
The Quora Partner Program Is a Scam - vincent_s
https://medium.com/@AntonioKowatsch/the-quora-partner-program-is-a-scam-9026c675cc7e
======
inetknght
I'd argue that Quora by itself is nothing more than a search engine
optimization scam.

I'd also have argued the same about Medium half a decade ago. It still is, in
my opinion, but the people putting content on it have significantly improved.

~~~
notacoward
Former two-time Top Writer here. I agree. I quit when I realized that Quora
were routinely manipulating answer rankings and selectively enforcing their
community rules to maximize clicks. Now it's full of stupid questions and
clickbaity non-answers, with any real information pushed far down the page if
it's visible at all.

~~~
wpietri
_waves in former Top Writer_

Yeah, Quora was useful to me in dark times; it was nice to be able to feel
like I could sincerely help a single person. And sometimes those answers
helped a lot more than one person. I wrote some things I'm really proud of
there. But eventually I felt used and a bit addicted, so I got out.

In retrospect, I'm glad I did. Every time I look it seems sadder, farther from
what drew me to it.

~~~
behnamoh
I literally had to block parts of Quora's website using AdBlock to stop it
from bothering me.

Whenever I want to just read an answer it keeps pushing these notifications
and asks me to answer questions. It was this aggressive behavior by Quora that
made me quit contributing.

I wonder if there is something inherently wrong with online business models
that doesn't allow good old sites like Quora to sustain their quality.

GP: I agree. Although I don't accept how Medium forces readers to sign up and
subscribe, sometimes there is good content on it.

~~~
wpietri
> I wonder if there is something inherently wrong with online business models
> that doesn't allow good old sites like Quora to sustain their quality.

For content sites, definitely. You get value from reading things relevant to
you. But they get paid when they distract you from that and trick you into
reading whatever advertisers want. From a short-term revenue perspective, the
optimum is just enough content to trick you into visiting the page and staying
there long enough to get distracted by an ad that you click on.

This is in contrast to sane businesses, where there's a close correlation
between delivering value and getting paid. E.g., a coffeeshop makes money when
you buy a cup of coffee, and continues to make money when you like it enough
to keep coming back.

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treyfitty
The guy in the article openly admits he's only interested in the monetary gain
from spamming questions, rather than asking questions due to genuine
curiosity. So this spammer is complaining and labeling the whole program is a
Scam? FFS

Here's what's most likely really going on: \- Quora is trying to incentivize
searching for answers to genuine curiosities on Quora. To do so, they prod
with money. \- Quora has rules to identify spammers who are gaming the system.
\- This person was clearly a spammer who was only interested in making money
at the bottom of the barrel and was banned.

Sounds like everything is working fine.

~~~
brazzy
Wait, so you think that people should _not_ actually be _incentivized_ by the
money that Quora pays to incentivize writing questions, but should instead be
motivated by "genuine curiosity", except uh, somehow more so when being paid
money, they just mustn't ever admit that the money is also a motivation?

That is beyond silly.

The author does _not_ in fact admit that he's _only_ interested in the
monetary gain, quite the opposite actually: he writes "asking questions became
like a sport to me".

Motivation isn't and cannot be a criterium to judge what makes someone a
spammer, only the quality of the content.

There's absolutely valid criticism of Quora here on the following points:

\- "prodding" people to work for them with _promises_ of money (actually more
than just promises, the money was represented as already belonging to them).

\- Then, when someone has provided a considerable amount of content for them
over the course of a month, banning them _without a warning_ and failing to
pay out the promised money.

\- Being unwilling to give proof for or even _specify_ what the user was
banned for.

It's really not much different from a company hiring someone and promising
commission-based payments, and then one day before payday firing them without
giving a warning or a reason, and refusing to pay out any commissions for the
whole month the person worked for them.

But hey, it's the "sharing economy" now, so that makes it OK!

~~~
treyfitty
What I said was silly if you take the 0th approximation in logic. Companies
run growth/marketing tests all the time. It's not unreasonable to assume this
is one of them. If they can make the case that prodding with dollars will
incite users to come back to the platform to get their genuine questions
answered, then this is worth it.

What the author is doing is gaming the system and taking away the full intent
of the hypothetical test/growth strategy. He is doing the equivalent of
opening up a merchant account to collect 5% credit card reward cash back and
paying 3% in merchant fees to net a 2% difference. Obviously the intent of the
credit card company wasn't to get their raw transaction numbers up- it was to
incite new and genuine transactions onto their card.

Similarly, Quora, while may want to get their raw numbers of questions up,
they wanted to get this goal achieved while preserving the integrity of their
platform via genuine content.

What's silly about that?

~~~
xnyan
You claim that the author is gaming the system, then go own without backing up
that assertation. Are you saying that because Quora said it was so, that it
must be true?

Quora offered money for questions, OP provided...questions for money. If they
were spam questions, then can him. They quantity is irrelevant unless it was
part of the terms of service.

------
Vysero
I am a Quora Parner myself but I never took it seriously. I have 680 answers
and only 84 questions. I mostly use it to find genuine advice when I need an
answer fast. That being said, I have never had a good experience with their
moderation team. I honestly feel like the site is run by a bunch of crooks but
I have no evidence to support that. That's just my opinion formed over the
past few years of operating on the site and the occasional run ins with their
moderation team.

------
blakesterz
"Quora Partnership Program is a by-invitation-only program where Quora invites
authors and other people to ask interesting questions"

I don't quite understand the program. I would've guessed this program pays
people to ANSWER questions, not ask them. Quora has a shortage of questions,
but not a shortage of answers? That surprises me, or are people also paid to
answer questions as well?

~~~
jcmoscon
They have a program that pays for answers too.

~~~
jfengel
Not recently. They had one briefly some years ago, but it is long gone.

------
Veen
I'm not sure why anyone contributes hours of their time to this sort of
"incentive" program. The power lies entirely with the platform. They can pay
or not pay on a whim. They can choose to explain their decision or not.
There's no real recourse other than writing a blog post about it.

In fact, I'm not sure why anyone wastes time writing content at all for a
business that uses that content to serve ads—at least not without a legally
binding contract with clearly described payment obligations.

------
sonicxxg
I feel Quora's content quality is slowly becoming more like the dreaded Yahoo!
Answers.

~~~
chrisseaton
> I feel Quora's content quality is slowly becoming more like the dreaded
> Yahoo! Answers.

For some reason quite a few senior people in my field seem to take time to
post extremely authoritative answers to questions on Quora. I don't see any
other site coming close to the quality.

~~~
trey-jones
I've gotten good information from Quora, but I would point to StackExchange
for the highest quality Q&A in general, and especially for programming and
related fields. It sounds to me like perhaps asking questions was
overcompensated compared to answering.

If the highest quality answers were also the most well compensated, wouldn't
that be the ideal situation? If you have a bunch of paid professionals
standing by to answer questions then genuinely curious people might come to
your platform to ask. I have no data to back this up, that's only intuition.

------
MrFantastic
Quora is driving me crazy with all the requests to Answer questions that seem
to be algorithmically generated.

Most of the question could be easily answered with the first result from
Google or are purely opinion based.

~~~
ec109685
It’s probably due to this partner program. Huge incentive to automate question
asking if you are getting paid for it.

------
roryrjb
No matter what the intentions are on either side, this is still a user
creating data inside the black box that is a web service/company/database and
once you do that it's their data. They can shut you out at any moment for any
reason, right or wrong. I try to avoid all of this where possible and if I
have anything in the cloud I keep a backup of everything, say in the case of
Fastmail or Gmail I use isync. Anything else that isn't critical I just accept
that one day it might not be there. I know this isn't addressing anything in
the article directly I just mean generally if people are going to be annoyed
if a company has changed the goal posts in their domain then don't commit to
using that service. Offline first!

------
awillen
Feels like there's a whole other side being left out - there's no
correspondence with Quora posted, just "Long story short: they accused me of
foul play and told me that they weren’t going to pay out my earnings. When I
inquired about the whole ordeal they were neither able to provide proof for
their claims nor were they willing to specify what they accused me of."

Definitely curious what foul play he was accused of.

~~~
jfengel
They're famous for not explaining themselves. Nominally, they're trying to
avoid getting bogged down with explanations and counter-explanations. Trolls
will happily troll moderators with interminable arguments.

I hadn't heard them accused of doing so just to avoid paying out. I wouldn't
put it past them, though it does seem like Hanlon's razor would apply -- that
it's stupidity rather than malice.

In the case of Quora Partners, the program attracts large quantities of very
repetitive questions with little guidance on which ones cross the line from
merely boring ("Who was the star of movie X?") to unacceptable ("What fruit
starts with A/B/C/D...?" "What is 7 _4+1? What is 5_ 0-3?...") Even if I knew
their questions, I couldn't tell you if they'd find it acceptable.

~~~
awillen
Sure, but if this were a case where they offered just a generic form email
with no real explanation, why wouldn't OP put it in the post? That would
support the cause that this is Quora acting badly. Instead, there's just the
vague reference to it, which suggest the actual communications are being left
out for a reason.

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gmuslera
You used to be able to delete your account and content from Quora. At least I
did it a few years ago after they started with sponsored content between
answers.

~~~
sulam
GDPR and CCPA mean they must be able to delete your account if you request it.

------
blackrock
Has anyone made any money or received kickbacks from Quora?

------
threeboy
Quora was cool before it turned into Yahoo! Answers part 2.

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Macha
I guess this explains the recentish rise in likes that just went to questions
on quora in HN comments

------
smoyer
Hmm ... I can't scam you out of free content any more but the image of your
signature at the bottom of your blog post is going to be very useful when
emptying your bank account.

