Leaving Quora was also one of my own better moves. Like the OP, I had also been a Top Writer a couple of times. I had many of my own fans, some of whom still follow me on Twitter seven years later. I even have the fleece. But I got sick of features coming and going, staff jerking people around, and particularly the incessant promotion of flippant intelligence-free non-answers over well thought out real answers for the sake of engagement. Many of those answers clearly violated the site's stated rules (e.g. excessive use of irrelevant images) and got shown first contrary to user upvotes which I consider dishonest and unfair to people who actually try to contribute positively. So I just up and quit. Loudly. Even as a non-user, their cozy relationship with Google to boost their search rankings pisses me off. Everyone should quit Quora.
"Engagement-driven" product development is a very poor choice. You might be optimising for the short-term and your personal product manager performance review. But other than that it will slowly kill your product.
Reddit has been "slowly killing" their product for a long time now, and it's bigger than ever. Problem is this stuff actually does work if you want to mass market.
The relevant question for me is: how much bigger would Reddit be today without their shitty approach?
I never turned into an active user - mostly because I'm appalled by things like: being forced into their mobile app, for example. I just use reddit to read stuff and then leave. On HN I contribute a lot.
Niche subreddits are still decent but the community as a whole is a cesspool.
The mistake was bringing internet to the masses, as opposed to keeping it difficult enough to be used only by passionate and/or smart people. Now that the cat is out of the bag maybe paid memberships to exclusive communities is the way to go?
Just late night riffing here after a few drinks and, might be wrong about all of the above.
You're being downvoted for "gatekeeping" but you're not wrong.
NSF has the L2 paid membership section, which is the absolute best place for information in the field - both public and insider information. Likewise airliners.net has (or had) an excellent paid option, and I can think of a few others.
Requiring payment is still a good way to let those passionate about a topic self-admit themselves while keeping the masses at bay.
I think the problem is the scaling of communication, rather than letting in the unwashed masses. In any community experiencing continuous growth, there will be a constant influx of people unaware of the social norms and conventions. Most of these "normies" are just regular people, that if they stuck around, you'd realize they were no different than the regulars.
If this is a one-thing event, the community usually stabilizes, but the problem with reddit is that the central premise seems to have become growth, so there's always a bunch of new faces, which makes maintaining an actual community nearly impossible. Only exceptions seem to be communities where the topic is extremely esoteric, or the moderators are super aggressive.
I agree. Any community can only scale at a certain rate and maintain its culture. Scaling too fast leads to the infuxed culture dominating.
We see the same issues with immigration as well, see for example how many European cities are struggling with the prevalence of Arab culture and Muslim customs. They welcome the immigrants (the people), but do not welcome the changes to the culture of their cities.
After a few drinks I'd expect you to say something more controversial, like it failed because it took sides in the culture war.
Bringing discussion to the masses is actually a known problem, and something reddit managed to solve with subreddits. Quite a few others before it fell due to this issue, notably slashdot and digg.
If you've been there 5 years I'm not sure you're a tourist anymore. And 4chan has been complaining about being ruined by tourists since project chanology anyway
I was a top writer too. The part where it completely went to hell for me was when they started recklessly combining all the questions. I had a lot of answers that were thoughtful or clever and specific to the actual wording of a question but quickly became part of an irrelevant mess.
Now it’s just a spam magnet and functionally useless. But it was not a single step into oblivion it was more like a series of bad decisions.
Still have the top writer fleece though somewhere.
Yeah, burying good painstakingly-written answers beneath crappy non-answers to different questions was not a good move in any dimension. You have my complete agreement and sympathy on that one. Personally it was the "must have a bio for each subject" thing, and the harassment from staff over it, but it could have been any of a hundred other things.
As an active StackExchange participant I've tried to get into Quora multiple times but the purposefully, grey-pattern-ridden UX is the real barier to entry. I still can't figure out how the darn thing works.
I occasionally find myself clicking on a Quora link Google search. When I did so yesterday, I found it hard to tell the difference between promoted questions/answers and answers to the actual question I was looking at. It’s like open a pack of hot dogs and trying to find an actual hot dog amongst a pack of assorted eraser colored, fleshy, slimy tubes with rounded ends.
Hahaha that is exactly it. Especially on mobile. My God.
I open a quora answer from Google. I start reading, then realize I'm reading an ad. I see a number badge on the Home button in the top nav menu. But I also see a Notification Bell button. Why are there notification badges anywhere but there?
I see a Globe button. I imagine it would send me to a search page or something? Or a map? Nope, it's a modal to change the language, but the only option is "English (current)". Hmm. Seems like a lot of ambiguity and real estate and code and clicking for nothing.
Ok, I try to reorient myself and find the heading related to my search. Oh cool, they have RSS feeds?! Oh wait, when I click the RSS icon it makes me follow... the question? The user who wrote the question?
On this same bar on the end is a an ellipsis menu. Holy crap. There's 10 options in there!
I scroll down to an answer. Finally! Wait, crap, I forgot what the exact question was. I have to scroll back to the top to see the question! But each answer's engagement options bar is sticky while I scroll past them... Why not make the question sticky?! And wait, what?? Did I upvote this answer previously?? Oh, no, the upvote icon has a color border as opposed to the grey downvote icon.
Ok, this answer's author claims to be the CEO of Quora. I check, and yep, I can add the same "credential" to my own profile. His profile picture on the answer has a checkmark. Does that mean he's verified? Or is this answer verified? Or is this the accepted answer?
Also, 9 out of 10 it’s some very shitty answer written as if the author would have any reasonable knowledge on the topic.
A recent example, I was looking at Gluon Mobile, which can presumably compile to ios, but not much info is available on it. One “relevant” google search was a quora link for “is android slower than ios due to java”. I am unfortunately somewhat addicted to flame wars so I read some replies and.. the first one was someone going on an on about how OpenJDK can be quite fast, how there is benchmark game, etc etc, while failing to realize that android does not run OpenJDK, nor does it have a traditional java runtime.
