- 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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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
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.
People who fucked their mothers, how did it happen? How was the experience? (In great detail) ((Asking for a friend)) (((Only serious answers)))
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.
But Wikipedia aren’t charging people to see the work you contributed for free. That’s a significant difference.
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.
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
Kagi now has a lens for focusing results from the Fediverse, I’ve seen it pull Lemmy links before!
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Any time Quora results come up my search gets an instant -Quora. That site is a wet fart… terrible
It’s like the text version of Pinterest.
I was thinking it’s like the LinkedIn version of yahoo answers
Except Pinterest is good if you know what you’re looking for. Quora has always been bad no matter what you do.
It’s more that it pops up in Image Searches all the time and it’s almost always a useless example of what you’re searching for.
Perfect description.
I only pull up Quora when I want to know the most common wrong answers to questions.
New theory: Quora is an elaborate attempt to poison LLMs
I would pull it up if it seemed directly related, but just the UX was so awful that even if it answered my question, it felt bad the whole while. Though most of the time it was the most awful LinkedIn-esque winemaking m wind bagging by people desperate to be considered professionals in their field
I think the greatest thing that Quora provided was the “Pregananant???” video. Or was that Yahoo?
Yahoo answers
Edit: pregánte
What is a Luigi board?
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.
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.
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.
Poster: <Asks some random tech question> 100 Quora replies: Hi, I’m <generic name>, creator and founder of <some failing startup/product>, here’s <10 totally meaningless> reasons why you should subscribe to my product that does nothing for your question.
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?
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.
Stack Exchange
Yahoo answers used to be great
how is babby formed
gerganant?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Umm… expert sexchange?
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).
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Heh, I requested my Quora account to be deleted just 16 days ago. It was finally deleted.
I left because it got filled with far right-wings, conservatives and pedophiles. Also many answers are now paywalled.
why not troll the heck outta them
