“Why Do So Many Music Venues Use Ticketmaster?” “What’s It Like to Train to Be a Sushi Chef?” “How Do Martial Artists Break Concrete Blocks?” If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.

  • @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    1441 year ago

    I’ve been pouring my life into the Internet since before Quora existed.

    There was never a time I recall Quora not being shit. All it ever did was dilute search results.

  • @d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
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    1711 year ago

    If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.

    I disagree, the best place for such answers used to be Reddit, and Stack Exchange for the techy stuff. Quora always felt like cancer for some reason and I never really used it.

      • db0
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        81 year ago

        search engines are thoroughly crap right now. Abandon all hope that they will become better.

        • M137
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          -21 year ago

          You say that like it’s true for all search engines. Which isn’t the case and is incredibly dumb to think.

          • db0
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            61 year ago

            Lemme guess, you’re a kagi cultist.

      • Russ
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        31 year ago

        Kagi now has a lens for focusing results from the Fediverse, I’ve seen it pull Lemmy links before!

      • @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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        51 year ago

        The problem with Lemmy is the federated content gets duplicated on multiple sites, word for word, which isn’t good for SEO

        • db0
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          101 year ago

          That is a search engine problem, not a lemmy problem.

      • @crazyCat@sh.itjust.works
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        31 year ago

        Have we said anything useful yet? Just kidding, but I just look for casual commentary on here, all surface level and meme stuff when tired at the end of the day.

      • @RecallMadness@lemmy.nz
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        21 year ago

        I think Something will have to change quite significantly.

        Search engines give heavy weighting to uniqueness of content. And with Lemmy content being replicated across the fediverse that doesn’t exactly happen.

        And I’m not sure you can set a canonical URL that’s off site. And then, if it does and that site goes down, you “lose” the content.

        • @AA5B@lemmy.world
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          31 year ago

          It’s not just that it’s not unique, but any single instance is less heavily viewed, even if the overall response is

    • @Gork@lemm.ee
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      871 year ago

      I think that’s because Quora paywalls responses from volunteers, preventing others from seeing them unless they pay a subscription. Pretty scummy.

      • @stoy@lemmy.zip
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        191 year ago

        I wouldn’t call it scummy, just bad business, give people one premium answer per week, so they know the quallity and at incentivised to pay.

        • @ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz
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          191 year ago

          Do they pay the people who answer the questions? I genuinely don’t know. But if they don’t then, yes, it is scummy to just profit off of someone else’s work and not pay them.

          • @FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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            51 year ago

            I’ve contributed to sites like Wikipedia.

            Not everything needs to be measured in money though. There’s inherent satisfaction in the work with things like this. And at the end of the day, we all benefit from having platforms with accurate, well thought out answers. Today you’re answering, tomorrow you’re the one with the question.

            • @ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz
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              261 year ago

              Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit. They don’t monetise volunteer contributions and they don’t paywall the knowledge on their site, they run on donations. It’s not really a comparable situation.

        • @AA5B@lemmy.world
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          41 year ago

          It is though, because they gamed search engines well enough to frequently be in the top results yet never had an answer you could see. Annoying as fuck

    • Haus
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      51 year ago

      I’d say there was a period before reddit hit its pinnacle where Quora was significantly better. Probably more than 10 years ago, though, and only for a few years. I remember when I started spending more time on Reddit than Quora.

  • @Eideen@lemmy.world
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    91 year ago

    I used to feel opening a Quora page was okay, and useful.

    No i dread opening a Quora page. You get spammed by “do you like to login with Google”. There is a AI bot on top, befor the top replay. There is a AD/sponsor spot that looks like the rest of the page, you get Related questions, then you get other answers. So now you need to think to open the page.

  • @dust_accelerator@discuss.tchncs.de
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    131 year ago

    But even then, there were issues plaguing Quora that would continue to fester. First, an anonymous former Quoran told me, the site started “shortening the length of questions.” The professed reason was to increase Quora’s visibility on Google, but that brevity came with a cost: It also made it difficult for users to ask the types of complex questions that could be addressed by specialists

    Ah, I see they started the enshittification very early. It might’ve been a good LLM database, but the good quality content would be outdated by now and the more recent is infested with troll and bot garbage and AI writing. Sad.

  • @IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Quora was just Ask Jeeves 2.0… Both relied on human “experts” and neither could figure out a long term monetization plan.

  • magic_lobster_party
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    611 year ago

    For me I hated Quora because of how locked down it is. Want to view another question on the site? Must register an account first! No fucking thanks. It was always nagging about creating an account.

    Because of this I actively ignored Quora results anytime I googled something.

    • squiblet
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      331 year ago

      Yep, I can’t speak on the decline of quality because it was a site that was early to dark pattern bullshit. It would show up prominently in Google search and then tease “you have to sign up to read the answers”. Uh, no. Reminds me of expert sexchange or whatever that site was that got smashed by stackoverflow for similar reasons.

        • @Barbossa404@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Experts Exchange, basically if stackoverflow was quora. Can only see questions even when logged in and you’d have to pay a pretty penny to get access to any answer. Or you could collect enough points to access the answer you need by writing answers yourself (ridiculously many points, think weeks of answering).

    • Icalasari
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      111 year ago

      I finally cracked and made an account

      It’s not worth it, you basically get alerts on the account for everything to the point of uselessness

    • DAEMON
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      11 year ago

      I found a work around for this even though i don’t use quora anymore here it goes :

      • click the question you want to see from the web page . then when the question thread link you want to see appears on your search bar click your search bar and load it manually . Also you have to be in incognito mode for this to work .
  • @QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
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    381 year ago

    This article links to a Tweet of a screen recording of a TikTok of a screenshot of a Reddit post as proof that Quora is “hateful”. Yeesh.

  • @egitalian@lemm.ee
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    141 year ago

    Good riddance honestly, never have I gotten a good answer from Quora, seems like they’re all trolls. So for the past decade+ I overlook ANY Quora links related to my search

    • @psud@lemmy.world
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      51 year ago

      If you had a question that attracted an expert in a relevant field, you’d get a good answer. If your question didn’t attract them you’d get a random internet stranger

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
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    141 year ago

    Heh, I requested my Quora account to be deleted just 16 days ago. It was finally deleted.

    I left because it got filled with far right-wings, conservatives and pedophiles. Also many answers are now paywalled.

  • @RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    121 year ago

    The once-beloved forum is now home to a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical…

    Oh, so like Reddit or yahoo answers, too?

  • @callouscomic@lemm.ee
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    531 year ago

    It was always a garbage site, and it hid behind a requirement to login just to view more than like 1 question, amd it was full of creepy discussions.

    • @Tangent5280@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      People who fucked their mothers, how did it happen? How was the experience? (In great detail) ((Asking for a friend)) (((Only serious answers)))

  • @yamanii@lemmy.world
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    151 year ago

    Was it ever alive? When I found it the site was already trash asking for an account just to see content, yahoo answers was the shit.

    • @kevincox@lemmy.ml
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      41 year ago

      It definitely was. I remember finding some amazingly insightful answers from people with proper experience. But that must have been nearly a decade ago now. Some of the most memorable ones were reflections from prisoners as IIRC some prisons had some sort of program where the prisoners could write answers and someone would post them on Quora. Interesting insights from murders, con artists and whoever else.

      But it has been so long since that was the case. I’ve had it blocked from my search results for years now. Utter trash.

    • @linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      51 year ago

      I think the main stay of taking Quora seriously mainly consisted of reddit posts citing Q articles from Google searches.