
Ask HN: Are most questions on Quora submitted by bots? - chung-leong
Why else would the same question get asked over and over and over again? I don&#x27;t know how many times I&#x27;ve seen some apparent novice asking what programming language he should start with. A real person would just read one of the many existing answers.
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mtmail
There's a couple of questions on Hackernews that repeat a lot. I'd say human
nature, not bots. Some questions have a slight twist or personal background,
sometimes a year is added in hope to get recent answers. Same on AskReddit.
It's up to the platform (or moderators) to enforce anything.

"Ask HN: How to find mentors?" "Ask HN: How to find a mentor/advisor?" "Ask
HN: Where to find a mentor in my city (or any)?" "Ask HN: How to find a
mentor?" "Ask HN: How Can I Find a Mentor?" "Ask HN: Where do you find mentors
online?" "Ask HN: Where can one find a mentor?" "Ask HN: How do you find a
mentor at a new job or a new place?" "Ask HN: Best way to find a mentor" "Ask
HN: How did you find your mentor?"...

or which books people can recommend, how to people writes notes, how does your
company do knowledge management, how do I learn web development, how does a
backend developer switch to frontend...

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chung-leong
The other day I was about to answer a question about the city of Krakow (where
I live). Then I opened the list of hidden answers and saw a guy warning others
not to waste their time, since the OP has asked the same question about every
other Polish city. Sure enough, a search revealed exactly that. The question
actually employed the name "Kraków", which is the Polish spelling.

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kohanz
I'd say no based on the fact that you see most user-driven forums experience
this problem. I can't remember how many times I've seen a pinned post or set
of rules to exclaiming "use the search function before posting". Even
StackOverflow has many duplicate questions despite possibly having some of the
best built-in workflow to prevent that from occurring.

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chung-leong
It's different at SO. Generally a poster would follow up on their question. At
Quora, posters would ask questions and not say a peek after. Lots of copy-and-
pasted answers as well.

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jppope
The chances are high... Quora raise $226 million dollars for what would
theoretically be a pretty normal CRUD app in most people's minds. So what is
that investment being used on? I'm guessing the bots concept has some merit...
but its probably larger than that.

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seattle_spring
> ... for what would theoretically be a pretty normal CRUD app in most
> people's minds

Is Facebook also a pretty normal CRUD app?

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wprapido
Quora apparently uses bots for translating questions into languages other than
English. Other use cases? It's either bots or a bunch of human morons

