Back around 2013–2021, I really liked Quora. I could go through questions people asked, find interesting questions that I was especially qualified to answer (mostly about fonts and typography), and write up an informative answer that people would read and upvote. Comments and further questions in the discussion to each of my Quora answers would help me refine and improve them.
I could similarly find and read interesting thoughts and analysis on darn near any topic of interest. I accumulated favorite writers and would often read Quora as a leisure activity, just for intellectual interest. It was a social network focused on ideas.
Quora has since mostly turned to junk. At this point, I don’t even have any confidence as to how long the site will even continue to be up. Or if it is still up, will the content be freely available? Findable? So I have been revising and saving my best answers here, to trickle out over time.
Why did Quora turn to crap? This is the process Cory Doctorow calls enshittification. They were getting participation and views, but without making money. The site needed to figure out how it would make money. So they experimented in a bunch of different ways to try to increase “reader engagement” and reduce costs… and in the process lost everything I liked about it.
In the case of Quora, some particular things included:
- Making it harder to find the answers to a question. The default when you click on a question is now to show “all related” answers instead of the answers to the current question… which means you have to read more and click more to get the info you actually want.
- Rewarding people for asking questions (through the “Quora Partner Program”) instead of focusing on getting good answers. Worse, specifically rewarding questions that upset people as long as they got responses. Responses pointing out problems in the question itself are still responses, so… you can see where that path leads.
- Allowing anonymous questions. Yes, there are totally legitimate reasons for question-askers to want to be anonymous. But the proportion of junk and trolling skyrocketed after this change.
- Doing all the above while reducing their staff of moderators.
- Most of the above factors contributed to spam, misinformation, and low-quality content
- At first, it was just more bad content. BUT, the spam, low-quality content and user-hostile interface decisions drove away many of the best contributors (myself included, obviously). So now the fraction of “good content” is much worse, not only because the denominator grew out of control, but the numerator also shrank.
Quora’s “Top Writers” program lasted from 2013–18, coinciding with peak Quora. There weren’t any huge perks, just a little recognition, a badge on your Quora profile. But still, it was nice. It was not a big enough deal that it made it onto my c.v.—but I did link to my Quora answers. I just deleted that link on my c.v., because being associated at all with Quora seems like a negative.
But now Quora has been overrun with spam and fake questions plus hate speech and bullying. I won’t yank my existing answers (already often revised and polished over time), but I am polishing and further revising the best ones, and will post them here. I have already copied a couple dozen of my best answers to draft posts here, edited and posted the first couple, and done some light editing on most of the others (with more to come). I may set them to auto-post periodically.
That all makes me sad, but at least I was able to slurp up a whole bunch of my existing content and plan to re-post.
