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votes
Quora+ Program: A case study in ruining a perfectly functional community forum and online information resource
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- Title
- What do you think of the new Quora+ subscription model?
- Authors
- Prahlad Yeri
To be honest: the current Quora model really isn't morally acceptable to me. Quora abuses the Referer header to force you to sign up for an account when clicking answers from within their website. This isn't circumventable without technical knowledge, and Quora is primarily not a place for technical knowledge (which is instead overwhelmingly found on StackExchange, which while having its own community problems distinctly is designed to prevent problems like this).
A tension older than the internet: “Information Wants to be Free”: The history of that quote (the context of that quote is often lost, so I recommend reading the full quote).
It seems to me that the only successful way to monetize web content, at scale, that started out free, is to start running advertisements/sponsorships. Can anyone think of counterexamples where a platform managed to continue to grow after erecting a paywall? There’s nothing inherently wrong with erecting a paywall, then contracting and finding a sustainable business model that way. But for some things like Quora+, the size of the active user base is going to have a significant effect on the quality of the content. So, even if some readers are willing to pay for quality answers, if there aren’t enough active readers and answerers, people will be unlikely to look to Quora+ in the first place.
Several newsmedia companies (maybe most notably The New York Times) introduced paywalls after several years of providing ad-funded content free for readers. The Times launched its website in… I want to say 1996? And didn’t add a paywall until 2011.
Newspapers definitely don’t need to rely on a sizable user base to actually produce content, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it was still crucial when these paywalls were created that the amount of overall traffic continue to increase. Part of the way that the Times did this was initially launching with fairly lax rules (here’s an article from their initial launch that describes the original metering rules). Even now, the Times only has a “soft” paywall, and just launched an AI system to try to bring even more nuance to the metering system.
You could imagine a version of this for Quora that would maybe feel less gross. Some number of free questions per month, and an increase to that number if you answered a question (or even asked one), or something. Basically encouraging participation.
Yeah, NYT and a few others (perhaps WAPO) did it, my guess is they were able to do because they had huge reputation and backing that preceded the paywall strategy (a reputed newspaper publication for decades and website running since 1996 as you said). I highly doubt Quora can command that kind of reputation. And even if they did, the best (or win-win) scenario here is to push the ad revenue model further and explore that for monetization. But since we are living in times of economic depression and manufacturing slowdown, I can imagine why that would be difficult.
Right good point. I’d say the caveat here is that this is a business model that predates the web. While news publications tried to adapt to the web by having free offerings, I think ultimately the quality ones are deciding (independently) it’s not sustainable. Whereas for things that originated on the web and are web-only, I think they tend to go the other way where the free version is primary and any paid versions are only expected to be adopted by a smaller, more engaged pool.
There is also the question of ethics when it comes to paywalls though. A capitalist will always want to see the money (whatever be the cost) and that kind of mindset is seen with paywalls. Imagine what will happen tomorrow if others like Stack overflow, Wikipedia, Github, Reddit, etc. also started holding content hostage for a few bucks after getting inspired by Quora? Will the Internet even be the same again? Many of us grew up taking these resources for granted for learning programming, technology, geek culture, politics, etc. and in turn contributed heavily to them too.
Indeed, Quora itself is built upon free and open source tech such as Python, Flask, MongoDB, etc. (to the best of my knowledge). Isn't it very unethical of them to use these free resources, openness of Internet and geek culture to grow into a corporation and now trying to gatekeep others of the same resources?
Capitalists don’t tend to ponder ethics too heavily, but online communities generally do. This mirrors the “information wants to be expensive/free” tension fairly well. Capitalists see value in something like Quora to be extracted. Quora users will see this value extraction as unethical greed. Quora users who share this mindset will leave, and the Capitalists will reap what they’ve sewn. Capitalists will argue that this is a feature of Capitalism—the so called invisible hand of the markets. The ultimate problem is if the Capitalists have complete control of the markets, eventually there may not be anywhere left to run to when users get fed up. Then the invisible hand gets bound by an invisible rope and greed doesn’t get punished commensurately.
Maybe, but is it necessarily worse than corporations profiting off of answers provided by volunteers without compensating them? My understanding is that part of this program is also compensating answerers with some of the excess revenue they expect to raise.
I’m not totally convinced that asking for money in exchange for information is inherently unethical, either; such feelings don’t (in my experience, at least) seem to apply to books or newspapers.
Re: using open source software to build a closed/paid product, I don’t know if that’s unethical, either. If it is, you’d have to be willing to make the argument that all paid software products using an open source language (that is, quite a huge fraction of them ) are unethical, and that doesn’t quite pass the smell test for me. And what about open, non-software technologies? Is it unethical to require payment for a book that you write, because some of the information you used in that book was learned at a public library?
I suppose the answer to these questions could be “yes”, actually, if fundamentally your argument is “I don’t agree with the ethics of capitalism,” which… me neither. Seriously, I don’t agree with the ethics of capitalism. But a paywall on Quora doesn’t feel like a particularly worse flavor of capitalist ethics than an ad-supported free Quora that doesn’t compensate its content producers, to me, at least.