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How Quora Died

slate.com One of Our Best Websites Died While No One Was Looking

The once-thriving site used to answer our most specific questions. But users are fleeing.

One of Our Best Websites Died While No One Was Looking

“Why Do So Many Music Venues Use Ticketmaster?” “What’s It Like to Train to Be a Sushi Chef?” “How Do Martial Artists Break Concrete Blocks?” If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.

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How Quora died

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  • Modern Quora reminds me a lot Yahoo! Answers when I was a kid - it's mostly a trolling playground. You can technically get some useful info out of it, but odds are that you won't be able to sort it out.

    I'm from the firm belief that anyone using a chatbot to directly reply questions either 1) never interacted with chatbots enough to conclude the obvious (that their answers are often unreliable crap), or 2) doesn't care about reliability at all.

    BNBR is never enough to create a nice and respectful community. You need to go a step deeper and analyse why and when users are hostile towards each other.

    “The A.I. thing, the terms of service issue, has been a massive drain of top talent on Quora, just based on how many people have said, Downloaded my stuff and I’m out of there,”

    One thing that corporate social media struggles to understand is that not all the users have the same impact in a platform. It's extremely easy to take a mildly unpopular decision that only pisses off 0.5% of your userbase, and the platform becomes ruined because that 0.5% were damn important.

107 comments