Exactly. Essays on essays being written on irrelevant, hell even if you decide to skip and scroll past any answers that look like ebook you can't scroll enough to skip to the precise and meaningful answers.

This is my go-to example of the type of hilariously terrible Quora answer that plagues the site: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-learn-competitive-programming...

90% of that "advice" could be copy pasted onto any "how do I learn something", and the remaining two sentences related to competitive programming are so vague that he links to the wikipedia page on "Algorithms" and the wikipedia page on "Programming Language"

And that gets you 460 upvotes, far above some of the better answers at the bottom of the thread.

This answer looks to be written by an AI.

Yes. Apparently from an 'Idea machine'

As an Indian, I have to agree. My feed is filled with questions about salaries and IT jobs, even though I've never held an IT job or want one. The answers are insipid, the burden of proof is entirely anecdotal, and brevity is apparently not a thing.

Plus, the platform is now filled with spammers just promoting their own companies. Ask a question about how to manage a project better and you'll only get some spammer promoting his software instead of actually sharing tactics.

This bizarre racism seems quite off-topic.

On one hand I feel the same reaction you have to the parent, phrased this way it sounds like he/she is denigrating a whole nation.

On the other hand, there was something that happened here that we should probably talk about.

A few years ago some of the topics (especially human-relationship subjects) experienced a sudden surge of content from people from India. I know many smart and erudite Indians, and these new users... weren't. I don't know what happened. Maybe Quora suddenly became a fad with the pre-teens in India? Kids online are generally insufferable from all cultures.

The platform didn't digest this well. Quite a few topics that used to be interesting suddenly became filled with garbage. I stopped watching many. Now I seem to just get bombarded with WW2 trivia, which is ok I guess, but I kinda miss "the old Quora".

It's an awkward subject but the parent's comment can't just be discounted as racism.

Eternal September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

What happened in India was from mid-2016 usable internet access became super cheap. This suddenly added at least a hundred million new users to the Internet in a short span of time, people who were being exposed to totally new communities beyond their facebook friend circle. This is not about India, this happens whenever there is a clash between new users and old users and the number of new users is overwhelmingly larger than the old ones. This should have happened when China started getting internet, but I guess their government policies coupled with less number of English speakers than India prevented it. But this is not the last time this is happening. After the Indians settle down, I guess next will be Africa and we will start again.

When AOL first created its portal to Usenet newsgroups in the 1990s, there was a similar effect.

Very true. Funny anecdote:

I used to be an avid reader of alt.best-of-internet. When AOL put newsgroups online, alt.best-of-internet was at the top of the alphabetical list and suddenly got a deluge of nonsense. Please to AOL went unheard.

Someone got the brilliant idea to keep a thread bumped to the top whose title was:

OFFICIAL MESSAGE FROM AOL: WE WORSHIP SATAN

I don't know if this was cause/effect, but shortly afterwards alt.best-of-internet was hidden or moved to a less conspicuous location in the UI and the deluge stopped.

If you're okay with pointing out that statistically Indians are much more likely to make stupid answers, what's wrong with saying statistically blacks are much more likely to commit crimes.

Choose both or none.

Crimes are/ might be more likely to be committed by blacks, in some countries. Being black doesn't make you more likely to commit a crime.

I think he's talking about the difference between correlation and causation.

You're right though in that from a law enforcement POV the two look roughly the same.

> Kids online are generally insufferable from all cultures.

Hey man thats ageist! I know X kids that are probably smarter than the average adult!

Maybe we should have a conversation on ageism now.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

Maybe we should. Because assholes of all ages tend to be blamed on kids - thirty years old someone being toxic on the internet is assumed to be teenager even when his/her age is known.

The follow up question is: if we truly assume it is all kids being jerks, why do adults dont voice disapproval the way they would in real life, but rather sheepishly enable it? Role modeling and it takes a village and all that.

He absolutely 10000% correct, it is not racism. Quora is 98% Indian (or similar region country people) asking fake questions to "market" their crappy service.

It is incredibly obvious if you ever visit once. (Probably will be your first visit because you didn't notice it.)

It is indeed not racism. I was an editor at Quora in its early days as a way to make some easy side money. I'd say something on the order of 90% of the unedited content in the queue originates in India, and it's terrible. Loads and loads of repetitive, already-answered questions (a seemingly never-ending flood) about IIT or body shops and worried queries about which engineering school is the best or the most competitive, all badly written and horribly spelled. And that's before you even get to the scammy stuff!

Not just people marketing their services but people marketing themselves.

People post questions about themselves and then proceed to answer those questions to build an online presence.

This bizarre racism where nobody states what's blatantly apparent because it can be misinterpreted as racist and people claim racism so as to seem not-racist seems quite off-logic.

Have you used the website? It’s not racism if it’s reality

Quora was great years ago, but now it’s just a glorified Yahoo Answers full of ... non-answers and fake stories in broken English.

Tell me about it. I was probably among the few thousands of Indians using the website during 2012-2013. It helped me so much with learning programming, asking experts, reading about their experiences about working on large scale projects. I thought Quora was the go-to place for useful advices. A year or so and a Quora popularity boom later, I had hundreds of followers, feeds with all kinds of life stories and experiences, and all stuff I deemed useless. I decided to delete my account. The shitloads of crap that Indians have spewed on Quora is most probably the only thing I feel shameful about as an Indian.

There's a weird/fascinating subculture of "Indian Quora," a bit like the ruNet. Check out /r/indianpeoplequora, or just this question: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Indian-thug-life-like. It's a deep Indian circlejerk that's invisible to most of Quora.

What's wrong with Indians?

reddit.com/r/IndianPeopleQuora is pretty active

Well, in the tech world (especially online), they tend to provide low-quality service and bad codes. Quora is an free Indian-web-service-provider advertising platform. Nothing else. It is frustrating to see all off-shore "developers" coming up with a solution to your problems.

It's pretty ironic, that 2 of the top tech companies have Indian CEOs.

Statistically, it is very insignificant.

Market cap-wise, not quite so insignificant.

Accomplishments of few people are not enough to fix the epidemic.

Reminds me about the Quora's "India Problem" in 2013. I am an Indian and I stopped going on Quora within a month of joining the service. Now, from the looks of it, it has actually worsened.

Yet you have the Indians to thank for your username: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru

How is the etymology of "Guru" relevant to this discussion?

It is relevant because the parent made a disparaging remark about Indians on Quora, while having a username with a borrowed word from India. I dislike the antipathy shown towards Indians online (and off), and I try to combat it where I can.

There are more civil and polite methods of expressing dissatisfaction than the kind of blanket statement that gurumeditations has resorted to above.