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.
Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content.
Now it's a "modern" ExpertSexChange where "online marketing specialists" ask questions with one account and answer their own questions with another account.
"Disclaimer haha I work for Bullshit.ly as a growth ninja but here's my response..."
"In conclusion I'm not saying you should totally checkout our stuff ... but you totally should. just my 2 cents."
And they are getting more sophisticated so it's not always so easy to spot.
The real question is why does Google still put them on the first page? They've dispatched other nuisance sites but Quora still seems to get special treatment. Quora can't possibly have many inbound links to their content so why the high page rank?
Look at how long pinterest results have ranked highly in image search, even though they're completely useless. I just don't think Google cares to remove them, since surely they have known that pinterest should be excluded from image search results.
Google has some strange preferences. Forbes still dominates SERPs despite one of the worst user-experiences of any mainstream site. It's downright unusable without ad block
IRL social networks. The guy who wrote the Quora algos probably has friends that work at Google who can influence the pagerank. I've seen these kinds of interactions first hand at various events in Seattle-Bellevue around 2014-2016. Only recently has it died down (mainly because the meetup groups either fizzled out or stopped offering free beer).
Long ago I was a consultant for a large church. One of their IT guys got a call from the pastor, who was worried about being hacked... The IT guy had been working on the desktop and had left up a browser window. The pastor read the URL as ExpertSexChange...
Around 1997 or so, I got called into a meeting with my boss, director, and head of IT security. I worked night shift in a wafer fab, and someone was accessing the computers in the office, and visiting inappropriate sites at night (that their new sophisticated monitor found). I was young, and into computers, I guess they assumed it was me. I pointed out that I didn't have a keycard that gave me access to the office area, so it couldn't be me, asked if they checked it. While they were quickly apologizing, I asked what site they accessed.
www.excite.com
The look on their faces when I suggested they actually verify the site before firing whoever it was.....
I remember seeing a news story back in 1995 about how content for the current Super Bowl (Super Bowl XXX) was being blocked by parental filters because it assumed 'XXX' was adult content.
What kind of content could there have been then for the superbowl: Blinking tags and daily updated grey-background text? Are you sure parental filters really were a thing in 1995. I remember 1995. I was using mosaic.
I had a similar experience during school. One real life troll told a substitute teacher I was accessing porn sites. Teaching sub only looked at the website url before kicking me off the computer. Unfortunately there was no follow-up for me to call them out on being lazy/ignorant. Funny thing was the "troll" did get banned later for accessing porn sites on the school network.
I mean, if I was going to have that kind of surgery I'd definitely be looking for an expert. You put a regular cosmetic surgeon in there and you risk having no wrinkles on things that should have wrinkles and other such catastrophes. All this to say maybe they missed an opportunity when they ditched that domain. ;)
Knowledge services make for horrible VC businesses.
The exception to that rule is Stack Exchange, because they have a business model that is unique to the space and impossible to replicate for a site like Quora (Genius, Answers.com, wikiHow, et al.).
Quora has to allow low quality content on their service in order to keep the volume up, to drive traffic & clicks, to drive ad potential, to avoid the dreaded down rounds and eventual drift toward forced sale. There's only so much legitimate high quality content for a site like Quora and it's nowhere near enough to validate a $2 billion valuation (much less higher).
Consider for a moment that Yelp - which is a real business in a highly monetizable segment, that is also profitable and will hit an annual billion dollars in sales soon - is worth $3 billion. So if you get a $2 billion valuation as Quora, where are you going from there? It's obvious.
Genius is facing the same exact fundamental problem that Quora is. Take a lot of money from VCs, get a big valuation, find it impossible to live up to it. Turns out normal people don't want to annotate everything and could mostly care less unless it's a more narrow passion segment (music).
There are only two paths for knowledge services. Stay small and very lean, aggressively limit costs, and use an ad model - that's wikiHow. Or go the Wikipedia route. Anything involving VCs will end in disaster and or forced sales. Knowledge services properly have to think very, very long-term (if they're actually trying to fulfill a knowledge mission and aren't just traffic fronts), they need a decade outlook or more. VCs think short-term, they look at ~5-10 year type exit outcomes. High quality, long-lived knowledge services are fundamentally opposed to a focus on exits in any manner, as they have a higher calling than looking for an exit for a VC - and any deviation from that must inherently destroy the community.
There's definitely value to be created, but the catch is focusing. Someone will pay for the best data on their problem. Very few people are interested in buying 100 dumpsters full of random text: I can't see general services like Quora ever being worth much.
Metaweb is an example of the forced liquidation problem with knowledge services that take serious VC.
Freebase had no business model and Metaweb took $57 million in VC. Then Google took the public service, which had been built up by a large community, and effectively buried it.
As with most of the other cases, their only possible path that involved sustainability and long-term knowledge value, was to not take VC, stay lean, and either API their system for a fee (not a huge business), or run an ad model. Either way, their business case was small, and they took a lot of VC. The end result, another dead, formerly promising, knowledge service in an increasingly long list.
> Quora has to allow low quality content on their service in order to keep the volume up, to drive traffic & clicks, to drive ad potential
How does flooding my feed with dozens of questions about what the probabilities of different subsets of the faces are when rolling a die (e.g. what's the probability of getting an even number or greater than 5 when rolling a die?) help drive traffic, clicks, and ad potential?
Because each of those is probably a homework problem in Stats 101, and every college kid is going to be googling for the answer to the variation from their edition of the textbook.
I went to college in the USA, and I understand that undergrads are often put into classes far outside of their expertise. Still, I expect college students to be able to count to 6 and understand fractions. Even the remedial algebra students I helped in high school weren't that bad.
There are still people that think that buying multiple lottery tickets actually lowers your chances of winning.
I tried to argue against someone with this. I even tried scaling the problem down to being two balls drawn from a pool of four, and showing how if you buy multiple tickets, your chances of winning greatly increased. And they accepted what I was saying, but just insisted that the math "doesn't scale" and it doesn't work the same when it's 5 balls drawn from a pool of 69.
Even worse, she tried to say something like "You're really good at math. You should know this!"
They also changed their answer ranking algorithm. It started giving much higher weight to answers from users who answered many other questions on the site.
I guess the goal was to incentivize users to answer more questions.
But Quora was nice because you would find for almost each question an answer from a real expert in that specific question. And that's pretty unique by definition.
Result was that the best answers were often not the top 1 despite having way more upvotes -> bad user experience. True experts almost stopped answering because what was the point if it was going to be hard for users to find their answer, and certainly they wouldn't bother to start answering a bunch of questions on the site just to increase their ranking.
My 16-year old son has a classmate who has made about $50 or
so writing spam questions for Quora. Some of these questions were astonishingly stupid, the kind of writing that I would have fired a spam writer back in the day that I hired spam writers.
It wasn't clear if he was working for Quora or working for somebody who wanted to spam Quora, but the damage is done.
Honestly, if you 'incentivise' someone to post on a community site (whether via money, exchanges or free stuff in general), the quality of their work will usually be terrible. What do you expect when you ask non experts to post reams of topics about things they haven't got the slightest clue about?
I always wonder who's doing that and why. Quora does pay people to write questions, but the pay is supposed to be tied somehow to the quality of the answers. Maybe it's more a quantity thing, as dozens of people jump in to give answers to the basic arithmetic questions in my feed.
