How Quora Died

NinjaZ@infosec.pub to Technology@lemmy.world – 216 points – One of Our Best Websites Died While No One Was Looking
slate.com

“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.

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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 that's because Quora paywalls responses from volunteers, preventing others from seeing them unless they pay a subscription. Pretty scummy.

I wouldn't call it scummy, just bad business, give people one premium answer per week, so they know the quallity and at incentivised to pay.

Do they pay the people who answer the questions? I genuinely don't know. But if they don't then, yes, it is scummy to just profit off of someone else's work and not pay them.

I’ve contributed to sites like Wikipedia.

Not everything needs to be measured in money though. There’s inherent satisfaction in the work with things like this. And at the end of the day, we all benefit from having platforms with accurate, well thought out answers. Today you’re answering, tomorrow you’re the one with the question.

Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit. They don't monetise volunteer contributions and they don't paywall the knowledge on their site, they run on donations. It's not really a comparable situation.

It is though, because they gamed search engines well enough to frequently be in the top results yet never had an answer you could see. Annoying as fuck

Here's hoping at some point search engines will return Lemmy links when people look for answers, but we're not there yet

search engines are thoroughly crap right now. Abandon all hope that they will become better.

You say that like it's true for all search engines. Which isn't the case and is incredibly dumb to think.

The problem with Lemmy is the federated content gets duplicated on multiple sites, word for word, which isn't good for SEO

That is a search engine problem, not a lemmy problem.

Have we said anything useful yet? Just kidding, but I just look for casual commentary on here, all surface level and meme stuff when tired at the end of the day.

I think Something will have to change quite significantly.

Search engines give heavy weighting to uniqueness of content. And with Lemmy content being replicated across the fediverse that doesn’t exactly happen.

And I’m not sure you can set a canonical URL that’s off site. And then, if it does and that site goes down, you “lose” the content.

It’s not just that it’s not unique, but any single instance is less heavily viewed, even if the overall response is

Kagi now has a lens for focusing results from the Fediverse, I've seen it pull Lemmy links before!

I'd say there was a period before reddit hit its pinnacle where Quora was significantly better. Probably more than 10 years ago, though, and only for a few years. I remember when I started spending more time on Reddit than Quora.

I've been pouring my life into the Internet since before Quora existed.

There was never a time I recall Quora not being shit. All it ever did was dilute search results.

Any time Quora results come up my search gets an instant -Quora. That site is a wet fart... terrible

It's like the text version of Pinterest.

Except Pinterest is good if you know what you're looking for. Quora has always been bad no matter what you do.

It's more that it pops up in Image Searches all the time and it's almost always a useless example of what you're searching for.

I would pull it up if it seemed directly related, but just the UX was so awful that even if it answered my question, it felt bad the whole while. Though most of the time it was the most awful LinkedIn-esque winemaking m wind bagging by people desperate to be considered professionals in their field

Before Quora it was yahoo answers and it was just as shitty as Quora. The only Q&A sites that are not a waste of time are stackoverflow and other stackexchange sites.

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."

A horrible user experience with an insufferable userbase. I can't believe it even lasted this long.

Who thought it would be great if similar questions overpowered the one you searched for?

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.

Yep, I can’t speak on the decline of quality because it was a site that was early to dark pattern bullshit. It would show up prominently in Google search and then tease “you have to sign up to read the answers”. Uh, no. Reminds me of expert sexchange or whatever that site was that got smashed by stackoverflow for similar reasons.

Umm.. expert sexchange?

Experts Exchange, basically if stackoverflow was quora. Can only see questions even when logged in and you'd have to pay a pretty penny to get access to any answer. Or you could collect enough points to access the answer you need by writing answers yourself (ridiculously many points, think weeks of answering).

I finally cracked and made an account

It's not worth it, you basically get alerts on the account for everything to the point of uselessness

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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.

Volunteer your time, but do it with your eyes open.

If you're okay with how it's going to end up, it's all good.

You mean like /c/asklemmy or /c/nostupidquestions?

I think we just need more biomass.

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

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.

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.

Pretty much what happened with reddit which lost all its power users.

Yes, with a difference: Reddit knows it but doesn't care due to the imminent IPO.

When is it? Feels like I've been hearing about reddit IPO for 3 years now.

I'm almost starting to wonder if that's the plan. Just keep saying "IPO IPO IPO" to get funding from over-eager VCs who want a piece of the IPO before it becomes widely available.

But then you just never IPO. Keep making minor to moderate mistakes along the way so you can be all "weeeeell we would have IPO'd but insert thing here so we want to wait another 6 months to let it die down". Repeat until you're ready to quit, then actually IPO and ride the initial IPO high all the way down via golden parachute.

Quora was just Ask Jeeves 2.0… Both relied on human “experts” and neither could figure out a long term monetization plan.

It was always a garbage site, and it hid behind a requirement to login just to view more than like 1 question, amd it was full of creepy discussions.

People who fucked their mothers, how did it happen? How was the experience? (In great detail) ((Asking for a friend)) (((Only serious answers)))

I don't ever remember people taking Quora very seriously. It was always full of insufferable questions and replies.

I think the main stay of taking Quora seriously mainly consisted of reddit posts citing Q articles from Google searches.

Was it ever alive? When I found it the site was already trash asking for an account just to see content, yahoo answers was the shit.

It definitely was. I remember finding some amazingly insightful answers from people with proper experience. But that must have been nearly a decade ago now. Some of the most memorable ones were reflections from prisoners as IIRC some prisons had some sort of program where the prisoners could write answers and someone would post them on Quora. Interesting insights from murders, con artists and whoever else.

But it has been so long since that was the case. I've had it blocked from my search results for years now. Utter trash.

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?

This article links to a Tweet of a screen recording of a TikTok of a screenshot of a Reddit post as proof that Quora is “hateful”. Yeesh.

Have you been there? It doesnt take long to come across the exact same thing they are highlighting.

I’m not debating the premises or conclusions of the article lol

Mistakes like this are merely clues as to how much time and effort the author actually puts into their journalism

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.

Poster: 100 Quora replies: Hi, I'm , creator and founder of , here's <10 totally meaningless> reasons why you should subscribe to my product that does nothing for your question.

Never used it, noticed it was infected with Chinese and Russian propaganda.

I’d love a plug-in to block all Quora results.

It's sad that so many plugins like this exist.

Remember ExpertsExchange? They charged people for the correct answer but was in the top 10 results. They got blocked very quickly when Google, yes Google, allowed you to block any site from your search. That feature is now gone and you have to specify that in your search terms.

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.

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.

Yahoo answers used to be great

Only for being laughably awful. Quora was in this place where the answers were just good enough that you probably wouldn't be able to dispute any obvious flaws without being a subject matter expert already. Yahoo Answers was only a meme factory.

Yeah nah. I didn't need to know how babby was formed

The UI being one of the worst does not help.

Good riddance honestly, never have I gotten a good answer from Quora, seems like they're all trolls. So for the past decade+ I overlook ANY Quora links related to my search

If you had a question that attracted an expert in a relevant field, you'd get a good answer. If your question didn't attract them you'd get a random internet stranger

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)

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 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.

Quora still has answers to some old math problems so it's not all that useless.

I worry that it will abruptly die one day and we'll lose that. Perhaps someone should be archiving good quora information lol.