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Comment by sleavey | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to compare Stack Overflow to Quora, which was similarly great a few years ago and is now almost worthless, but in a different way. Stack Overflow suffers from militant moderators who close and delete reasonable submissions and answers due to draconian rules. Quora, meanwhile, has been taken over by spammers and idiots, and has lost any sense of trustworthiness. Just today I visited a discussion on Quora about WordPress plugins [1]. The top answer is an advertisement, the second gives an answer but offers no justification (and is also an advertisement), the third is probably an advertisement, and the fourth is again an answer without any justification. Repeat ad absurdum.

It's weird that both sites' communities have made it difficult for old users to take part, but in completely different ways.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-WordPress-plugin-to-...

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Seconding the impression of SO. More than once I saw a question where it was kinda obvious that it was a beginner who was facing a very specific issue. Let's say it's a question that's not very difficult to solve for a seasoned programmer because even if you don't know it right off the batch, your experience can guide you pretty quickly to a solution. So, I spend the five to ten minutes to come up with a solution that works reasonably well -- in parts because I'd like to help out someone but in parts also because it's informative for me as well to learn something I didn't know before -- but just as I'm typing up my findings, the question gets closed. And it's not possible to answer closed questions (the rationale for which does not reveal itself to me immediately).

I mean, I get that SO wants to be a programming resource (as in "archive") where people with a problem should find a solution - not by asking but through googling. And so they want question/answer pairs that have a sort of general value, not an individual answer to just one person.

But then again: why? What's the big deal? Someone has a very specific question, and maybe nobody in the universe will ever have the same question again, but I'm willing to help that person out -- why shouldn't I be allowed to do it? Are they really worried about too much noise on the site? Please, come on.

In the situation I sketched above, I will still walk away having learned something new, but the person who posed the original question is left with a very negative user experience AND is none the wiser regarding their specific problem. At the same time, I was never allowed to help that person which I wanted to do not for the potential credit points but rather for altruistic reasons. Way to go.

Are they really worried about too much noise on the site? Please, come on.

Is this really so hard to believe? I have been a member of the community for ten years now (https://goo.gl/JZkqSP) and have seen the number of low-quality questions rise to the point where I honestly don’t enjoy answering any more. People don’t care to ask well, they just want to get over their personal issue as quickly as possible and be done with it.

I have countless examples of me googling for a very specific issue, and the only relevant hit I can find is a closed SO question.

Exactly. We have sophisticated search algorithms, noise is no problem.

Rather, noise is not a problem for SO, but it is a problem of someone else.

it has happened to me once or twice as well :(

Even with relevant, unique, well-worded questions, there are a number of militant reviewers who will flag it as a duplicate of the first question they find on the same topic (even though its clearly not a dupe).

It may well be true that the number of low-quality questions is increasing (I believe it, some really are just garbage), but the number of low-quality reviewers has unfortunately also increased.

I asked a really specific question about redis and one guy just posted this as an answer: You can install redis with sudo apt-get install redis-server

I agree with your sentiment, but I'd like to point out that I've seen examples of closed questions that were worded well, and interesting enough for me to answer.

Is this really so hard to believe?

When nearly every question I end up on has been closed it seems they don't really care, if they did closed questions would disappear.

I've been on Quora since 2011 when I wrote my first answer. I would easily spend hours back then reading incredible insights from all kinds of people. Sadly these days it's exactly as you say, a community filled with spammers and low-quality answers from popular personalities crowding out focused responses from people who are experience in that topic.

The product itself has also become 1000x worse to use and I think it's one of the biggest examples of a Silicon Valley company that remains successful despite the constantly bad product management.

I've noticed this but surprised by other topics.

Anything that is spam worthy, like marketing or self help, is pretty much junk.

But other topics on there are fascinating. I read a few weeks ago an account of someone's grandpa who was an SS officer in Nazi Germany.

If you have an interest in a topic that isn't typically spammed by 'gurus', check it out on Quora.

Quora suffers from an extreme cult of personality where answers are primarily upvoted these days based on the popularity of the writer and rarely on the quality of the answer.

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