37
votes
How Quora died - The site used to be a thriving community that worked to answer our most specific questions. But users are fleeing.
Link information
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- Title
- One of Our Best Websites Died While No One Was Looking
- Authors
- Nitish Pahwa
- Published
- Feb 2 2024
- Word count
- 2491 words
I've been a member of MetaFilter (an old-school Tildes-esque community blog) since 2007; one of its biggest highlights is the heavily moderated Ask MetaFilter Q&A site for questions on any topic.
At the time I joined, Yahoo Answers was the site's bête noir, the giant corporate platform sucking up all the oxygen in the Q&A space with inane questions and even more terrible answers. Eventually Yahoo shuttered the site, but AskMe soldiered on.
Then along came Quora, which was basically Yahoo Answers backed by massive VC money and filled with well-connected techbros. At its height the site was even more of a search results hog than Y!A, despite their irritating real name policy and pervasive paywalls.
In the mid-10s Google made sudden algorithmic changes that literally halved MeFi's traffic. This has knock-on effects on ad revenue and precipitated a funding crisis for the site's salaried staff, but the community pulled together and moved to a largely donation-supported model; AdSense is currently a fraction of the site's budget.
And now we see the titan Quora turning into a garbage dump due to corporate greed and disregard for the people that built it. Meanwhile, Ask just turned 20, MeFi turns 25 in July, and leadership is exploring transitioning the entire site to a non-profit model to strengthen community governance and keep it true to its mission.
I really hope that, as the big commercial platforms continue to heel-turn and sell out their users, smaller, human-scale spaces like MeFi, Tildes, Lemmy, etc. continue to live on and help lead us all back to a healthier and more sustainable model for building communities on the web.
Quora always struck me as speed running the enshittification process. I think the first question I saw was a question that was asked about what Jack Welsh did when he was CEO at General Electric that was answered by Jack Welsh. (In retrospect, Quora was doing a favor to Welsh and not the other way around!)
From day one it seemed to me that Quora, like Medium, was a little bit worse than the rest of the web but pretended to be a little better. Either one was an encyclopedia of dark patterns, such as the bogus SERP pages Quora made, full of irrelevant results, designed to show you what a rabbit hole you could enter if you only created an account.
People have woken up lately and are asking “What happened to Quora?” and “What happened to Medium?” but I think they were both rotten from day one because they both made you register to read subprime content.
Big internet platforms always sell out their users. The Wikimedia Foundation is the only one I can think of that hasn't, and even then, even now, I expect there are at least a few people with money and means who keep poking away at how they might be able to take control. Who salivate at the thought of being able to ad-ify the internet's primary encyclopedia. Which has been built by users.
I was online before IMDB. When you would have long, long, long conversations at parties and bars "about that guy who was in that thing? You know, the one with the girl from that other thing. Yeah, him, who was ... no that's not it. Wait, are you sure? Let's go ask so-and-so, she likes movies." That kind of thing went on for hours. No one could whip out a phone and settle it.
Then IMDB showed up and crowdsourced the bulk of their database. You were encouraged to log in and enter information. This is who "that guy" was, this is what "the movie" he was in was. This was "the girl" in it with him. Type, type, type, thank you for logging in and contributing to filling out IMDB's back database.
Then, when the database was populated, the IMDB people sold it to whoever, and I stopped caring more or less. For all I know it's been sold several more times. I do know IMDB has turned into this bloated thing, and you often need to click several times to drill down to what you'd expect to be the core of the site; information about who was in what, when, and with who.
They always sell out. The sites always sell. If not initially, someone comes along who will. The founders die, or move on, or hand it over. They expand, and bring in new blood. And the newcomers want money. That's why they showed up.
There was a time when the "if you're looking at this movie here are six recommended movies that you may enjoy" thing was rock solid. I found amazing films from that feature.
Currently, for Bugsy Malone the list is populated with other films Jodie Foster was in when she was a child, and then other random children's films released around about the same time. But they used to have [Paper Moon](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070510/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_paper%2520moon} in the list, and that's a far stronger recommendation.
I don't know when it stopped being great, but I suspect it was when the smaller core group of film geeks got out numbered by people with casual interest in movies.
I'm not a believer in dead internet theory, but Quora does seem like a good example of how we're moving in that direction.
This also reminds me of my debate over whether to delete everything I've posted on Reddit over the past decade. I know that some of the knowledge I've provided is still referenced by niche communities on the site. Every time I visit new Reddit, it feels worse and worse; I deeply hate how Reddit has changed from the forum I loved.
When I left Reddit I deleted the comments from my casual conversation account, but left comments and posts from the account I posted math tutorials and answers on. Just the other week I got an email notification from Reddit that a 14 year old coment had a new reply, which was thanking me for explaining a type of proof.
So I'm glad I left the content, even if I'm not a fan of the platform anymore.
I'm still on reddit (terrible me, I know). But even if/when I leave, I think I'd rather just keep it all up there. I have at least one post where I'm basically the only resource on the easily Googleable Internet, specifically for a laptop WiFi issue I was dealing with. I kept updating the post over several months with things I tried and what failed, until I came to a simple solution: replace the part, which I ended with. Super niche issue, and eventually it'll become irrelevant with time. But I know at least one other person stumbled upon my post via Google because they had the same issue and said so. Screw reddit inc, but if I can help someone, I think that's more important.
I've gotten similar notifications. It is always a kick!
I've had two people in the past few months thank me on a ten-year-old post in a 3D modeling software subreddit. One of them told me I "saved their grade." It gives me warm fuzzies. I love seeing that. (It's also somewhat hilarious that this software-bug-ish issue is still happening 10 years later.)
I too have thought about using one of those bots or apps that goes through your Reddit comments and deletes them. I decide against it because of happy moments like the one I just mentioned. I know the owners of Reddit suck and the website has been getting shittier, but I also think about the people who benefit from the posts I have made.
I feel like tearing down all my posts is like burning down a small part of a library. I think it is enough that I, and many others, no longer contribute to Reddit. The tree has been cut, it will no longer grow and provide shade, there is no need to poison the roots, they will decompose with time.
People spend SO much time on Reddit and other social media.
Yet they don't really consider it as part of their lives.
If you spent 15 hours a week on a hobby you no longer care for, would you destroy everything you made? Would you want to keep what you made so you can point to where your time went?
Like it or not, your time on Reddit fits into that category. It is part of your limited lifetime, what you spent yourself on. At least that is the reason I've used not to delete my content. Aside from non-fiction, many good conversations I've had with people over the years. Memories.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/hsuZJ