I have trouble finding respect for Adam knowing he permitted Quora to gradually transform from something promising to trashing it’s quality for financial sellout to the point that it can no longer be taken seriously. I don’t understand how someone can let that happen.
Yeah I was thinking last night after hearing his involvement in this, does anyone else realize that Quora is basically unusable now? I mean it started from such a noble cause to answer all of humanity's questions to literally tricking end-users into clicking ads...
It’s not just this, you are given answers to related questions when the answer to your actual question is further down. Possibly to increase stickiness? It doesn’t make sense.
This is the most confusing thing any time I've clicked a quora link. I have no idea what I'm looking at. Who designed that? It's crazy how bad it is. They probably got a promo for it lol
The chumbox is slang for the part of news site web design you... try to ignore. These sites managed to optimize their design for <10% of users who will click just about anything.
I'm honestly curious how Quora is still in business. I wouldn't say I was a heavy user, but I used to use it fairly frequently, and then it just became a minefield of walls and dark patterns such that whenever I get a Quora result in search I just go somewhere else. I used to hear people talk about Quora but now I never hear any sort of discussion about it from tech types, besides jests and disdain.
I completely realize that my experience may not track your average Joe, but I read an article from this summer that said Quora was planning an IPO, and I just am trying to wrap my head around how there would be any decent valuation.
Their SEO is very good. "I got it from Quora" is still an answer which carries some weight. And a lot of those answers have a long shelf life - easily 4+ years, even 20 in the case of, say, an answer about Steve Jobs.
So you have a site, with a lot of valuable links, on a platform where anyone can & will create more, with widespread name recognition. That's valuable.
Their SEO was/is technically extremely poor (per Google's rules) and should have gotten their content largely banished from Google. They were intentionally violating one of Google search's primary SEO rules: do not show the Google bot and users a meaningfully different site. Quora was doing exactly that, providing a very different experience to the non-signed in search user (arriving to the site via search results) vs Google bot. Google let Quora get away with SEO murder (speculation on HN has always been that it was due to the close relationships in SV), which is the sole thing that has kept Quora propped up (otherwise its traffic would have been properly obliterated for its blackhat SEO practices).
I always assumed Quora was a classic example of a company that raised too much money.
They had a fantastic, high quality service up to around 2015 - but they raised at least $226m at a (one point) $1.8bn valuation by 2017: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/21/uniquorn/
Justifying that valuation requires a metric ton of growth hacking that appears to be incompatible with maintaining a high level of quality on a Q&A site.
Quora is my biggest internet disappointment by far. I used to spend a lot of time there between 2013-2017. It wasn't perfect but there were great questions, great authors to follow, and the feed consistently served me quality content.
Then they flipped the switch on the new algorithms / monetization strategies and it all turned to shit. All of the thoughtful writers were replaced by whoever could churn out the most sensational (and usually blatantly false) answers. Whenever Google leads me there now I am physically pained by the awful user experience and absolute drivel in the top answers.
Cheat people into generating top quality content for you. Once you have enough, put all of it behind a paywall. And use all that content as your chips in the new AI game.
