[Havoc]

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

[bigfudge]

That was a really long time ago though. It’s seems like it’s been awful for at least 10 years.

[npn]

Quora was bad when I visited it in 2021. So what year it was good again?

[ayewo]

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...

[rsynnott]

> 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.