

The downfall of Quora (2013) - anbala
http://thegoodones.quora.com/Interesting-read
This is the email circulating the Valley. The high profile venture capitalist&#x27;s name has been redacted along with that of the recipient.<p>February 1, 2013<p>[name redacted],<p>Since you asked what I think about Quora and its latest pivot, here&#x27;s my answer. It&#x27;s probably far more than you expected but bear with me. From its early days the big question about this site has been &quot;can an almost unlimited supply of SiliconValley cash and hype turn a mediocre idea into a success?&quot;
======
lelandriordan
This article nails it. I remember when Quora first came out, I thought that it
was a great idea, like a stack overflow for the masses. Fast forward to now
though and I find myself avoiding it at all costs. Quora seems willing to try
any and everything to fix itself except for solving its most glaring and
obvious problem, its closed ecosystem. On mobile it is ridiculous when you do
a search in browser and click a Quora link it forces you to install the app to
see the answer. If you do make the mistake of installing the app you are then
inundated with useless notifications about things you don't care about. I know
that there is good information hidden in there, but its a terrible strategy to
make people jump through hoops to access it. Meanwhile Stack Overflow became
Stack Exchange with sub-sites for more and more topics thus transforming
itself into what Quora could have/should have been in the first place. Its
open nature has driven its growth to a top 200 Alexa rank while Quora seems
destined to continue its semi-annual pivoting.

------
jbinto
I mentally blacklisted Quora when it was proudly US only (I'm Canadian). Their
reasoning was extremely dubious: something about "cultural differences" and
"language barriers" preventing "high quality content".

Foolishly, I gave them another chance when they opened registration worldwide.
The second strike was when I found out that they showed the Googlebot
different content, à la Experts Exchange.

And the third strike was the heavy handed social integration. Can't post (or
even read content) unless you link with Facebook, etc.

It's a shame. As others have noted here I think the web could use an improved
version of "Yahoo Answers"; something with a StackOverflow feel. Especially
since Google Answers (the one you paid bounties for) went the way of the dodo
in 2006.

~~~
tejon
> As others have noted here I think the web could use an improved version of
> "Yahoo Answers"; something with a StackOverflow feel.

It's odd that nothing fills this gap. Slant.co comes close, but is built
around "what" rather than "why" or "how" \-- useful in its own right, but not
the same.

I wonder if the problem is simply that Yahoo! Questions, Ask.com and Quora are
all just too well-known and nobody wants to take them on, despite how terrible
they are? Considering the celebrated audacity of startup culture I'd honestly
be surprised if this is the case, but on the other hand I'm not finding a lot
of other compelling explanations.

I suppose one other possibility is that aforementioned sites have soured the
public on the genre to the point that when someone says, "It's kind of like
Yahoo Questions or Ask.com," the immediate response is "Ick."

~~~
troymc
What about all the Stack Exchange communities (e.g. Mathematics Stack
Exchange, English Language & Usage Stack Exchange)?

~~~
DanBC
"What's a list of good books about programming language X?"

"I'm switching from this programming language to that programming language;
what are the important gotchas?"

~~~
Karunamon
Followed immediately by the question being flattened by administration as "not
a good fit" despite the previous existence of these types of questions
producing excellent discussion and answers.

I think SE is awesome in spite of its rules, not because of them. The whole
"discussion is bad mmkay" thing seems to be cargo-culted by the staff of these
sites despite many examples to the contrary.

------
tptacek
This piece starts out teasing some kind of business or market analysis about
Quora, which would be interesting to read, but it almost immediately descends
completely and permanently into Drama, some of which seems like it's only
really intelligible to people who spend a lot of time on Quora.

It's not a worthwhile read, and we'd be better off discussing Quora based on
virtually any other story about it.

~~~
swartkrans
I noticed you get unwarrantedly defensive when it comes to negativity
surrounding popular individuals or well-known companies. I say unwarrantedly
because you usually write very awesome posts with lots of detail, but when you
spring to the defense of the GitHub founder who fell from grace, or in this
case Quora (and there are other instances I remember to some degree), you
peremptorily want to end the discussion without any good reason and just issue
some dismissive insults.

It never works, though. The conversations continue. People have good reason to
not like Quora. They've had a user-unfriendly attitude problem, and they've
been less than nice to their employees as well. I personally can't stand it
when some people are treated with contempt, but I guess this sort of thing
doesn't bother you or maybe you don't pick up on it.

~~~
bronbron
> I noticed you get unwarrantedly defensive

Uhh I don't think he was defensive at all. I think he made a very good point.

I would bet large amounts of bitcoins that no VC wrote any of this, save MAYBE
part of the opening. It's extremely verbose and the business analysis
ultimately is a smaller part of what amounts to just a rant about the quora
community.

And if you want to read that, that's great. I don't. I've read the exact same
criticism of Wikipedia, Reddit, <insert social community here>. It doesn't
really provide any insight I didn't know already: big social communities tend
to get co-opted by people with agendas and too much time on their hand. Cool.

Talking about company strategy and why it is unlikely to be successful is
interesting, and provides good salient points for the rest of us. Talking
about 'rad fems' taking over Quora? Not so much.

~~~
cloakandswagger
The community is typically a pretty big aspect of a business running a
community answers site. Would you have been satisfied if there was a pie
chart?

~~~
bronbron
> The community is typically a pretty big aspect of a business

'The community' is an extremely nebulous term, and unlikely to be influencing
any business decision, largely because any individual's perception of the
community is heavily subjective and influenced by the subject of the content
you consume (which can vary widely on any large, similarly nebulous site).

I highly, highly doubt 'the community' came up in any acquisition discussions
of reddit or tumblr, largely for that reason and because it ultimately has
little effect on their user base. People aren't leaving reddit in droves
because SRS exists. If people leave quora, it won't be because 'rad fems'
drove them away.

> Would you have been satisfied if there was a pie chart?

You're super cool. Wicked jab there bro. Super salty about it. Remind me to
high five you next time and we can pound some natty ice and talk about how
cool you are.

~~~
cloakandswagger
>Super salty about it.

Yes obviously you are

------
junto
Quota. ?share=whatever

That to me sums up the site in its entirety. A content SEO Google cheater that
tries to con people into signing up to boost its user numbers

They should have looked to StackOverflow as a good example of how you build a
proper community, and more importantly, nurture it.

Good ridance.

~~~
dozenal
Stackoverflow has of a lot of terrible answers that get voted up by people who
aren't equipped to evaluate them properly, and closed threads when anyone
starts actual substantive discussions. It also suffers from lack of decent
rewards for contribution. That's not what I would consider a good community.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Stack Overflow could be better net citizens if they'd stop polluting Google's
search results with closed discussions.

They're welcome to set whatever rules they want for what's "on topic" or a
"good fit". Their site, their rules. No harm, no foul.

It's just irritating as hell to waste your time clicking over there from a
Google link and finding a closed discussion at the other end.

Telling Google to not index a topic would be a minor tweak. If they've found
the discussion unworthy, why do they want Google to index it anyway?

~~~
avn2109
Well, very often I will click through to SO from Google to a closed thread
that got downmodded like crazy, but that nevertheless exactly solves my
problem in less than a minute from the first answer.

Perhaps on some level SO knows this, and also knows that their mods are
perhaps somewhat overzealous, and therefore has adopted the current state of
affairs as a sort of compromise/duct-tape solution.

~~~
slantyyz
This.

I too, have found so many downmodded questions to have the exact answer I
needed for a particular problem. It's by far the most frustrating part of
using Stack Overflow.

The overzealous modding has had a chilling effect on my desire to ask a
question on SO, because nobody wants their question to be downmodded as a
stupid or pointless question.

~~~
junto
It would be quite interesting to know which topics you find this happening. I
don't tend to see this kind of toxicity on SO. I'm frequenting C# and .NET.
Maybe Jon Skeet drags the C# community up to his level!

~~~
slantyyz
I see a lot of this in the web development oriented areas. So mainly in the
CSS/JS areas.

------
antr
This issue hits a home run with me: "Ideological Moderators".

I was a very active Quora user on 2010-2011, I'd visit the site over 10 times
a day, I would write any answers on Word, make sure they were thorough, well
written, etc, before I replied to question. I made an effort, both offline and
online. What I really enjoyed was the initial community, the well thought
questions and answers. During this 18-24 month period I also got thousands of
upvotes, lots of thank you messages for my answers, etc.

One day an army of moderators came along. These moderators weren't Quora
staff, but volunteers. I get it, it takes considerable man power to go through
many of those questions and answers. I can work with that.

It was when I asking a question on movies & documentaries that I had my first
encounter with them. I can't recall the exact question I asked, but it
something along the lines "what are the most interesting documentaries
released in 2011?". One moderator, without contacting me, changed the question
to something more specific, he added a sub-genre to the question. I got
notified of the change, went back, and changed it to the original question.
After a couple of hours I get a message from the moderator telling me that
that question isn't a "good/relevant" question (I'm paraphrasing). I ask why,
and I get told that "You can't ask generic questions". Once more, I change the
question to the original one and ignoring the random argument by the
moderator. Then this moderator contacted a second moderator in order to gang-
up on me, supporting each other random policies in order to make a statement.

It was then that I realised that these people didn't like to moderate Quora
for the content quality, but for the feeling of 'power' and control moderation
creates. I noticed that these guys liked being moderators because they enjoyed
telling others what to do, with no regards for the content, quality, or users.
That same day I deleted all of my questions, answers, and Quora account. I
haven't used it again since then, and it feels great.

------
Karunamon
This struck me as more representative of other sites. Like, the one we're on
now:

 _The No Humor Rule: Humor is a de facto taboo on Quora. While the occasional
demonstration of witwill evoke no more than a scowl and shake of the head from
the community, more regular use will draw a barrage of down votes and risk the
possibility of banishment. The staff attempts to deny that this istrue but
fails to convince anyone. Many Quorans simply don 't appreciate humor and will
automatically down vote any post that contains it. _

s/quora/HN/g

That said, the author of this piece tries really, _really_ hard to bash on
Quora for their login policy. You have to be logged in to contribute or to
read.

Honestly? I think they're reading far too much into that.

~~~
mullingitover
> Honestly? I think they're reading far too much into that.

I honestly hated them for their login policy. They deserved to fail purely for
that stunt alone.

~~~
Karunamon
What "stunt"? Why is this such a big deal to people? I've never found a login
to be a particularly onerous thing.

~~~
lutusp
Easy to answer -- a website that doesn't require a login (for casual reads)
hopes to attract visitors. A website that does require a login hopes to
control and exploit visitors.

~~~
Karunamon
"Control and exploit".

How melodramatic.

------
iamben
Some of the comments here are really interesting. A lot of general Quora
negativity?

I think the weekly (semi personalised?) Quora 'digest' is one of the only bacn
emails I'll open pretty much without fail, almost always ending up on the
site. Some of the questions/answers are fascinating.

~~~
parkov
I also enjoyed the Quora digests until one day the links stopped going
directly to the threads but all pointed to a feed page. I assumed this was
another dark pattern to boost pageviews and unsubscribed.

~~~
derwiki
I prefer the feed page. There's usually more than one interesting link in a
Digest and the pages aren't exactly lightweight on my phone. I wouldn't be so
quick to call it a dark pattern; could be a reasonable UX decision based on
how people use the emails.

------
quadrangle
Wait, Quora is actually a thing? People actually have content there? I've only
visited a couple times and saw that I couldn't access anything. I assumed that
the answers didn't really exist, and it was just a scammy thing to get you
hooked in. Kinda like how a site might use some popular keyword but the actual
content isn't helpful at all.

Who the heck are these people that actually use it? Why??

~~~
cloakandswagger
Fake exclusivity wrapped in a shell of pseudo-intellectualism.

------
gprasanth
Quora's auto linkification of text seems to be excellent. clueless.it indeed.

~~~
currysausage
Not even a space can prevent the linkification: day.%20So; backstabbing.%20To

This really is quality engineering.

------
bithive123
I thought Quora's philosophy was "blur the page and cover it with a modal
signup form".

------
andrea_s
That's... A fairly long rant answering a short question ("what I think about
Quora and its latest pivot").

Not that I'm here to defend Quora, but this level of heat makes me wonder
whether the unnamed VC has some ongoing beef with it.

------
Communitivity
"Quora's philosophy can be summed up as why should the serfs get a share if
they were dumb enough to work for free in the first place?"

Different currencies. The owners of Quora are being paid in US dollars, the
content creators in both attention and reputation. Both attention and
reputation are currencies that will translate to dollars more and more as we
progress towards an, in-part, reputation-based economy. With everyone having
access to information what will matter will be your curation of that
information, and your commentary. The better these are the better your
reputation will be in those content areas, and the more your endorsement will
be worth (in both reputation and dollars).

~~~
rustyconover
"A reputation based economy is what we're moving towards", we should be
resistant to that. I think it would be fair to say a "reputation based
economy" is a synonym for crony capitalism -- I'll only do business with you
if I know you.

This is a socially unfair economy at best, and at worst will generate
inequality as social cliques will continue to preserve and enrich themselves
and "the people they know". If we're going to move more toward social and
economic fairness this isn't the direction to go.

I'm comfortable knowing that Whole Foods takes dollars rather than Klout
points or retweets. That way anyone who can make a dollar can eat and not
worry about starving because they failed to impress some arbiter of social
currency. Reputations aren't fungible hence they are flawed as a just economic
currency.

~~~
leovan
this is an intriguing criticism but assumes a corrupted reputation economy.
wouldn't a perfect meritocracy be a reputation based economy?

~~~
rustyconover
A meritocracy is a type of government not an economy. Or possibly I don't
understand your question.

~~~
leovan
a meritocracy is a resource allocation system and functionally equivalent to
an economy for considering your proposition that reputation based systems lead
to bad allocations; i'm questioning that proposition.

------
fredsted
I kind of feel these sites - Yahoo Answers, Quora - are just serving users not
wanting to Google things.

Everyone has questions. Questions can be googled.

Granted, Googling stuff is hard.

Even though you can just stick a question into Google and get some reasonable
feedback, it's still hard to know who to trust: I read most students have no
clue on what to trust when googling for school assignments. It's not taught
there, they're just expected to know. And it's one of those things that is
crucial to fully understand things in the society of today.

Of course, people want definitive answers. If there's a definitive answer for
something, it's probably in a place like wikipedia.

For something that doesn't have a definitive answer and which can be
discussed, there's discussion forums like reddit and HN that a great for this
purpose.

In my mind, Quora solves very little, and the way they force you to login
really irks me – information should be free. (Just make it publicly accessible
already! Make dumps and APIs available like wikipedia. Make it free!) And then
there's all the other issues the author describes in this article, especially
the inane questions.

I have to say, lots of interesting discussions have happened on Quora - mainly
due to the participation of interesting people, not random 13-year olds.
That's still a _huge_ accomplishment and why I hope Quora sticks around, but
more in form of a general discussion/opinion/experience platform.

------
DanBC
A surprising fierce critique of quora.

I'm not sure there's anything someone wanting to build a community can learn
from this article. Which is a shame, because we should really be trying to
learn from experience. It would counter the fuckin stupid ideas some people
have. (ie: real names only to combat hostility and trolling. The obvious
counter would be the comment sections of most newspapers.)

~~~
001sky
The only pessimism warranted is that people can't differentiate
experimentalism from failure. Empirical data on failure is under-valued. Just
like how academics never publish all the shit that goes wrong. Tons could be
learned/saved from publishing negative results. After all, its all in the
interpreation. Having bad empirical examples heightens contrast and
differentiation, which is often a good thing.

------
junto
After thinking about this for a while it struck me that Quora is simply this
decades version of expertsexchange.com.

It has the same "register to read what we slyly showed Google but not you,
unless you bump our daily user sign up rate to impress investors" dark pattern
going on.

------
seige
I remember once being very passionate about Quora and I really wanted to join
their team.

After doing my research, I came to get data that they are extremely biased to
only take ex-Stanford, ex-Facebook people. This was back in 2011-2012 so I
hope things have changed atleast from that angle.

My friend interviewed with them and he came back with a very bad experience
and was extremely pissed off that he was almost ridiculed for not having
cracked it so far in his career.

Anyways, their practices have been very dubious from the start. They should
thank those deep pockets of the founders.

------
qq66
This does not read like it was written by a VC, at least not in an investment
context. An investor would not express concern that a user-generated content
company was not sharing economics with its contributors. In fact, a company's
ability to attract contributors without sharing economics with users (e.g.
Facebook) would impress an investor.

------
whyenot
Written in 2013.

Please also include the date when submitting links like this.

------
dgreensp
I'm acquainted with the founders of Quora, and I don't think making "fast
money" was a primary motivation in founding Quora. They set out to create a
question/answer site with a better user experience and a better community.

The business model seems, from the outside, to be the belief that, like
Facebook and Twitter, they will make money somehow eventually after becoming a
runaway success, even it takes years to monetize.

~~~
grimlck
Actions speak louder than words, and I don't see how requiring logins to view
answers results in a better user experience and community.

I would guess that since it is socially uncouth to say their motivation for
the site is to try to make a lot of money, they instead state a more noble
sounding mission whenever asked about motivations.

~~~
dgreensp
I'm not going to defend Quora's actions, but your comment sounds like knee-
jerk cynicism to me, especially if you don't know the founders personally, and
that irritates me. If you've started a start-up before, you know the mix of a
big vision, good intentions, and also some desire for fame and/or fortune that
varies from founder to founder.

Starting a site like Quora and painstakingly nursing a community of
intellectuals into existence would be a pretty dumb way to make fast money,
given all the possible business models for doing so.

------
api
"more fast money could be madeby starting a for-profit version of Wikipedia
with the end game being to eventually IPO-it."

The whole "Zero to One" campaign by Thiel et. al. seems to be an attempt to
thrust a stake through the heart of this kind of thing.

------
tokenadult
From the article kindly submitted here: "Quora's philosophy can be summed up
as why should the serfs get a share if they were dumb enough to work for free
in the first place?"

That's a good question. What is the incentive to be a content creator on
Quora?

AFTER EDIT: Aside about the other comments wondering if Hacker News has a no-
humor rule. I find comments from time to time on Hacker News that are laugh-
out-loud funny. I'll link to two examples to show what I mean, after noting
that a good humorous comment on Hacker News is still the same thing as a good
nonhumorous comment on Hacker News: a comment that is "thoughtful" both in the
sense of being civil and in the sense of providing food for thought in the
context of the discussion thread. One recent Hacker News comment that I
thought was so funny, and so thoughtful, that I shared it on my Facebook wall
(where it was liked by several of my friends) was by patio11 about Yahoo's
business plans after the Alibaba IPO.[1] A much older comment that I cherish
from years ago was about how lifestyles in Japan changed after the "lost
decade" of meager economic growth in the 1990s.[2] You can be humorous on
Hacker News and get upvotes (evidently) if you embed your humor in a
substantive comment. I don't usually attempt humor here myself, but I
appreciate it (and upvote it) when I see it from other participants here.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8333625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8333625)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328819)

[1]

~~~
pinaceae
ego.

just like wikipedia it runs on the precious recource called 'mansplaining'.
men really like to show off.

just like this comment.

~~~
Karunamon
Is the sexism really necessary?

~~~
pinaceae
how is that sexism - look at the stats behind who edits wikipedia, who posts
here or at quora.

prove me wrong, with science.

it is the opposite of sexism - it is an uncomfortable truth.

~~~
aroch
It isn't `mansplaining` just because a man is writing something. I also wasn't
aware that writing source-backed articles for an encyclopedia is actually a
secret plan by men to oppress women. If you're of the opinion that any time
men write or speak on a subject that they're `mansplaining`, perhaps you
should reevaluate your world view.

~~~
kelukelugames
> this is about sites using the natural trait of men, especially the nerdy
> types, to get immense joy of being right.

I believe this trait is true, but the word mansplaining is loaded and few
people agrees with your use of it.

~~~
aroch
Given the number of women on Tumblr who will happily shout down others just to
be right (as far as they're concerned with "right'), I don't think this is a
trait specific to men. _All_ people like being smart and like being able to
show that.

~~~
kelukelugames
You are absolutely right. ESPN comments are pretty bad. :)

------
michaelochurch
Quora has _a lot_ of high-quality content. Yeah, you have to sift through some
garbage, but compared to Yahoo! Answers it's a different world. Most of the
time, the top answer will be a good one.

It may not stay that way forever, but thus far, the quality of the best
content is _really_ good when you consider that people wrote it for free, and
that the filter is some mix of community voting and machine learning (as
opposed to expert curation).

That said, I didn't know about the US-only policy (that was a bad idea) and
I'm glad they've changed it. The "social" integration definitely pisses me
off, because 90% of "social" in this era is alienation. I considered quitting
when I found out that my activity was getting piped out to Facebook. Awful
decision.

~~~
ForHackernews
"compared to Yahoo! Answers"

Setting the bar pretty low there, aren't you?

~~~
michaelochurch
Point.

------
dlysenko
> Youwill find yourself blocked from seeing content unless you first invest 15
> minutes registering through your Facebook or Twitter account.

I can't understand why people constantly hyperbolize how long it takes to sign
up for a website or app. For me it'll never take more than 120 seconds,
probably 60 of which are spent waiting for the activation email.

------
nether
Calling the users "Quorites" is a dead ringer for a lack of familiarity with
the site. This guy has barely used Quora, why care for his opinion? It's
"Quoran,"'which he mentions later on for some reason.

~~~
lutusp
> This guy has barely used Quora, why care for his opinion?

That would be on a par with dismissing atheists' views on religion, or the
reverse, i.e. not a very good idea if the goal is to hear a wide spectrum of
views.

