“Why Do So Many Music Venues Use Ticketmaster?” “What’s It Like to Train to Be a Sushi Chef?” “How Do Martial Artists Break Concrete Blocks?” If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.

  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    171
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    11 months ago

    If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.

    I disagree, the best place for such answers used to be Reddit, and Stack Exchange for the techy stuff. Quora always felt like cancer for some reason and I never really used it.

    • Gork@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      86
      ·
      11 months ago

      I think that’s because Quora paywalls responses from volunteers, preventing others from seeing them unless they pay a subscription. Pretty scummy.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        21
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        11 months ago

        I wouldn’t call it scummy, just bad business, give people one premium answer per week, so they know the quallity and at incentivised to pay.

        • ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          19
          ·
          11 months ago

          Do they pay the people who answer the questions? I genuinely don’t know. But if they don’t then, yes, it is scummy to just profit off of someone else’s work and not pay them.

          • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            arrow-down
            4
            ·
            11 months ago

            I’ve contributed to sites like Wikipedia.

            Not everything needs to be measured in money though. There’s inherent satisfaction in the work with things like this. And at the end of the day, we all benefit from having platforms with accurate, well thought out answers. Today you’re answering, tomorrow you’re the one with the question.

            • ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              25
              ·
              11 months ago

              Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit. They don’t monetise volunteer contributions and they don’t paywall the knowledge on their site, they run on donations. It’s not really a comparable situation.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          11 months ago

          It is though, because they gamed search engines well enough to frequently be in the top results yet never had an answer you could see. Annoying as fuck

    • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      11 months ago

      Here’s hoping at some point search engines will return Lemmy links when people look for answers, but we’re not there yet

      • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        11 months ago

        search engines are thoroughly crap right now. Abandon all hope that they will become better.

        • M137@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          11 months ago

          You say that like it’s true for all search engines. Which isn’t the case and is incredibly dumb to think.

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        11 months ago

        The problem with Lemmy is the federated content gets duplicated on multiple sites, word for word, which isn’t good for SEO

      • Russ@bitforged.space
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        11 months ago

        Kagi now has a lens for focusing results from the Fediverse, I’ve seen it pull Lemmy links before!

      • crazyCat@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        11 months ago

        Have we said anything useful yet? Just kidding, but I just look for casual commentary on here, all surface level and meme stuff when tired at the end of the day.

      • RecallMadness@lemmy.nz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        11 months ago

        I think Something will have to change quite significantly.

        Search engines give heavy weighting to uniqueness of content. And with Lemmy content being replicated across the fediverse that doesn’t exactly happen.

        And I’m not sure you can set a canonical URL that’s off site. And then, if it does and that site goes down, you “lose” the content.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          11 months ago

          It’s not just that it’s not unique, but any single instance is less heavily viewed, even if the overall response is

    • Haus@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      11 months ago

      I’d say there was a period before reddit hit its pinnacle where Quora was significantly better. Probably more than 10 years ago, though, and only for a few years. I remember when I started spending more time on Reddit than Quora.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    145
    ·
    11 months ago

    I’ve been pouring my life into the Internet since before Quora existed.

    There was never a time I recall Quora not being shit. All it ever did was dilute search results.

    • teamevil@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      45
      ·
      11 months ago

      Any time Quora results come up my search gets an instant -Quora. That site is a wet fart… terrible

    • Rusty@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      11 months ago

      Before Quora it was yahoo answers and it was just as shitty as Quora. The only Q&A sites that are not a waste of time are stackoverflow and other stackexchange sites.

  • maness300@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    89
    ·
    11 months ago

    I think it’s so fucking stupid how it it always defaults to “similar questions” instead of just showing us the actual answers.

    Just another example of throwing as much shit at an audience to drive up “engagement.”

  • ShustOne@lemmy.one
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    78
    ·
    11 months ago

    A horrible user experience with an insufferable userbase. I can’t believe it even lasted this long.

    Who thought it would be great if similar questions overpowered the one you searched for?

    • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      The Quora experience:

      “Hey Quorans, how many carrots go in a carrot stew?”

      Answer to a similar question: “Why does Bugs Bunny eat carrots?”

      unfunny joke “I have an IQ of 128” sarcasm Anyways to answer the question, it’s because he needs good eyesight.

  • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    61
    ·
    11 months ago

    For me I hated Quora because of how locked down it is. Want to view another question on the site? Must register an account first! No fucking thanks. It was always nagging about creating an account.

    Because of this I actively ignored Quora results anytime I googled something.

    • squiblet@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      33
      ·
      11 months ago

      Yep, I can’t speak on the decline of quality because it was a site that was early to dark pattern bullshit. It would show up prominently in Google search and then tease “you have to sign up to read the answers”. Uh, no. Reminds me of expert sexchange or whatever that site was that got smashed by stackoverflow for similar reasons.

        • Barbossa404@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          Experts Exchange, basically if stackoverflow was quora. Can only see questions even when logged in and you’d have to pay a pretty penny to get access to any answer. Or you could collect enough points to access the answer you need by writing answers yourself (ridiculously many points, think weeks of answering).

    • Icalasari@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      11 months ago

      I finally cracked and made an account

      It’s not worth it, you basically get alerts on the account for everything to the point of uselessness

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    54
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    Another social media site which followed the enshittification paradigm. This playbook has played out so many times until now. Start it with “good intentions” as a for-profit startup. People join and volunteer their time because the founders say all the right things and the site culture is so new and exciting. Once the site gets popular though, all the fancy talk from the founders goes out the window.

    When will people learn this lesson? Don’t ever volunteer your time on a for-profit proprietary social network. You will get rugpulled! We are all the value in all these sites. Why do we let them control our interactions, ffs?!

    PS: Would be interesting to get a fediverse version of Quora. Or Maybe we can make something using Lemmy communities instead.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      11 months ago

      Volunteer your time, but do it with your eyes open.

      If you’re okay with how it’s going to end up, it’s all good.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Would be interesting to get a fediverse version of Quora

      A Fediverse version of Stack Exchange would be easier - since the content is creative commons you could start with a full catalog of already answered questions…

      But honestly, competing with the real Stack Exchange on one end and Large Language Models on the other end… never going to work.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      11 months ago

      You mean like c/asklemmy?

      I think Reddit almost had it for awhile. There was a point when stuff like r/askhistorians and the like actually worked, and you’d get fairly good answers. That’s one place where the Fediverse isn’t up to speed yet, for that sort of thing you need a critical mass of “everybody uses it” to really achieve.

      So far Lemmy is at its best in the hobby subs because three people with the same hobby will still have fun talking, but if I say “nutritional anthropologists of Lemmy: when and where did humans begin eating cheese?” it’s gonna be crickets because there’s probably not a nutritional anthropologist to be found among us.

  • callouscomic@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    54
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    It was always a garbage site, and it hid behind a requirement to login just to view more than like 1 question, amd it was full of creepy discussions.

    • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      People who fucked their mothers, how did it happen? How was the experience? (In great detail) ((Asking for a friend)) (((Only serious answers)))

  • gwildors_gill_slits@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    41
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    I don’t ever remember people taking Quora very seriously. It was always full of insufferable questions and replies.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      11 months ago

      I think the main stay of taking Quora seriously mainly consisted of reddit posts citing Q articles from Google searches.

  • jet@hackertalks.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    11 months ago

    This is the classic mission mismatch. The people are there for a community. The company is there for a profit.

    The wikimedia foundation is a foundation whose mission is in line with the people who add to Wikipedia. So there isn’t a conflict

  • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    39
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    11 months ago

    This article links to a Tweet of a screen recording of a TikTok of a screenshot of a Reddit post as proof that Quora is “hateful”. Yeesh.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    11 months ago

    Modern Quora reminds me a lot Yahoo! Answers when I was a kid - it’s mostly a trolling playground. You can technically get some useful info out of it, but odds are that you won’t be able to sort it out.

    I’m from the firm belief that anyone using a chatbot to directly reply questions either 1) never interacted with chatbots enough to conclude the obvious (that their answers are often unreliable crap), or 2) doesn’t care about reliability at all.

    BNBR is never enough to create a nice and respectful community. You need to go a step deeper and analyse why and when users are hostile towards each other.

    “The A.I. thing, the terms of service issue, has been a massive drain of top talent on Quora, just based on how many people have said, Downloaded my stuff and I’m out of there,”

    One thing that corporate social media struggles to understand is that not all the users have the same impact in a platform. It’s extremely easy to take a mildly unpopular decision that only pisses off 0.5% of your userbase, and the platform becomes ruined because that 0.5% were damn important.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      11 months ago

      One thing that corporate social media struggles to understand is that not all the users have the same impact in a platform. It’s extremely easy to take a mildly unpopular decision that only pisses off 0.5% of your userbase, and the platform becomes ruined because that 0.5% were damn important.

      Pretty much what happened with reddit which lost all its power users.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        11 months ago

        Yes, with a difference: Reddit knows it but doesn’t care due to the imminent IPO.

          • isildun@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            11 months ago

            I’m almost starting to wonder if that’s the plan. Just keep saying “IPO IPO IPO” to get funding from over-eager VCs who want a piece of the IPO before it becomes widely available.

            But then you just never IPO. Keep making minor to moderate mistakes along the way so you can be all “weeeeell we would have IPO’d but insert thing here so we want to wait another 6 months to let it die down”. Repeat until you’re ready to quit, then actually IPO and ride the initial IPO high all the way down via golden parachute.

              • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                edit-2
                11 months ago

                That’s what I’m predicting, too; past IPO the site will become a shadow of its former self. It won’t be just porn being banned, but also:

                • subreddits will be seized by the trademark owners, creating a chilling effect
                • content policy will be completely revamped. No more “we’re trying to protect you lol” façade, it’ll be right into “we don’t care about users or trash like this, we care about brands”
                • DMCA will be enforced on an “it’s a user so it’s assumed to be guilty unless it can prove the contrary”.
                • r/assholedesign and r/hailcorporate will get banned
                • they’ll revamp the ad spaces to give you a harder time blocking them
                • old.reddit? “I dun unrurrstand, y u live in the past? we remove it lol”

                I just wish that this all happened before the IPO. Sadly, it won’t.

  • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    Quora was just Ask Jeeves 2.0… Both relied on human “experts” and neither could figure out a long term monetization plan.

  • weew@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    I think the greatest thing that Quora provided was the “Pregananant???” video. Or was that Yahoo?

    • frezik@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Only for being laughably awful. Quora was in this place where the answers were just good enough that you probably wouldn’t be able to dispute any obvious flaws without being a subject matter expert already. Yahoo Answers was only a meme factory.

  • yamanii@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    11 months ago

    Was it ever alive? When I found it the site was already trash asking for an account just to see content, yahoo answers was the shit.

    • kevincox@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      11 months ago

      It definitely was. I remember finding some amazingly insightful answers from people with proper experience. But that must have been nearly a decade ago now. Some of the most memorable ones were reflections from prisoners as IIRC some prisons had some sort of program where the prisoners could write answers and someone would post them on Quora. Interesting insights from murders, con artists and whoever else.

      But it has been so long since that was the case. I’ve had it blocked from my search results for years now. Utter trash.