- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
“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.
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Quora was just Ask Jeeves 2.0… Both relied on human “experts” and neither could figure out a long term monetization plan.
I think it died when they started paying people For answers. People asked the most stupid questions just so they can be the top answers
The once-beloved forum is now home to a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical…
Oh, so like Reddit or yahoo answers, too?
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.”
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.
Have you been there? It doesnt take long to come across the exact same thing they are highlighting.
I’m not debating the premises or conclusions of the article lol
Mistakes like this are merely clues as to how much time and effort the author actually puts into their journalism
Good riddance honestly, never have I gotten a good answer from Quora, seems like they’re all trolls. So for the past decade+ I overlook ANY Quora links related to my search
If you had a question that attracted an expert in a relevant field, you’d get a good answer. If your question didn’t attract them you’d get a random internet stranger
But even then, there were issues plaguing Quora that would continue to fester. First, an anonymous former Quoran told me, the site started “shortening the length of questions.” The professed reason was to increase Quora’s visibility on Google, but that brevity came with a cost: It also made it difficult for users to ask the types of complex questions that could be addressed by specialists
Ah, I see they started the enshittification very early. It might’ve been a good LLM database, but the good quality content would be outdated by now and the more recent is infested with troll and bot garbage and AI writing. Sad.
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.
I think that’s because Quora paywalls responses from volunteers, preventing others from seeing them unless they pay a subscription. Pretty scummy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But Wikipedia aren’t charging people to see the work you contributed for free. That’s a significant difference.
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
Here’s hoping at some point search engines will return Lemmy links when people look for answers, but we’re not there yet
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.
It’s not just that it’s not unique, but any single instance is less heavily viewed, even if the overall response is
The problem with Lemmy is the federated content gets duplicated on multiple sites, word for word, which isn’t good for SEO
That is a search engine problem, not a lemmy problem.
Kagi now has a lens for focusing results from the Fediverse, I’ve seen it pull Lemmy links before!
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.
search engines are thoroughly crap right now. Abandon all hope that they will become better.
You say that like it’s true for all search engines. Which isn’t the case and is incredibly dumb to think.
Lemme guess, you’re a kagi cultist.
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.
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?
Stack Exchange
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.
I don’t ever remember people taking Quora very seriously. It was always full of insufferable questions and replies.
I think the main stay of taking Quora seriously mainly consisted of reddit posts citing Q articles from Google searches.
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.
We could call it Fedora!
Cute, but already taken by the OS.
ThatWasTheJoke.heic
That .heic made my eye twitch. Reminded me of my coworkers at work not being able to open a photo they took on their iPhone, and that they want to use on the intranet
Haha well played
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.
You mean like /c/asklemmy or /c/nostupidquestions?
I think we just need more biomass.
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.
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.
And here we go again: Earlier this month, the A.I.–accelerationist venture capital hub Andreessen Horowitz blessed Quora with a much-needed $75 million investment—but only for the sake of developing its on-site generative-text chatbot, Poe.
I disagree, quora at the beginning was a place to find quick answers to a lot questions on many different themes, a bit like reddit. But it rapidly became full of “pro replier” just like the Microsoft forums and it was unbearable, then, my 2 cents, it was confusing because of subscription, layout, suggested q&a totally unrelated to the topic I was looking for and a lot of questions that nobody would ever even post on /No Stupid Question (I don’t want to judge, but for a lot of them it was easier, faster and you’d get an immediate answer with a plain Google search)
I’d love a plug-in to block all Quora results.
It’s sad that so many plugins like this exist.
Remember ExpertsExchange? They charged people for the correct answer but was in the top 10 results. They got blocked very quickly when Google, yes Google, allowed you to block any site from your search. That feature is now gone and you have to specify that in your search terms.
If you are using Firefox, check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/ You can block certain domains from your search results, works great for me
Thanks.
Saved, thanks.
Marvellous.
Just use kagi
+1 for Kagi, am loving it.
I’ll check it out but have never heard of it.
