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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

It's genuinely hard to believe that Quora is still running.

I've met more than one Quora engineer who were stone cold convinced that they hired the absolute best and brightest engineers _in the entire industry_ and that they were destined for greater things than Google, Amazon, etc.

All I was left with was impression that Quora hires people that are batshit.

I get where you're coming from. But I have to admit, I read my Quora digest email really often. I'm impressed how often I not only click through to read an answer, but enjoy the answer and find it valuable.

Quora definitely does some questionable things nowadays, but I'd also argue they are still getting some key things right too.

The difference I'm seeing in the comments seems to be between actual Quora users and people who just keep stumbling on Quora via search. My impression is that Quora does well at tailoring content for its users while being obnoxiously aggressive about getting non-users to sign up.

Sounds very similar to Pinterest; a spammy clickbait-ridden excuse for a website serving only to deceive you when you search for products or images for non-users, or an amazing tool you can use to categorize all the things, and find inspiration for similar items for users.

Yup. Just when I finally gave in and made a user with a backup email it turns out they're also demanding I download their app? I definitely would've created an account long ago, with my regular Gmail, if they didn't demand it from me. And probably have their app too. But now I'm just determined to not give in further.

And yes, I get they're doing it because it presumably works better on aggregate than not being assholes. That just makes me hate it even more.

Quora just makes me irrationally pissed off. I realize my dislike is over the top, some of the content isn't terrible, I'd love for the basic format to somehow work out, but the package is somehow worse than Trump tweeting and I sincerely hope it fails as soon as possible.

I agree. Some questions in my digest are interesting and often get very insightful answers from people with first hand knowledge.

I find out Quora is still running every time I make a search query and get pages full of useless answers.

Oh, here's a bunch of Quora links. I'm screwed.

Quora: the Pinterest of text search. Or is Pinterest the Quora of image search?

Nah, Pintrest is somehow amazingly good at offering similar content. People must love making those boards because I get good enough results that there must be a lot of users doing good work in categorizing and organizing those images.

It's fantastic for artists since its really easy to generate large collections of reference images on just about any subject, inspiration sources etc.

But to everyone else I'm sure it's really annoying.

Is it? I'll never know because they also require logging in :)

Perhaps people shouldn't make startup with something as difficult to make profitable as question and answers type content, and instead leave it for an organization that is oriented to that mission.

That way, something like quora would grow more valuable instead of becoming more useless as they attempt to make money out of a squeezed lemon.

I want to be the person who is sympathetic to people being laid off, instead of making light of the situation.

But Quora grinds my gears so hard that I can't separate the two.

Seems like a windmill people keep tilting at. A while back there was "Experts Exchange" AKA "Expert Sex Change dot com".

Experts Exchange: The living embodiment of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch.

My understanding is that Stack Overflow started as a direct competitor to Experts Exchange and their SEO shenanigans, although based on recent goings on, Stack Exchange would’ve been served better as a non profit entity similar to Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210444

I wonder sometimes what Nietzsche would have made of VC culture. This is one of those times.

I don’t get it either. They claim 300m MAUs and healthy answer growth.

While it’s SEO is fantastic, the actual content is pretty marginal.

I have no idea what the ultimate point is like I do with, say, Wkipedia.

The odd thing about Quora is that there's actually a lot of good content, but it doesn't show up in search results because the questions that trigger it are of the format "Tell me something interesting about history / technology / whatever"

The "hard fact" questions have answers that suck. Absolutely. SO is wildly better for that.

It's really a place to go to follow certain people you can rely on to post interesting stuff (ex, there's a lot of really good ASOIAF content), follow niche topics and waste time. Like an entirely text-based reddit.

You also have a huge amount of questions like “What’s the cheapest ticket I can get from A to B?” Or “Do I need travel insurance?” followed by answers with links to various spammy sites.

For some reason there seem to several experts in my fields there who provide highly technical authoritative answers to questions there routinely.

I don’t think there’s any better Q&A site?

Quora has been a resourceful site for me, though I do use google to find the info most of the time.

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