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by fxtentacle 768 days ago
I cannot remember a time when quora was not broken, so AI certainly didn't ruin it.

The UI and their login popups have always been horrible enough that I try to avoid them. But in addition to that, most specific questions - the ones that would benefit the most from a nuanced human answer - get answered with generic copypasta. My impression is that Quota tried gamifying the process of answering... And they succeeded, to their detriment. Now people keep answering questions that they have no clue about just to make their presumed importance score go up. It's a bit like those grifters that order a ghost-written book in their name so that they can already claim authority before they learn a new skill.
1 comments
Havoc 768 days ago
You may have just joined late?

Right at the start when there was artificial signup scarcity it was fantastic. Like hn great except for questions

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bigfudge 768 days ago
That was a really long time ago though. It’s seems like it’s been awful for at least 10 years.
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npn 768 days ago
Quora was bad when I visited it in 2021. So what year it was good again?
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ayewo 768 days ago
Early 2010s. Basically around its founding.

This is an article [1] from 14 years ago where Arrington characterized Quora with “People say they feel smarter after they use Quora” and “It’s kind of like Wikipedia [2]. This is the long tail of information”

1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchm...

2: https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/30/quora-is-really-about-a-be...

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rsynnott 768 days ago
> Arrington characterized Quora with “People say they feel smarter after they use Quora”

But… they still do; as the article says, and it’s completely correct, it is essentially selling _feeling smart_. That’s not the same as _being_ smarter, though. I’m not sure there was ever _really_ a golden age; it wasn’t as bad as it is today on launch, certainly, but it was never great.

> “It’s kind of like Wikipedia […]”

Except without Wikipedia’s editing process, which is relatively good at keeping out incorrect things written by internet knowitalls. It _always_, right from the start, had a big problem with the confidently incorrect.

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