
Quora - ChazDazzle
http://blog.samaltman.com/quora
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notacoward
After having been a "Top Writer" for two years in a row, I stopped
contributing to Quora a bit over a year ago. I had several reasons, but the
two biggest were:

* A very opaque answer-ranking system which often promotes what I consider really crappy (e.g. factually incorrect or off-topic) answers over better ones. This is not just stupid people voting, BTW; simple ranking by vote count would be far better than what actually happens. This is something Quora themselves, or their algorithms, do.

* A cadre of popular writers who openly flaunt the rules (e.g. don't answer the question, fill posts with meme-y images). A significant subset of these "Slop Writers" are clearly there to peddle their own books with an annoying coda on every answer.

Those kind of things seriously degrade the reading experience there. I
honestly don't get why Quora would allow, facilitate, and even seem to promote
behavior which drives away both readers and writers. It would only make sense
if people were actually paying them to have their answers ranked higher or to
be allowed to break the rules, but that would be extremely hard for them to
hide so I don't think that's really the case. Considering some of the other
problems there, like the site generally being slow/flaky or the random
addition/removal of features, I think they're just not thinking very hard
about these issues.

I still go back there to read sometimes. So far, I keep finding that the same
problems are still there and getting worse, so I don't expect I'll write there
again.

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0898
Perhaps it's the personalisation, but the questions on Quora have become very
trivial and click-baity in the past 12 months. ("Who is the most beautiful
Indian female of all time?" "What's the most embarassing thing you have seen
in a hotel room?")

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paulcole
Stopped going there a long time ago. Hate the idea that I need an account to
read.

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vgddvh
Deleted my account there a year ago after it started sending me lots of
questions of type "what are the first signs that you have illness X" where X
varied from lyme disease to ebola. After finding that I match all the known
diseases, I decided that this BS was not really worth an account there. SO is
so much better in terms of content quality - the amount of BS stupid questions
on Quora is just hitting over the roof

~~~
vgddvh
I also tried to find a way to delete these topics from my feed but there is
just no such functionality.

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acconrad
If Quora is doing "extremely well", then why are they still seeking funding
this many years in for a _second_ round with YC?

