Ask HN: Are most questions on Quora submitted by bots? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are most questions on Quora submitted by bots?

6 pointschung-leong7 comments

Why else would the same question get asked over and over and over again? I don't know how many times I've seen some apparent novice asking what programming language he should start with. A real person would just read one of the many existing answers.

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There's a couple of questions on Hackernews that repeat a lot. I'd say human nature, not bots. Some questions have a slight twist or personal background, sometimes a year is added in hope to get recent answers. Same on AskReddit. It's up to the platform (or moderators) to enforce anything.

"Ask HN: How to find mentors?" "Ask HN: How to find a mentor/advisor?" "Ask HN: Where to find a mentor in my city (or any)?" "Ask HN: How to find a mentor?" "Ask HN: How Can I Find a Mentor?" "Ask HN: Where do you find mentors online?" "Ask HN: Where can one find a mentor?" "Ask HN: How do you find a mentor at a new job or a new place?" "Ask HN: Best way to find a mentor" "Ask HN: How did you find your mentor?"...

or which books people can recommend, how to people writes notes, how does your company do knowledge management, how do I learn web development, how does a backend developer switch to frontend...

The other day I was about to answer a question about the city of Krakow (where I live). Then I opened the list of hidden answers and saw a guy warning others not to waste their time, since the OP has asked the same question about every other Polish city. Sure enough, a search revealed exactly that. The question actually employed the name "Kraków", which is the Polish spelling.

I'd say no based on the fact that you see most user-driven forums experience this problem. I can't remember how many times I've seen a pinned post or set of rules to exclaiming "use the search function before posting". Even StackOverflow has many duplicate questions despite possibly having some of the best built-in workflow to prevent that from occurring.

It's different at SO. Generally a poster would follow up on their question. At Quora, posters would ask questions and not say a peek after. Lots of copy-and-pasted answers as well.

The chances are high... Quora raise $226 million dollars for what would theoretically be a pretty normal CRUD app in most people's minds. So what is that investment being used on? I'm guessing the bots concept has some merit... but its probably larger than that.

> ... for what would theoretically be a pretty normal CRUD app in most people's minds

Is Facebook also a pretty normal CRUD app?

Quora apparently uses bots for translating questions into languages other than English. Other use cases? It's either bots or a bunch of human morons

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