79 points

Uh people actually liked Quora? I always blocked that website for SEO spam

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32 points

i think it’s been gliding on the entropy of its original value for a long time at this point (it was founded in 2009)—certainly i can’t remember a time where it was useful, but then i only first encountered it in like 2016.

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15 points

I used it 2012-2014. It was fairly decent at that time.

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7 points

The SEO spam is terrible. It reminds me of the days of things like Experts Exchange that just hand your query back to you and pretend like it’s what you want. “Here’s the exact question you’re looking for, just pay us and you can totally see the answer, we promise!”

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75 points
Deleted by creator
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4 points

I think for like ten minutes they were vetting people joining or something, and the answers were high quality. But the whole thing turned into yahoo answers within a month of it getting popular.

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2 points
*

honestly, not sure I -ever- found a useful answer on Quora.

Reading them taught me one thing, Quora had/has a weirdly strong hardon for Steve Jobs and is/was all too happy to talk about anecdotes of him buying the authors’ lunch or reconciling with his estranged daughter. The only time I read criticism of Apple or him was when the question specifically asked for it.

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40 points
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How shortsighted does one have to be to say, “oh robots can generate questions, generate the answers, do the moderation, function as support”, and then expect anyone other than robots to view or contribute to the site? They just spent years specifically catering to robots (SEO crawlers), is there a reason to be surprised at the result?

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35 points

I finally stopped using it entirely when they started paywalling the answers. I don’t know if you had to actually pay or just sign up to view them but whatever it was went too far for me. Nothing of real value was honesty lost from my existence either.

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32 points
*

I was on it back when it was in closed beta and even went to their launch party. People were even saying how much the quality was declining as the closed beta got larger. It’s been a shitfest for a while - it seems tailor-made for blowhards to speak authoritatively without having any real authority on an issue.

To react to the article:

most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora

The first one is subjective but the second one isn’t - and neither are true.

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12 points

It’s been a shitfest for a while - it seems tailor-made for blowhards to speak authoritatively without having any real authority on an issue.

i’m sure plenty of people have made this joke before, but AI answers should have no problem fitting in with a culture of this sort!

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6 points

Food for thought: have AIs been trained using data scraped from Quora, like they used data scraped from Reddit?

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5 points

Almost certainly, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t

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