Ask HN: Why is Quora popular all of a sudden? It seems like Quora has been popping up in Google searches more and more lately, and it's doubled in popularity in the last year [0]. Does anybody have any idea why? They recently pushed out a snazzy new design (at least for Quora.com), but this can't be the only reason. What do people think? [0] https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0bm8t1r |
Their unsubscribe form is (or was last I saw it in 2015) a nastier piece of work than I could imagine, even if told: Come up with the most annoying unsubscribe form you can. Make it really hard to unsubscribe from everything...make'em work for it.
Quora, I hope, will continue to lose to much better, much more ethical, Q&A sites. The Stack Exchange sites seem like the market leaders, as they probably should be. They do nearly everything right, and they do it without being smarmy. Sites that believe they have a right to my attention, and are willing to cheat to get it, really ought to be shunned in polite company. I'm not sure how they've managed to maintain a patina of legitimacy after all these years of being no-good, shiftless, internet hucksters. We, as a community, usually shun the hell out of spammers...and yet, when Quora (and LinkedIn, for another example of a spammer getting a pass) do it, most folks just shrug as though it's no big deal. Does a certain level of economic success lend credibility even when behaving in ways that deserve no credibility?
Not that I'm grumpy about it, or anything.
It's totally understandable why they make that tradeoff, and quite possibly if SO relaxed strictness on that front I would be among those asking to reinstate it. It is, however, quite frustrating at times. So I think Quora is a nice alternative due to the more permissive policy there.
Any company that needs dozens of "dark patterns" and tricks to stay afloat probably shouldn't exist. LinkedIn is the same.
Yeah, no thanks. I don't think looking up my password just to sign in is worth using the app on mobile.
Which is a pity because it seems like they have a lot of interesting content, but there's no way in hell I'm going to give them my Facebook or Google+ account to get at it, and I can't be bothered creating a new throwaway email just for them.
It's annoying because although they initially attracted a lot of high profile members, as they become more popular they are doing a very poor job of maintaining quality. Unlike Stack Exchange the community moderation tools are not useful; not to mention the community itself does a terrible job of actually moderating for quality. It's Microsoft Q&A / Yahoo Answers all over again.
The number of highly-upvoted "answers" which are simply self-promotion links or conceited, self-absorbed nonsense is sometimes beyond belief. To give the community the benefit of the doubt, it's possible they have open holes that are allowing bots to upvote answers, or that they have a paid answer promotion service which is not vetted for accuracy or relevance to the question.
Most of Quora's content is evergreen. They improved question merging recently and that resulted in a high concentration of high quality answers to popular questions. Quora's management calls them canonical questions. The ask2answer flow also improved. You can now find people who can answer your questions. That feature was previously under-developed and didn't work very well.
Quora's top contributors enjoy the virtuous cycle. We write answers and people upvote them, which introduces other readers to us. Our audiences are massive. I only have about 250,000 views per month and about 5500 followers, but some other writers have several million per month and more than 20,000 followers.
Quora will collapse answers that are highly upvoted but incorrect. This helps with site quality and likely pleases Google.
I am one of about 800 Quora's Top Writers ( http://quora.com/Leonid-S.-Knyshov ) if you have any specific questions.
I think that's the crux of it. When I'm feeling lazy and google a specific question, their results pop up first because someone has most likely asked the same exact question verbatim on Quora before.
It's also really easy to fall down a Quora rabbit hole with the "associated questions" on the right side. I was watching a Star Wars marathon the other day following The Force Awakens and at one point had like 450 tabs open of associated Star Wars quora questions. Eventually I realized I could never catch up with 30+ years of nerd speculation and analysis and just simply didn't have time to read it all so I closed everything without reading them all! But I wanted to!!
It was important to get the digest right because it granted Quora permission to keep getting user's attention even when away from the site (push vs pull) and also gave users a 'takeaway' - either information or topics of discussion to debate with friends through real conversation or an email forward.
This feature lets them have high retention rates and increases word-of-mouth to gain new users.
I would love to read an article about how to create such digest emails. Typically they are truly terrible but they managed to make it interesting.
Quora lets you sign up using a Google account. Normally, this means you won't need to create a new password. However, Quora immediately asks you to provide one.
With that in mind, what's the point of linking your Google account? Well, according to this recent thread, Quora tries to access your contacts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/3ax27p/tried_to_re...
Whereas other rivals sites like the ___ exchanges didn't have this nag.
Also change the country drop down filter below the search bar from Worldwide to India. You see an exponential rise in popularity, and the rise is not sudden. https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0bm8t1r&geo=I...
It gets more annoying and restrictive every day so that I have to think trice before deciding if I should go again trough that agony of asking a question and fight with SO admins to keep it from being closed.
PS: I deleted my account sometimes back because I thought they used too many dark patterns to my taste at the time.
Recently the site has basically become a plagiarism echo chamber. People copy/paste blogs verbatim in a bid for upvotes. Maybe Quora should stop optimizing for Facebook's key metrics like MAU.
Maybe the whole point of Quora is higher quality content, a special place which only allows for certain standard of content. If everyone can have a guard of honor, then it is simply a guard. If anyone is allowed to answer on Quora, it's simply a content mill. And the wrong kind at that.
To be what Quora is trying to be, you need a heavy handed deletionist culture. For that you need passionate people who spend time doing that, and you need an open platform. Both of which Quora is not. It's like they had a decent idea in 2010 but never really improvised.
It could be that Google is tracking your clicks with cookies and showing you more of the sites you click frequently in the search results. Or the queries you are using might be dominated by Quora.
While I dislike Quora for forced sign up (with an even weirder explanation for why you need to have an account), some of the answers there are top notch. I haven't seen such depth in any Q&A sites.
Most importantly, the site is SEO friendly.
I do appreciate the insider comments we get from a wide variety of areas.
My only gripe is a question of style, namely the style that comes when most content creators are in it for self-promotion (which is fine btw); in the end it feels like everyone is in a job interview.
1. how do i make a million dollars in a week?
2. who in history made $1 billion in the easiest way?
3. who is smarter Terrance Tso or Leibniz?
4. what's faster Ferrari or Lamborghini?
and finally:
5. who would win: Boxer vs. Ninja?!?!?!
7. Why do some people think Mark Zuckerberg is a good programmer?
8. What skills do people who work at Google have that other people don't have?
9. What are the top things to do before applying for a position at Google?
Why not?