All philosophical views aside, there are some really core issues that got me to stop using Quora and unfortunately the case to stop using it is made by the site itself:
* The content quality has deteriorated significantly since the site's inception. The content is far cheaper than before and far less interesting in very obvious ways.
* Moderation systems have not done a good job of growing the site as a community. The site has lost the character that drew many people to it in the first place.
* The machine learning models terribly over-fit to user signals, creating a frustrating experience.
These 3 core issues with the site are what got me to gradually stop using it as someone who was initially an early adopter.
I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchange is a mystery to me; I suspect that most Quora users simply aren't aware that Stack Exchange exists, since SE traditionally catered primarily to a technical audience.
Edit: One of my biggest gripes with the platform is that it's always solicited a large number of promotional answers. Anytime I end up on Quora, I'm usually stuck scrolling through a long list of "Use my product, it's the best!" answers. It appears to make no effort to discourage or remove such content, and, for whatever reason, those answers tend to get heavily upvoted.
Q is better at "soft" knowledge - psychology, personal history, experience, opinion.
SE is better for "hard" knowledge - clearly-defined problems with specific solutions.
Having said that, I find SE very, very frustrating.
Given any problem, the answers invariably seem to include multiple takes with distracting or irrelevant side points; show-boating comments, often nit-picky, about very minor issues; just plain wrong answers that have been massively upvoted; no account of chronology - later answers always have fewer votes than older answers, even if they're better solutions; moderator show-boating with questions closed for no good reason (e.g. when dupes aren't really dupes.)
SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content.
I enjoy my Quora feed, but I treat it more as entertainment. I wouldn't use it for anything mission critical. I actually agree with Q and not the WB comments - comments about private experiences or opinions are the property of the authors, not communal property, and authors should have the right to withdraw them.
Also - FB isn't archived either. Do the WB people have the same negative attitude to FB groups?
As for SE - sometimes I try to use SE for mission critical problems. Usually I get a few hints from the answers, then end up having to solve the problem independently.
Yes my biggest pet peeve with Stack Overflow specifically is that instead of an answer to the question, you'll often see a lecture about how the poster is doing it wrong. Usually this is because the responder didn't actually read the question and is trying to get their internet points in before someone else answers it.
It's not a bad idea to outline a different approach, but it's almost always better to first answer the question and then add your opinion afterwards. I've even seen questions where they poster will state "I'm not doing it the accepted way because..." and still see useless responses saying "You should do it this conventional way instead" etc.
I think this is just a negative of having a points reward system that encourages answer sniping. However, without a points system you'd see far less content. I've accepted it as a necessary evil, and overall I'm pretty happy with the quality of SO content once you learn to filter out the nonsense.
I'm sympathetic to some of your complaints about SE, but I think this is a mistake:
> SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content.
You can see the effect of this approach in many cases where the community has tried to establish a "canonical" Q&A about some recurring topic, and it's frequently not pretty; every tangentially relevant detail that somebody thought to tell the world about gets edited in, and then never gets edited out. Unless somebody is willing to purge lots of users' contributions entirely (which they generally aren't), this one great beast of an answer just continues to grow and grow in scope, gradually losing any sort of coherent narrative or direct relevance to the question.
The failed Stack Overflow Documentation project failed in a similar way. Wikipedia articles about programming topics also seem to me to generally be tedious, confusing and riddled with inaccuracies.
The competition-based model that SE uses certainly has failure modes, but a more collaboration-based model also has failure modes - ones that I think are more serious and crippling.
Agreed I have seen many SO answers in areas where I have expertise where wordy waffly feel good answers - that don't actually answer the question asked get preferred of short and to the point 3 or 4 line answers.
There is also to much vote whoreing going on with people chipping in with non relevant answers. I wish I had a pound for every employment answer that mentions "right to work" when its not an American employment question.
SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question which is enforced in all communities except some (Interpersonal SE and "soft questions" come to mind). Even in those contexts, answers must be well cited and be credible in a certain way (e.g. in Interpersonal SE all answers must be grounded by personal experiences). This makes it a fundamentally different website than Quora. Quora is about expertise, opinion and anecdotes. SE is about facts and answers deemed credible enough by the community.
Personally I think this is a reason to sometimes use quora. The one right answer cult is a huge limitation of se, which frustratingly often closes good questions just for being subjective. This is not site policy but over zealous modding.
SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question
Probably had. The secret of SE’s success was the rigorous curation as encouraged via the gamification system, explicitly at the design of the site’s founders. Now there are various interpretations of their change in direction, but the quality has noticeably deteriorated for both questions and answers. There’s no sign of a credible rival right now but when one appears it will do to SE what SE did to ExpertsExchange overnight, and for the same reasons.
I asked someone who uses Quora. the same thing and they said quora is for reading opinions and experiences and Stack Exchange is for finding the facts.
The only time I ever found the posts on quora valuable was when I was thinking about applying for one of the big tech companies and I wanted to know a bit about what the people who have worked there think about it. That kind of stuff would be off topic on Stack Exchange but thats also the reason why Quora is mostly junk because of a lack of quality control.
The vibe on many of the technical branches of SE is one of exclusivity and pretentiousness. Just Friday I was stuck on using some old CLI tool that nobody uses any more, and my problem was two some obscure settings in the myriad options that you can set that had to be configured for this case just because. Somebody at SE came back to an ancient question on the site last year and updated it with the answer last year.
And I can't even thank him. Quora is much easier to assimilate into.
SE is much more difficult to start using than Quora, which is also probably why it has higher quality content. Quora has absolutely no quality control.
That's definitely true, though I find that the less technical platforms are laxer. However, that level of quality control is exactly what keeps me coming back. If you ask a stupid question, SO is going point it out rather bluntly. Quora will give you a best-effort answer so someone can plug their latest product.
Ask a vague question on Quora, and you'll get a vague answer.
Ask a vague question on Stack Overflow, and you'll get downvoted along with comments to the order of, "You haven't provided enough information for us to give you an answer."
quora did SEO right. It has huge visibility, and thus, high quality answers get huge votes, even from people who aren't from that field of expertise. So perhaps post quality is lower than SE, but vote quality is magnitudes higher in my experience.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I've looked things up on Google and frequently see Quora answers at the very top.
I'd say at least half the time I click on the link, the top answer, it is either highly biased, anecdotal, just plain wrong, or a combination of those things. Many of the answers are also in broken English. Despite this, the answers get thousands of upvotes and it makes me question whether or not the Quora userbase is competent at identifying good content.
Over time, I've grown to not trust the first answer on Quora as I trust the top answer on SE. At that point, the Quora result becomes a waste of an entry on Google's front page.
As others have said in this thread, Quora seems to be suited towards personal questions and opinion-based questions, in which case, maybe Quora and SE are compliments to each other.
>I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchange is a mystery to me; I suspect that most Quora users simply aren't aware that Stack Exchange exists, since SE traditionally catered primarily to a technical audience.
SE has nowhere near the breadth of Quora, and almost no social, personal life, and politics related topics. At least any SE site I've chanced on, and I'm a member of several.
Quora still has some incredible gems and answers from people directly involved with the question. Unfortunately, as all content sites, their growth has led to a rapid decrease in quality, and their efforts to inflate questions has only made it worse.
I’m actually surprised at how bad their ML model is. Funny to see someone else mention how overfit their model is. There’s literally no content discovery, it’s the same extremely specific topic. But you know what? I’ve also noticed this phenomenon on YouTube, maybe there’s something to it from an advertising revenue perspective.
A coworker of mine was recently sharing an encounter with an engineer at Quora to me. The gist of it was that the Quora engineer was saying that they've built the best engineering team in the entire industry -- that they're the 'smartest guys in the room'.
Both my coworker and I were impressed by the gall of such a suggestion and then began to wonder how much self-deception and double-think must be occurring, culturally, within a company for its employees to be suggesting such a thing to others.
At least they didn't decide to create their own programming language in order to build their website, unlike another company founded by early Facebook employees (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2191800)
If you were an early employee at Facebook it takes significant self-awareness to realize that that success may not be directly linked to your formidable brain power. Especially if you that was your formative professional experience in your 20s.
Probably, for the majority of users, it's best to show content which aligns with their opinions and interests to increase engagement. It's similar to the Google "Filter Bubble".
Filter bubble is one thing. It's another thing to filter content so aggressively that over 50% of the site's content stays the same from one day to the next while still showing content you already upvoted.
That's the reason I stopped using it a few weeks ago - it got so bad I had to scroll down multiple pages of collapsed answers in order to find a single question/answer that I hadn't seen yet. Which is exactly the opposite of what should happen.
Despite the fact that I use YouTube only for music videos and technical content and have never watched a Jordan Peterson video, YouTube recommends only Jordan Peterson videos to me.
I have also seen the content quality decline. Online community management and moderation policies seem like an important research area but I have found little that explores the dynamics of these communities and analysis of which policies work and which don't. Why, for instance, are the comments here on HN generally quite good but not so good on other technical sites? What kind of moderation would enable people with differing political views to discuss them without the usual flaming?
Very well put. I deleted my account about a year ago. I kept seeing a few good answers, old ones, over and over in my feed, juxtaposed with boring answers to questions that would have better gone unasked. And the questions in my areas of expertise had turned from thoughtful inquiries to pure garbage. If Quora think they're sitting on a goldmine by locking up their content, they're sadly mistaken.
Yes, they introduced that "feature" this year. Like the new "spaces" which seem to have replaced the interests/topics users can select but actually don't work as a replacement because they seem more like Facebook groups where you can post random stuff and questions related to a topic.
This combined with the horrible feed made me quit recently.
I can tell you why the content quality deteriorated. The Partner Program... Encourages weird questions with primary purpose of gaining most viewers. I happen to be selected as one of these people (not too sure why), and I refuse to take part in that nonsense.
I joined in late 2010, shortly after the site launched because iirc you couldn't read answers without signing up. I think one time I clicked on a question like "what is 1 + 1"? And now my quota is full of nonsense.
If I open a question then I basically get nothing but that question (and similar questions) show up in my feed. For someone who has passing interest in random topics (so I click on a random question every so often) suddenly having nothing but repetitive WW2 tank questions in my feed is annoying. All those topics I was told to select, btw, mean nothing apparently and never show up in my feed nowadays.
I took the chance with their data breach and required password change recently to just stop using the site altogether.
The moment you engage with Topic X, you will be inundated with Topic X in the feed, in your email digest, in additional follow ups asking "Are you still interested in X" and so on.
It leaves little room for true exploration and discovery because 1 mis-click on a topic could change your entire content experience for days or weeks.
* The content quality has deteriorated significantly since the site's inception. The content is far cheaper than before and far less interesting in very obvious ways.
* Moderation systems have not done a good job of growing the site as a community. The site has lost the character that drew many people to it in the first place.
* The machine learning models terribly over-fit to user signals, creating a frustrating experience.
These 3 core issues with the site are what got me to gradually stop using it as someone who was initially an early adopter.