Uh people actually liked Quora? I always blocked that website for SEO spam
i think it’s been gliding on the entropy of its original value for a long time at this point (it was founded in 2009)—certainly i can’t remember a time where it was useful, but then i only first encountered it in like 2016.
I used it 2012-2014. It was fairly decent at that time.
The SEO spam is terrible. It reminds me of the days of things like Experts Exchange that just hand your query back to you and pretend like it’s what you want. “Here’s the exact question you’re looking for, just pay us and you can totally see the answer, we promise!”
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I think for like ten minutes they were vetting people joining or something, and the answers were high quality. But the whole thing turned into yahoo answers within a month of it getting popular.
honestly, not sure I -ever- found a useful answer on Quora.
Reading them taught me one thing, Quora had/has a weirdly strong hardon for Steve Jobs and is/was all too happy to talk about anecdotes of him buying the authors’ lunch or reconciling with his estranged daughter. The only time I read criticism of Apple or him was when the question specifically asked for it.
How shortsighted does one have to be to say, “oh robots can generate questions, generate the answers, do the moderation, function as support”, and then expect anyone other than robots to view or contribute to the site? They just spent years specifically catering to robots (SEO crawlers), is there a reason to be surprised at the result?
I finally stopped using it entirely when they started paywalling the answers. I don’t know if you had to actually pay or just sign up to view them but whatever it was went too far for me. Nothing of real value was honesty lost from my existence either.
I was on it back when it was in closed beta and even went to their launch party. People were even saying how much the quality was declining as the closed beta got larger. It’s been a shitfest for a while - it seems tailor-made for blowhards to speak authoritatively without having any real authority on an issue.
To react to the article:
most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora
The first one is subjective but the second one isn’t - and neither are true.
It’s been a shitfest for a while - it seems tailor-made for blowhards to speak authoritatively without having any real authority on an issue.
i’m sure plenty of people have made this joke before, but AI answers should have no problem fitting in with a culture of this sort!
Food for thought: have AIs been trained using data scraped from Quora, like they used data scraped from Reddit?
Almost certainly, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t
My favorite stage of Quora is when the monetized asking questions. Around this time I had too much time on my hands and showed up to help. When I realized I was making fractions of a penny, I turned to trolling the power users.
These guys were so insecure. They’d whine in their answers about how Quora should pay for good answers, not for questions that bring traffic. Nice try, but every tech bro is online and dying to give an opinion, so sorry, “good” answers is not worth paying for.
And when you would try to correct them or report their answers as incorrect they would lose their shit and try and report me 😂
Fun times. Like a dolphin watching a ship sink.
Too many better alternatives. Reddit (yeah, even after spez’s shit, Reddit is still better than Quora), Stack Overflow/Exchange, and now ChatGPT.
The noJS frontend Quetre even let you browse it without having to log in. I used it for a hot minute before realizing the answers on Quora were generally hot garbage.
It’s a reminder that not all of the old web was better, despite our collective nostalgia.
I think Reddit really enjoys the power of community effort. r/science removed every single personal anecdote, for example.
It was always garbage
I liked Quora as recently as a few years ago, it had some nice explanations that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Obviously you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but you have to do that anywhere on the internet.
I’ll be honest, I could sometimes find a helpful answer there, but for about the last 2 years it has taken 3 reloads of a page at least before it actually loads any content, otherwise it just sits there at a plain white page showing their logo and I usually give up rather than try to get lucky with a page actually loading.
Yeah, this is sad, just read a post that Desgner News shut down, it also was mostly spam jn the end, no one cared anymore. But maybe that’s ok? Things change.
That article is horrible, not for it’s content but their insistence of underlining words and phrases in sentences as links but it creates false emphasis and makes it unreadable!
They need to learn to develop some subtlety with their word cloud link nonsense
