They break all of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high-quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they started getting on my case for not having topic bios, even though other people's were blatantly false, for not responding nicely when their favorites were being dicks in comments, etc. So I just quit cold turkey and haven't posted since. I only go back to read sometimes when I'm super bored, and that's about it.
I left Quora in 2014, but your first statement feels very true to me. I can't say what they did after I left, but I saw a clear willingness to have a fuzzy interpretation of the rules for power users.
There was a time when Quora would bend over backwards to have one person from NASA write answers. I felt that wasn't really a great strategy. I always felt it would be much more valuable to have 1000 NASA employees write their best answer, and to find a way to make that happen.
This clearly didn't happen, as the one person from NASA who wrote thousands of answers is still a very active.
Full disclosure: I deleted my entire account, questions (>100), answers (>1000), and edits (>100,000) in rage in around 2015, mainly because I'm immature, but partly because I didn't want Quora to have what I made after I left. Also, I created a new account, because I wanted to feel it out to see how it was now, in case someone comes looking :P
Right now the system seems to be breaking rules that hurt writers and readers alike, with no discernible benefit other than creating tons of ad inventory and SEO inbound traffic.
There's also seemingly no effort spent on stopping spam even with blatant examples reported many times. It's crazy to see questions get paid thousands while being a Top Writer means I get the opportunity to buy their merchandise.
Granted, most of these posts are early 2017 and earlier.
Not to mention, the abundance of dirt quality content and insincere questions (and answers)
Everything after the comma explains why Quora is junk.
Now they removed descriptions from questions, hide comments by default, so they are heading the same direction.
Stackoverflow is helpful as documentation with examples, but for engineering problems is of no help anymore. I usually have to ask in some dev chats and discuss there
Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. Looking at Crunchbase they had $226M funding compared to Stack Overflow's $68M. I know it's more complicated than those numbers, but I feel like that funding is squandered on Quora.
I think that pretty much sums up how I feel about Silicon Valley and what it's come to stand for. Earlier, it was about building something cool that people used (and make a good living doing it). Then some of those cool things ended up making so much money, that now it's not about making creating, it's about making money.
The same thing happened with the mobile app stores. First it was about people making cool stuff that was useful, and then a few stories came out about how insanely lucrative some apps ended up being, and everyone wanted to make the next app and get rich.
Since this seems to be a natural emergent phenomenon with how our culture and technology interact, I guess I'm just hoping that somewhere along the lifecycle of the phenomenon it settles into a more sane paradigm where everyone isn't constantly on step X of what is essentially a get rich quick scheme.
Reddit also has the gilding system for making extra cash for when ads aren't enough.
For most media outlets, someone paying is still someone they're gonna show ads too.
My point still stands. It's all driven by an economics in some form or another and the more of the economics you drive the more it's possible for you to align the incentives to produce things in your favor. This is the case no matter which actor in the system you are.
Heck, you controlling the economics in terms of what you spend your money and attention on are really the only levers you've got in order to drive the supply/demand mechanism of the market. The other variables are technology and what the other people in the market are demanding as that effects what will be supplied.
If you had enough money you could pay for a one off piece of unique research if you really wanted to. These days you even get people subscribing to individuals on patreon as a model that exists.
That people pay for the internet connection doesn't really have much effect on the economics. It's the payment for the production of the information or lack thereof that is driving the deleterious effects on quality of information that we are seeing.
This is mostly of our choosing too! And we will continue to put up with it until we don't and we sort out alternative systems. You can already see things changing with some sites putting up paywalls and some people choosing to pay or some people clicking away.
It's not an easy fix in aggregate, but as an individual it's possible to make choices where the economics isn't skewing in a direction you're not happy with. The trade-off is you might not be happy to pay for what you used to get for free. Well I don't have a good answer to that other than it is what it is.
Two good examples in my life at least I can think of is paying for access to Pluralsight means I'm getting high quality, in-depth, curated tech education on demand rather than scrappily piecing together random tutorials that bug me with passive aggressive "no, I don't want to become a coding ninja" ebook offers. The being I buy and read a decent amount of high quality books as the economics is structured such that they have to provide the value upfront before I'll exchange the money and the cost to produce the book is higher than just a blog post, so it's much more in-depth and Im not being sucked into anyone's marketing funnel.
All personal choices but I've been saying for years now the economics of the internet is somewhat busted as it relates to information. You just have to be careful and don't be afraid to use economics to drive the quality up in your favor.
Then there is stuff like Khan Academy. That's just out of this world awesome. Free and insane quality.
Then again that's a case of education as infrastructure. That guy put in the work to produce that content once and it can go on teaching forever. That is the real power of the internet, but it seems that's the exception to the rule.
https://qz.com/480741/this-free-online-encyclopedia-has-achi...
I thought that sort of thing might be copied by more educators on more topics. Same non-profit or public-benefit corporation might run them all with some charter, license, and/or contract maximizing the availability while still making money to support content updates. Could be many doing this sort of thing.
I think we're already seeing it play out in slo-mo over the last 6~8 years. It's becoming more and more noticeable that things are shifting now.
That's a good point. Though it certainly isn't the case for Instagram...
And posts out of order. And posts on repeat.
It’s clearly no longer the simple service which simply shows me the latest images posted by those I follow.
It’s now a site I can tell is trying to game me, and that’s such a turn off.
Facebook had that moment where they crossed a line and that was when I stopped posting. Instagram too is getting close.
They shouldn’t push their luck.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/influ...
Life is almost comical.
Quora pushed a blend between Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. It was text-based discovery. I do miss the well-researched, cited, frequently updated answers of yesteryear.
Maybe it's because I've work with people in this space, but I'm convinced 60% of Instagram activity is generated by bots. Give it time.
The actual reason could be that your business model is not sustainable. Eventually you will then be pressured into ever more desperate ways to get income. Inevitably that will include ads on the web.
HN has indirect benefits to YC, so it gets hosted and maintained. In that model, ensuring authenticity and freedom from advertising cancer works for the benefit of both the community and YC.
That is so easy to game for a startup - Post something related, get friends/ pay for upvotes, repeat. What applies to quora's fall also applies to HN. How could HN (or any other niche community for that matter) survive that downward spiral?
But I guess a big part of the reason is that HN generally doesn't want to have this kind of content here, whereas people running Quora embraced and encouraged thinly-veiled ads.
Is advertising a male business?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(subculture)
>Bro is a subculture of young men who spend time partying with others like themselves.[1] Although the popular image of bro lifestyle is associated with sports apparel and fraternities, it lacks a consistent definition. Most aspects vary regionally such as in California where it overlaps with surf culture.[2] Oxford Dictionaries have noted that bros frequently self-identify with neologisms containing the word "bro" as a prefix or suffix.[1] In a New York Magazine article in September 2013, Ann Friedman wrote: "Bro once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men."[3]
When I see a startup with a woman at the helm, it seems that advertising is a bit less aggressive, but again, that may be selection bias.
Well... I can't say that surprises me.
It became marketing. Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup.
Same with Medium.
Once the startup bros say a site is good for "native marketing", that's when the begins to die.