of dirt quality content and insincere questions (and answers)
That's a good point. Though it certainly isn't the case for Instagram...
Quora pushed a blend between Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. It was text-based discovery. I do miss the well-researched, cited, frequently updated answers of yesteryear.
>It's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency.
On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person.
I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks.
knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function.
If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
And posts out of order. And posts on repeat.
It’s clearly no longer the simple service which simply shows me the latest images posted by those I follow.
It’s now a site I can tell is trying to game me, and that’s such a turn off.
Facebook had that moment where they crossed a line and that was when I stopped posting. Instagram too is getting close.
They shouldn’t push their luck.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/influ...
Life is almost comical.
Maybe it's because I've work with people in this space, but I'm convinced 60% of Instagram activity is generated by bots. Give it time.
The actual reason could be that your business model is not sustainable. Eventually you will then be pressured into ever more desperate ways to get income. Inevitably that will include ads on the web.
Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. Looking at Crunchbase they had $226M funding compared to Stack Overflow's $68M. I know it's more complicated than those numbers, but I feel like that funding is squandered on Quora.
I think that pretty much sums up how I feel about Silicon Valley and what it's come to stand for. Earlier, it was about building something cool that people used (and make a good living doing it). Then some of those cool things ended up making so much money, that now it's not about making creating, it's about making money.
The same thing happened with the mobile app stores. First it was about people making cool stuff that was useful, and then a few stories came out about how insanely lucrative some apps ended up being, and everyone wanted to make the next app and get rich.
Since this seems to be a natural emergent phenomenon with how our culture and technology interact, I guess I'm just hoping that somewhere along the lifecycle of the phenomenon it settles into a more sane paradigm where everyone isn't constantly on step X of what is essentially a get rich quick scheme.
Reddit also has the gilding system for making extra cash for when ads aren't enough.
That people pay for the internet connection doesn't really have much effect on the economics. It's the payment for the production of the information or lack thereof that is driving the deleterious effects on quality of information that we are seeing.
This is mostly of our choosing too! And we will continue to put up with it until we don't and we sort out alternative systems. You can already see things changing with some sites putting up paywalls and some people choosing to pay or some people clicking away.
It's not an easy fix in aggregate, but as an individual it's possible to make choices where the economics isn't skewing in a direction you're not happy with. The trade-off is you might not be happy to pay for what you used to get for free. Well I don't have a good answer to that other than it is what it is.
Two good examples in my life at least I can think of is paying for access to Pluralsight means I'm getting high quality, in-depth, curated tech education on demand rather than scrappily piecing together random tutorials that bug me with passive aggressive "no, I don't want to become a coding ninja" ebook offers. The being I buy and read a decent amount of high quality books as the economics is structured such that they have to provide the value upfront before I'll exchange the money and the cost to produce the book is higher than just a blog post, so it's much more in-depth and Im not being sucked into anyone's marketing funnel.
All personal choices but I've been saying for years now the economics of the internet is somewhat busted as it relates to information. You just have to be careful and don't be afraid to use economics to drive the quality up in your favor.
Then there is stuff like Khan Academy. That's just out of this world awesome. Free and insane quality.
Then again that's a case of education as infrastructure. That guy put in the work to produce that content once and it can go on teaching forever. That is the real power of the internet, but it seems that's the exception to the rule.
I think we're already seeing it play out in slo-mo over the last 6~8 years. It's becoming more and more noticeable that things are shifting now.
https://qz.com/480741/this-free-online-encyclopedia-has-achi...
I thought that sort of thing might be copied by more educators on more topics. Same non-profit or public-benefit corporation might run them all with some charter, license, and/or contract maximizing the availability while still making money to support content updates. Could be many doing this sort of thing.
For most media outlets, someone paying is still someone they're gonna show ads too.
My point still stands. It's all driven by an economics in some form or another and the more of the economics you drive the more it's possible for you to align the incentives to produce things in your favor. This is the case no matter which actor in the system you are.
Heck, you controlling the economics in terms of what you spend your money and attention on are really the only levers you've got in order to drive the supply/demand mechanism of the market. The other variables are technology and what the other people in the market are demanding as that effects what will be supplied.
If you had enough money you could pay for a one off piece of unique research if you really wanted to. These days you even get people subscribing to individuals on patreon as a model that exists.
Well... I can't say that surprises me.
HN has indirect benefits to YC, so it gets hosted and maintained. In that model, ensuring authenticity and freedom from advertising cancer works for the benefit of both the community and YC.
That is so easy to game for a startup - Post something related, get friends/ pay for upvotes, repeat. What applies to quora's fall also applies to HN. How could HN (or any other niche community for that matter) survive that downward spiral?
But I guess a big part of the reason is that HN generally doesn't want to have this kind of content here, whereas people running Quora embraced and encouraged thinly-veiled ads.
Is advertising a male business?
When I see a startup with a woman at the helm, it seems that advertising is a bit less aggressive, but again, that may be selection bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(subculture)
>Bro is a subculture of young men who spend time partying with others like themselves.[1] Although the popular image of bro lifestyle is associated with sports apparel and fraternities, it lacks a consistent definition. Most aspects vary regionally such as in California where it overlaps with surf culture.[2] Oxford Dictionaries have noted that bros frequently self-identify with neologisms containing the word "bro" as a prefix or suffix.[1] In a New York Magazine article in September 2013, Ann Friedman wrote: "Bro once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men."[3]
Since they've chosen the advertising model, that means increasing views at all costs to create the inventory to sell those ads. Unfortunately but inevitable.
Here's a copy and paste from a different comment with some more details:
-- BEGIN COPY PASTE --
Gonna copy and paste this below, but it's very exciting to see your feedback on Quora. I'm working on a prototype for my website, knophy.com, that is going to revolve completely around promoting those with competency.
On the Internet, there is too much value and emphasis on QUICK bangs of interest, while the real value can lie much more comfortably in long for interaction, much like a conversation in person.
I'm not going to give too many details now, but I look forward to hopefully having you guys give the prototype a trial once it's ready. I estimate that will be in about 3 - 4 weeks.
knophy.com is currently live, but it's really just there because I'm developing all of this out in the open. I'm also working on radically changing how we think about business structures and actually incorporating the idea of demonstrated competencies into how the board is going to function.
If you'd like to check out the repo, it's here: http://github.com/technoplato/knophy
I didn't appreciate how hard it was to come up with good QA pairs for a topic until IBM Watson acquired the company I was working for (Blekko) and got to see how things got made. I isn't something you can farm out to Mechanical Turk, and without AGI it isn't something that is easily auto generated from a knowledge graph. Ten thousand questions about the insurance business and vetted and ranked answers? Solid gold.
So, I like this theory but I doubt the quality of what your algorithms would learn this way.
The canonical example is "Siri, where can I hide a dead body?" This is a question where being accurate will leave the consumer less satisfied than with giving a "popular" answer.
Not sure on cause/effect or if he exactly left because of it - but I don't think it was a coincidence that Quora went hard on spam, walled garden and monetization strategies after one of two co-founders leaves.
Pretty sure that got killed off at some point in their pre-MS struggles, at least on LI there was more chance of getting people with relevant experience.
Fact based, impartial content by people knowledgeable about the topic gave way to perception based/ meme worthy answers and later on to questions as well.
Also I agree with a couple of comments here which site India/ users from India as a factor. (Particularly around 2014 election and later).
And I think later on Quora did not have a choice but to go with the flow.
(I know this comment is also a bit generalization and perception based. :))
My experience:
- Quality of content has declined. You get asked a lot of nonsensical questions. On the answer side, too many quick and easy, no-more-thinking-required, answers.
- It needs to find a more specific niche. If there's a StackExchange for it, it doesn't need to be on Quora. I'm not gonna ask on Quora about how to use Python decorators. The thing they're good is though, is relating personal experiences. There's a lot of great answers to open ended questions relating to people's personal feelings about various things.
- Discovery is broken somehow. At one point I selected some topics, and now I'm in a filter bubble of my own making. I might like burgers, but that doesn't mean I should be fed burgers for every meal. Changing the topics is not the solution, there's always enough content to fill up the feed for hours.
- Cheerleading. Too many people get upvoted for being famous. Too many people get upvoted for pandering to popular opinion.
Some I like, some I don't. But it is interesting to read.
Jimmy "your premise is flawed" Wales was famous on Quora for his shutdowns. The site slowly started turning into a platform for marketers to pump their self-help/motivational channels.
Many of the answers have the same storytime format. The writer takes us back in time, introduces a concept that on first inspection seems wrong, and eventually gives us an example of why it is correct by using an example of someone else's misfortune.
It gets old fast.
From my understanding, the better your question does, the more money it generates. This puts incentives on questions that are (A) most likely to be asked and (B) answers that will drive traffic to the questions.
Quora used to be more like Wikipedia, and now it's more like Yahoo answers.
They don't pay for answers though, and this is making writers turn into unpaid workers generating money for spammers who just post questions all day. Many writers I know have stopped because there is no upside.
[0] https://www.quora.com/profile/Dave-Baggett
No, I don't need to login. No, I don't need 50 more notifications and an email digest, no, I don't need to install the damnt app.
If someone goes through the trouble to delete their account it makes sense that they’d want their content gone too (privacy).
For me, it's "Pinterest, what's that?"
Quora embodies what I fear most about the idea of ever starting a VC-backed co...that once you accept money it is very hard to return it and if your burn rate is low you could just “exist” for years without actually succeeding or accomplishing much at all.
Quora is Adam's baby. He owns most of it and has been involved as a primary investor for... I'm not sure how long. Before that he was CTO of Facebook and an early investor in Instagram. He's made immense returns on these investments. I don't have numbers, but I would bet money he could buy back Quora from investors with cash and still be a several-hundred-millionaire. With that said, why would he do anything but his pet project?
Also, if the site can be run completely independently (and it looks like operational costs are rather low) then why even take VC in the first place? Surely the effects of hundreds of millions requiring a return could easily be predicted as eventually causing problems?
As for funding, he wasn’t liquid when Quora started afaik, but also even smart wealthy people take loans and get VC.
1) Why wouldn’t the people answering the questions get that money? Aren’t they the ones adding value to the site?
2) I’ve noticed a ton of spam answers recently where the answer is just a link to another site, didn’t used to happen like 2 years ago
For sure good answers are more valuable than good questions.
asking questions can be done anywhere. the point of paying is to attract them to quora vs the competition.
> The top 10 earning partners earned an average of $9,189 and asked 11,256 questions each, averaging 61 questions per day
This explains quite a bit about the quality of the content on that site....
And yes, advertising this fact seems misguided to me.
What is the best way to maximize the revenue / opportunity here?
I think there was a conservative chilling effect that went above and beyond what they could have done to help.
Does StackOverflow and those guys pay anything? IIRC you don't even get paid to answer. Quora's investors' money is goin' down the toilet.
Haha, paying for questions: the dumbest idea I've heard in 2018!