[HN Gopher] Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
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Leaving Quora after 10 years of answering questions
Author : aarondf
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-12-13 21:43 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (exquora.thoughtstorms.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (exquora.thoughtstorms.info)
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Quora could have been way better than that. Quora trying to force
| people to sign-up just to see answers for user acquisition was a
| bad choice in my opinion. A service a bit more informal than
| stack exchange, with a less aggressive moderation makes total
| sense.
| manigandham wrote:
| Quora was incredible back in 2010. I would spend hours reading
| and writing. The highlight was interacting with some of the great
| Silicon Valley characters that contributed much of the early
| content.
|
| Since then the site has gotten steadily worse in every way
| possible, while staying aloft with infinite VC money and rich
| founders. It's sad story of what could've been.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Totally agree. I used to browse the site and now I block it
| from my search results.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Just another VC-backed zombie company. maybe it will be
| acquired by yahoo, google, or Microsoft and put out of its
| misery.
| xenihn wrote:
| Is there an industry term for users who are responsible for
| contributing valuable content in exchange for nothing that could
| be legally classified as actual compensation? Or for a business
| whose revenue and valuation depends on said type of user?
|
| Something Awful is the first example of such a business that
| comes to mind, and Reddit is the biggest modern-day equivalent.
| Give your moderators power (however feeble that power may be),
| and give your users some sort of recognition (shoutouts, internet
| points, etc), and they'll produce and curate valuable, eye-
| drawing content for you for free.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| yea Web 2.0
| pmyteh wrote:
| It's sometimes described as 'digital sharecropping'[0].
| Depending on your reason for participating you may get some
| economic benefit (perhaps as share or exposure for your
| business) while the platform both takes the bulk of any profits
| and completely controls the relationship.
|
| Or you may get nothing, of course, other than some magic
| Internet points and a faintly tarnished sense of fun.
|
| [0]: https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Basically all of social media is like this. You provide content
| to Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, whatever because you
| want people to see it. There is an edge case where you make
| money by getting famous, but usually people are just doing it
| for attention, same way they are for anything else. Why do
| people write answers on StackOverflow, Quora, whatever? They
| want people to read their answers and think they're smart.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I wonder if there is a curated collection of stats somewhere
| on the lifecycle numbers on social media ventures?
| iechoz6H wrote:
| Admittedly this is one explanation, another could be that
| people simple like helping others.
| fault1 wrote:
| In some sense, the people doing "unpaid work" can be seen as
| trying to improve their own brand, name, or following. Very few
| of these influencers are able to monetize directly through this
| type of work though, unless it's through some sort of medium
| that does revenue sharing, like Youtube.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| This would explain why most Quora answers start off like
| self-promotional puff pieces you'd find on LinkedIn, about
| how the answer you're about to read changed someones life.
| DantesKite wrote:
| What's crazy is that all that effort and skill can still be
| accumulated into something valuable.
|
| Off the top of my head, they could start a YouTube channel
| dedicated to answering silly or crazy Quora questions/answers.
|
| They could start a Substack accumulating the lessons they
| learned.
|
| They could try developing a competitor to Quora (something very,
| very small for starters), since they're familiar with the common
| issues the site has.
|
| You can leverage a lot of that experience into something valuable
| that wasn't immediately obvious in hindsight especially because
| it seems to come so effortlessly for this person. You just have
| to spend some time developing your business skills, knowing where
| to look for opportunities.
|
| When I look back at some of the masters of their craft, it was
| always non-obvious connections. I'm not saying everything you do
| in life will be economically or even creatively valuable, but
| you'd be surprised at what you'd find with a little effort.
|
| Even the art of researching and answering questions is in of
| itself a valuable skill that you can sell on Gumroad for $5.
|
| Of course you're free to move on to different project whenever
| you want but I figured this author should get some financial
| compensation for all the experience they accumulated.
|
| That's really the great thing about the Internet. Even the most
| niche fields can be valuable if you package it in the right way
| for others.
| haolez wrote:
| Quora has this nasty dark pattern where they send you spam e-mail
| with different senders for each "space". If you simply click on
| "Block this sender" in your e-mail client, it will not work,
| since they will send e-mails to you from new addresses. You have
| to block them at the domain level.
|
| In my opinion, this is extremely user hostile for the sake of
| improving some metrics.
| fault1 wrote:
| I also get quite aggressive mobile notifications from them.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| My domain-level spam filter has hundreds of domains, started
| with linkedin.com and facebook.com. These weasels will invent a
| hundred ways to get into your inbox in spite of turning off all
| possible mail notifications that exist at _that_ moment.
|
| In the past, I used to use two rules: mark as read and archive.
| These days I just automatically delete all.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| is it spam email? the unsubscribe link brings me to my email
| prefences with a single option, on or off.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I think calling this a "dark pattern" is unnecessarily
| uncharitable given that you can control per-space
| email/notifications in your user settings already.
| Additionally, each space's email takes the form of
| "<name>-space@quora.com", which is trivial to filter on.
| notacoward wrote:
| Leaving Quora was also one of my own better moves. Like the OP, I
| had also been a Top Writer a couple of times. I had many of my
| own fans, some of whom still follow me on Twitter. But I got sick
| of features coming and going, staff jerking people around, and
| particularly the _incessant_ promotion of flippant intelligence-
| free non-answers over well thought out _real_ answers for the
| sake of engagement. Many of those answers clearly violated the
| site 's stated rules (e.g. excessive use of irrelevant images)
| and got shown first _contrary to user upvotes_ which I consider
| dishonest and unfair to people who actually try to contribute
| positively. So I just up and quit. Loudly. Even as a non-user,
| their cozy relationship with Google to boost their search
| rankings pisses me off. Everyone should quit Quora.
| shoto_io wrote:
| "Engagement-driven" product development is a very poor choice.
| You might be optimising for the short-term and your personal
| product manager performance review. But other than that it will
| slowly kill your product.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Quora is pretty terrible these days. Tons of low quality spammy
| answers, annoying forced sign-in prompt for viewing certain
| questions and answers.
|
| Same for stack overflow and related sites. A lot of long-term
| contributors but no payoff, no recognition. I guess you can put
| in on your resume.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > I will soon be gone from Quora.
|
| Were people ever _in Quora?_ Isn 't it one more of those 'free'
| sites that exploit the free labor of random people to sell
| questionable content? I don't get how someone can get so attached
| to his own image that considers himself to be part of a company
| that he s clearly not a part of.
| freedomben wrote:
| It's been a long time since I went to Quora but they _used_ to
| have some really high quality answers from real experts.
| Quality was always a little hit and miss but the good answers
| were _really_ good.
| smoe wrote:
| What killed Quora for me was their push towards canonical
| question/answers, not allowing for any context to a question,
| ridding it of a lot of the nuance that made many discussions
| actually interesting. Now there seems to be just more and
| more rehashing of the same questions that have already been
| beaten to death waiting to get merged together.
|
| I was somewhat active for a while writing answers, but every
| time I wanted to ask a question the algorithm "forced" me to
| generalize it more and more to the point where I'm no longer
| interested in the answer. And I also felt the same with the
| questions Quora wanted me to answer.
| fault1 wrote:
| It basically was the anti-Yahoo Answers. Over time, it became
| just like Yahoo Answers.
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