0. For that answer in particular, it's several years old. The best answers have bubbled to the top, rather than consisting of a bunch of hot takes, which is all you get on HN.
1. They started with a strong focus on Silicon Valley, which attracted a bunch of well-educated people early on. It got a reputation as a place for good, intelligent writing, which spawned a virtuous circle as other good writers came to each other.
2. For a while they continued to attract that with rewards for good writers. It was more about appreciation than paying them, so what they got was enthusiastic volunteers.
3. Their rating system is a deliberate black box but it does do a decent job of finding the better content. Poor quality content gets downvoted and hidden. Not always, and it's far from perfect, but there is another virtuous cycle where the good writers get more votes. The further down you go on the page, the worse the answers get, and the collapsed ones are pretty bad.
4. The moderation is also deeply imperfect, but they've done an OK job of pushing down some of the silliness.
They used all of that to get themselves good SEO, and for the past few years they've been capitalizing on that to better monetize the site. A lot of people feel that the site has gone downhill, as seems to be the way of all flesh/bits. But it has a large number of really great writers who continue to produce good, interesting things.
They did a very good job attracting core early contributors who wrote unique great content and then it snowballed. Reading answers posted by the top 10 contributors is just fun. All content is SEO-friendly. Much of it is authoritative and Google loves authoritative content. There is a setting to make my content appear as anonymous to search engines, but many of us associate our names with our content.
Most of Quora's content is evergreen. They improved question merging recently and that resulted in a high concentration of high quality answers to popular questions. Quora's management calls them canonical questions. The ask2answer flow also improved. You can now find people who can answer your questions. That feature was previously under-developed and didn't work very well.
Quora's top contributors enjoy the virtuous cycle. We write answers and people upvote them, which introduces other readers to us. Our audiences are massive. I only have about 250,000 views per month and about 5500 followers, but some other writers have several million per month and more than 20,000 followers.
Quora will collapse answers that are highly upvoted but incorrect. This helps with site quality and likely pleases Google.
There is a lot of genuinely good content on Quora. They went out of their way early to attract some high-level Silicon Valley talent, and that brought in a fair number of good writers. It was really cool, for example, to have physics professors explaining the Higgs Boson at the time of the CERN announcement.
It degrades over time, partly from simple reversion to the mean, partly because a number of topics have simply been talked to death. That's why they started paying people to ask questions. There's still good new content in a lot of areas, such as history and language, that are very broad and deep. But topics like physics and mathematics are largely moribund, because there's only so much that can be talked about at the roughly high-school level that most people can follow.
So it does look increasingly like Yahoo Answers, but there's still good content if you know where to look. It earned a very good reputation early and that high rep still has some carryover.
I was a prominent Top Writer and I can give my impression of the consensus of other Top Writers.
It was known all along that Quora was losing a ton of money. They said prominently that their goal was to establish market dominance and then figure out how to monetize it. Several different approaches were tried and discarded, before eventually settling on the standard "put ads in front of eyeballs" approach.
In a lot of ways it just followed the pattern of so many sites (and before that, message boards). Everybody is cheerful at the beginning, feeling lots of elbow room. Then it starts to feel more crowded: topics are discussed to death, resentments build, trolls and spammers move in, etc. Moderation wanted to keep a light hand to maximize the audience, but they would still be accused on all sides of censorship and partisanship.
Really, the question is why it was ever more than yet another social media site. The answer is that they spent a ton of money, and pulled a lot of strings to attract celebrities. Its big early wins were Silicon Valley luminaries, which attracted enormous followings of people who hoped to become Silicon Valley-style rich off of that.
I could point to a ton of missteps that irked its most prominent people, but in a way that's a red herring. What the site wants is to put a lot of ads in front of users, and for all I know it's achieving that. The power users like to think that they're an attraction of the site and that once we leave, others will too. Maybe that's right; I don't know.
I'd definitely put its Partners Program as a point they could not walk back from. They paid people to post tens of thousands of questions, with the goal of attracting people to answer. I assume it worked, since they kept it despite numerous complaints. It's antithetical to what the best writers wanted, and if it worked it was only because those writers had given it a high SEO rating.
I personally gave up after seeing a persistent anonymous troll one too many times. Anonymity on Quora bypassed all of the tools that allowed individual users to block people, despite Quora's "real names" policy, and made it impossible to track people who misbehaved. Since then they've abandoned the "real names" policy (which they never enforced anyway), and if that's a prelude to eliminating its superpowered anonymity, that might make the site more pleasant to use.
Even so I think it's inevitable that a Q&A site will flounder on the fact that Q&A fits a narrow slot between "easily googleable" and "impossible to answer". Sites follow a cycle of "how much fun to re-answer basic questions of quantum physics and philosophy" to "the site used to be better before everybody else got here". Quora just had a higher peak, mostly because it spent money to get there.
I loved Quora for a long time. Great community, great atmosphere, lots of learning to be had. Slightly different culture/atmosphere from HN, which is interesting. It's been through a few changes and has had to cope with a flood of new users, but it's still a decent place to look for good answers to interesting questions.
Quora is a site that is somehow successful despite its product development decisions. They seem to constantly make the site and community worse with every update.
There's still a decent amount of amazing valuable answers from real verified experts but the experience of using it is horrendous and I've completely stopped trying to write anything anymore.
Quora started out fairly interesting albeit often with answers written by self-evident self/promoting know it alls. That’s mostly a decade in the rear view mirror today it’s fact with people trying to sill, promote, or I don’t know exactly. In any case it’s largely low quality which of course drives any high quality answers even less likely to be contributed.
In the early days, Quora has exceptionally high quality content. I enjoyed the experts writing answers on Quora platform. It was not only just gaining some random knowledge, but it was also entertaining reading from them. I read pretty much every night before sleep during that time.
Then it gradually degrades (maybe the pressure of putting ads on to make money), the quality has gone downhill dramatically. It's been a few years, I have no longer considered answers from Quora as worthy.
Quora was incredible back in 2010. I would spend hours reading and writing. The highlight was interacting with some of the great Silicon Valley characters that contributed much of the early content.
Since then the site has gotten steadily worse in every way possible, while staying aloft with infinite VC money and rich founders. It's sad story of what could've been.
It used be alright but their noise factor has increased a lot since half a decade ago.
Before that, Quora felt like a small community similar to HN. They had founders and executives answering questions. They were still spamming email afair but not as aggressively as today and it didn't have what is x + 3 = 10?
I deleted it after I reached a million answer views from a sudden growth. The users that moved in completely destroyed the whole thing.
That day, I learnt acquiring users via heavy marketing or SEO may not be a good decision for a community. They are better as spectators or consumers.
Quora went significantly downhill a few years back. It was a combination of hordes of new users, bad moderation, and bad incentives (order in which answers get shown etc).
Quora used to be good before 2012-13(?), what with its credit system and all. You had a fixed pool of points to ask questions. Potential people who wanted people to ask them questions could arbitrarily set their points, and these points were deducted from questioner's pool, and added to the answerer's pool.
When this was removed, it was the beginning of the end. Clickbait, self-promotion, rabid people-centric cults, unrelated answers (no person X, you should not answer with a sob story for 'what's the weather like in Seattle these days?'), no question details allowed, answers catering to the lowest denominator, crappy feeds, and (imo) the worst - fabricating actual relationships, sob stories, and credentials (IIT/MIT/etc.) to garner more views and become a top writer (w/e that's worth).
And the rabid and toxic community is nauseous, to say the least. No enforcement of community standards means that every non-mainstream opinion (or even an opinion that goes against the Quora mainstream) is lambasted as if you had insulted the commenter's family.
Although HN's moderation policy may seem caged to some, it is the reason for the quality of the community's discussions. Quora is a textbook example of what happens when users are given freedom to do whatever they want to. It is the reason why I deleted my Quora account happily (even though I had 1M+ views on my answers, and I liked answering the most mundane of questions) - the site is not worth the time you devote to it.
Quora used to be really good.Now it has become like Facebook.
Memes are everywhere.Female users are getting too many upvotes.People write totally dumb stuff and call themselves "writers".Most of the answers are memes/narcissistic/spam/low-quality.
Quora was an interesting example of that. They seeded it with some big names, especially from venture capital and Silicon Valley culture. That attracted a lot of eyeballs quickly, and for a while, some very good content (mostly not from the big names but from its diverse user base, and some good writers achieved notoriety).
That wasn't very lucrative, and they've spent the last few years spending that goodwill to attract lower-quality content but more page views. Eventually that will cause its hard-earned SEO to drop off, but today they seem to feel its the best way to monetize what they developed from that early money and star-power.
Quora knows that it's about attracting people to write answers, more than people with questions. They've had a number of tactics to get more questions so that people could write answers.
At one point, they paid people to do it -- which went about as well as you would expect. Users complained like crazy and it lasted long, long after it was an obvious failure.
Their idea wasn't completely insane. There are questions that people ask Google that they'd never ask a human. Stupid questions that people will nonetheless answer. And Quora wanted to be the place that Google directed them. Combined with a high reputation from its early days, it was well placed in SEO.
They never figured out how to turn that into money, and they've floundered about. They managed to have a bunch of smart people wanting to show off -- actually giving meaningful answers -- and they squandered it.
Can you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.
It seems like with Quora you either get very bad or very good answers. The good ones tend to be significantly older, i.e. before it got big and people started to gamify the system.
Quora has become an absolute cess-pool of thinly veiled content marketing / spam and pseudo-intellectual self-help Ted-talky BS, in my experience at least.
When it was first out there were a lot of smart writers posting thought-provoking content, a lot of (SV) insiders giving interesting anecdata, etc. It seems that it has devolved into a more yahoo answers meets TED / stevepavlina.com type community now, but maybe that's just my feed. I admit that I've hardly used it in the past few years so it could just be my shitty and uncurated list of topics and people i follow
Tangential, but it's strange to me the sort of culture that Quora has cultivated over the years. It seems to tolerate and even encourage low quality content and contributors to the point that ignorance, misinformation and poorly researched opinionated answers thrive on a regular basis. That's not to say there aren't good contributors and content, but browse any one random topic today and you'll be forgiven for thinking you are on Yahoo Answers. Just no filter at all, extremely poor questions, offtopic comments posted as answers, people with no understanding of the subject shamelessly pretending to know what they are talking about, etc etc.
It's just all around incredibly unpleasant. I loved Quora in its early years when it was invitation only, but I don't ever want to have anything to do with it again.
0. For that answer in particular, it's several years old. The best answers have bubbled to the top, rather than consisting of a bunch of hot takes, which is all you get on HN.
1. They started with a strong focus on Silicon Valley, which attracted a bunch of well-educated people early on. It got a reputation as a place for good, intelligent writing, which spawned a virtuous circle as other good writers came to each other.
2. For a while they continued to attract that with rewards for good writers. It was more about appreciation than paying them, so what they got was enthusiastic volunteers.
3. Their rating system is a deliberate black box but it does do a decent job of finding the better content. Poor quality content gets downvoted and hidden. Not always, and it's far from perfect, but there is another virtuous cycle where the good writers get more votes. The further down you go on the page, the worse the answers get, and the collapsed ones are pretty bad.
4. The moderation is also deeply imperfect, but they've done an OK job of pushing down some of the silliness.
They used all of that to get themselves good SEO, and for the past few years they've been capitalizing on that to better monetize the site. A lot of people feel that the site has gone downhill, as seems to be the way of all flesh/bits. But it has a large number of really great writers who continue to produce good, interesting things.
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