The downfall of Quora (2013) (thegoodones.quora.com)

This struck me as more representative of other sites. Like, the one we're on now:

The No Humor Rule: Humor is a de facto taboo on Quora. While the occasional demonstration of witwill evoke no more than a scowl and shake of the head from the community, more regular use will draw a barrage of down votes and risk the possibility of banishment. The staff attempts to deny that this istrue but fails to convince anyone. Many Quorans simply don't appreciate humor and will automatically down vote any post that contains it.

s/quora/HN/g

That said, the author of this piece tries really, really hard to bash on Quora for their login policy. You have to be logged in to contribute or to read.

Honestly? I think they're reading far too much into that.

From the article kindly submitted here: "Quora's philosophy can be summed up as why should the serfs get a share if they were dumb enough to work for free in the first place?"

That's a good question. What is the incentive to be a content creator on Quora?

AFTER EDIT: Aside about the other comments wondering if Hacker News has a no-humor rule. I find comments from time to time on Hacker News that are laugh-out-loud funny. I'll link to two examples to show what I mean, after noting that a good humorous comment on Hacker News is still the same thing as a good nonhumorous comment on Hacker News: a comment that is "thoughtful" both in the sense of being civil and in the sense of providing food for thought in the context of the discussion thread. One recent Hacker News comment that I thought was so funny, and so thoughtful, that I shared it on my Facebook wall (where it was liked by several of my friends) was by patio11 about Yahoo's business plans after the Alibaba IPO.[1] A much older comment that I cherish from years ago was about how lifestyles in Japan changed after the "lost decade" of meager economic growth in the 1990s.[2] You can be humorous on Hacker News and get upvotes (evidently) if you embed your humor in a substantive comment. I don't usually attempt humor here myself, but I appreciate it (and upvote it) when I see it from other participants here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8333625

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328819

[1]

    That little faggot with the earring and the make-up
    Yeah, buddy, that's his own hair
    That little faggot got his own jet airplane
    That little faggot he's a millionaire

Written in 2013.

Please also include the date when submitting links like this.

"Quora's philosophy can be summed up as why should the serfs get a share if they were dumb enough to work for free in the first place?"

Different currencies. The owners of Quora are being paid in US dollars, the content creators in both attention and reputation. Both attention and reputation are currencies that will translate to dollars more and more as we progress towards an, in-part, reputation-based economy. With everyone having access to information what will matter will be your curation of that information, and your commentary. The better these are the better your reputation will be in those content areas, and the more your endorsement will be worth (in both reputation and dollars).

Quora's auto linkification of text seems to be excellent. clueless.it indeed.

"more fast money could be madeby starting a for-profit version of Wikipedia with the end game being to eventually IPO-it."

The whole "Zero to One" campaign by Thiel et. al. seems to be an attempt to thrust a stake through the heart of this kind of thing.

A surprising fierce critique of quora.

I'm not sure there's anything someone wanting to build a community can learn from this article. Which is a shame, because we should really be trying to learn from experience. It would counter the fuckin stupid ideas some people have. (ie: real names only to combat hostility and trolling. The obvious counter would be the comment sections of most newspapers.)

That's... A fairly long rant answering a short question ("what I think about Quora and its latest pivot").

Not that I'm here to defend Quora, but this level of heat makes me wonder whether the unnamed VC has some ongoing beef with it.

This article nails it. I remember when Quora first came out, I thought that it was a great idea, like a stack overflow for the masses. Fast forward to now though and I find myself avoiding it at all costs. Quora seems willing to try any and everything to fix itself except for solving its most glaring and obvious problem, its closed ecosystem. On mobile it is ridiculous when you do a search in browser and click a Quora link it forces you to install the app to see the answer. If you do make the mistake of installing the app you are then inundated with useless notifications about things you don't care about. I know that there is good information hidden in there, but its a terrible strategy to make people jump through hoops to access it. Meanwhile Stack Overflow became Stack Exchange with sub-sites for more and more topics thus transforming itself into what Quora could have/should have been in the first place. Its open nature has driven its growth to a top 200 Alexa rank while Quora seems destined to continue its semi-annual pivoting.

I'm acquainted with the founders of Quora, and I don't think making "fast money" was a primary motivation in founding Quora. They set out to create a question/answer site with a better user experience and a better community.

The business model seems, from the outside, to be the belief that, like Facebook and Twitter, they will make money somehow eventually after becoming a runaway success, even it takes years to monetize.

I thought Quora's philosophy was "blur the page and cover it with a modal signup form".

Some of the comments here are really interesting. A lot of general Quora negativity?

I think the weekly (semi personalised?) Quora 'digest' is one of the only bacn emails I'll open pretty much without fail, almost always ending up on the site. Some of the questions/answers are fascinating.

Quota. ?share=whatever

That to me sums up the site in its entirety. A content SEO Google cheater that tries to con people into signing up to boost its user numbers

They should have looked to StackOverflow as a good example of how you build a proper community, and more importantly, nurture it.

Good ridance.

I mentally blacklisted Quora when it was proudly US only (I'm Canadian). Their reasoning was extremely dubious: something about "cultural differences" and "language barriers" preventing "high quality content".

Foolishly, I gave them another chance when they opened registration worldwide. The second strike was when I found out that they showed the Googlebot different content, à la Experts Exchange.

And the third strike was the heavy handed social integration. Can't post (or even read content) unless you link with Facebook, etc.

It's a shame. As others have noted here I think the web could use an improved version of "Yahoo Answers"; something with a StackOverflow feel. Especially since Google Answers (the one you paid bounties for) went the way of the dodo in 2006.

This piece starts out teasing some kind of business or market analysis about Quora, which would be interesting to read, but it almost immediately descends completely and permanently into Drama, some of which seems like it's only really intelligible to people who spend a lot of time on Quora.

It's not a worthwhile read, and we'd be better off discussing Quora based on virtually any other story about it.

Calling the users "Quorites" is a dead ringer for a lack of familiarity with the site. This guy has barely used Quora, why care for his opinion? It's "Quoran,"'which he mentions later on for some reason.

> Youwill find yourself blocked from seeing content unless you first invest 15 minutes registering through your Facebook or Twitter account.

I can't understand why people constantly hyperbolize how long it takes to sign up for a website or app. For me it'll never take more than 120 seconds, probably 60 of which are spent waiting for the activation email.

Wait, Quora is actually a thing? People actually have content there? I've only visited a couple times and saw that I couldn't access anything. I assumed that the answers didn't really exist, and it was just a scammy thing to get you hooked in. Kinda like how a site might use some popular keyword but the actual content isn't helpful at all.

Who the heck are these people that actually use it? Why??

Quora has a lot of high-quality content. Yeah, you have to sift through some garbage, but compared to Yahoo! Answers it's a different world. Most of the time, the top answer will be a good one.

It may not stay that way forever, but thus far, the quality of the best content is really good when you consider that people wrote it for free, and that the filter is some mix of community voting and machine learning (as opposed to expert curation).

That said, I didn't know about the US-only policy (that was a bad idea) and I'm glad they've changed it. The "social" integration definitely pisses me off, because 90% of "social" in this era is alienation. I considered quitting when I found out that my activity was getting piped out to Facebook. Awful decision.

I kind of feel these sites - Yahoo Answers, Quora - are just serving users not wanting to Google things.

Everyone has questions. Questions can be googled.

Granted, Googling stuff is hard.

Even though you can just stick a question into Google and get some reasonable feedback, it's still hard to know who to trust: I read most students have no clue on what to trust when googling for school assignments. It's not taught there, they're just expected to know. And it's one of those things that is crucial to fully understand things in the society of today.

Of course, people want definitive answers. If there's a definitive answer for something, it's probably in a place like wikipedia.

For something that doesn't have a definitive answer and which can be discussed, there's discussion forums like reddit and HN that a great for this purpose.

In my mind, Quora solves very little, and the way they force you to login really irks me – information should be free. (Just make it publicly accessible already! Make dumps and APIs available like wikipedia. Make it free!) And then there's all the other issues the author describes in this article, especially the inane questions.

I have to say, lots of interesting discussions have happened on Quora - mainly due to the participation of interesting people, not random 13-year olds. That's still a huge accomplishment and why I hope Quora sticks around, but more in form of a general discussion/opinion/experience platform.

This issue hits a home run with me: "Ideological Moderators".

I was a very active Quora user on 2010-2011, I'd visit the site over 10 times a day, I would write any answers on Word, make sure they were thorough, well written, etc, before I replied to question. I made an effort, both offline and online. What I really enjoyed was the initial community, the well thought questions and answers. During this 18-24 month period I also got thousands of upvotes, lots of thank you messages for my answers, etc.

One day an army of moderators came along. These moderators weren't Quora staff, but volunteers. I get it, it takes considerable man power to go through many of those questions and answers. I can work with that.

It was when I asking a question on movies & documentaries that I had my first encounter with them. I can't recall the exact question I asked, but it something along the lines "what are the most interesting documentaries released in 2011?". One moderator, without contacting me, changed the question to something more specific, he added a sub-genre to the question. I got notified of the change, went back, and changed it to the original question. After a couple of hours I get a message from the moderator telling me that that question isn't a "good/relevant" question (I'm paraphrasing). I ask why, and I get told that "You can't ask generic questions". Once more, I change the question to the original one and ignoring the random argument by the moderator. Then this moderator contacted a second moderator in order to gang-up on me, supporting each other random policies in order to make a statement.

It was then that I realised that these people didn't like to moderate Quora for the content quality, but for the feeling of 'power' and control moderation creates. I noticed that these guys liked being moderators because they enjoyed telling others what to do, with no regards for the content, quality, or users. That same day I deleted all of my questions, answers, and Quora account. I haven't used it again since then, and it feels great.

This does not read like it was written by a VC, at least not in an investment context. An investor would not express concern that a user-generated content company was not sharing economics with its contributors. In fact, a company's ability to attract contributors without sharing economics with users (e.g. Facebook) would impress an investor.

After thinking about this for a while it struck me that Quora is simply this decades version of expertsexchange.com.

It has the same "register to read what we slyly showed Google but not you, unless you bump our daily user sign up rate to impress investors" dark pattern going on.

I remember once being very passionate about Quora and I really wanted to join their team.

After doing my research, I came to get data that they are extremely biased to only take ex-Stanford, ex-Facebook people. This was back in 2011-2012 so I hope things have changed atleast from that angle.

My friend interviewed with them and he came back with a very bad experience and was extremely pissed off that he was almost ridiculed for not having cracked it so far in his career.

Anyways, their practices have been very dubious from the start. They should thank those deep pockets of the founders.