Is AI Hastening the Demise of Quora? (slate.com) 57
Quora "used to be a thriving community that worked to answer our most specific questions," writes Slate. "But users are fleeing," while the site hosts "a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical, straight-up hateful, and A.I.-generated entries..."
The site has faced moderation issues, spam, trolls, and bots re-posting questions from Reddit (plus competition for ad revenue from sites like Facebook and Google which forced cuts in Quora's support and moderation teams). But automating its moderation "did not improve the situation...
"Now Quora is even offering A.I.-generated images to accompany users' answers, even though the spawned illustrations make little sense." To top it all off, after Quora began using A.I. to "generate machine answers on a number of selected question pages," the site made clear the possibility that human-crafted answers could be used for training A.I. This meant that the detailed writing Quorans provided mostly for free would be ingested into a custom large language model. Updated terms of service and privacy policies went into effect at the site last summer. As angel investor and Quoran David S. Rose paraphrased them: "You grant all other Quora users the unlimited right to reuse and adapt your answers," "You grant Quora the right to use your answers to train an LLM unless you specifically opt out," and "You completely give up your right to be any part of any class action suit brought against Quora," among others. (Quora's Help Center claims that "as of now, we do not use answers, posts, or comments added to Quora to train LLMs used for generating content on Quora. However, this may change in the future." The site offers an opt-out setting, although it admits that "opting out does not cover everything.")
This raised the issue of consent and ownership, as Quorans had to decide whether to consent to the new terms or take their work and flee. High-profile users, like fantasy author Mercedes R. Lackey, are removing their work from their profiles and writing notes explaining why. "The A.I. thing, the terms of service issue, has been a massive drain of top talent on Quora, just based on how many people have said, Downloaded my stuff and I'm out of there," Lackey told me. It's not that all Quorans want to leave, but it's hard for them to choose to remain on a website where they now have to constantly fight off errors, spam, trolls, and even account impersonators....
The tragedy of Quora is not just that it crushed the flourishing communities it once built up. It's that it took all of that goodwill, community, expertise, and curiosity and assumed that it could automate a system that equated it, apparently without much thought to how pale the comparison is. [Nelson McKeeby, an author who joined Quora in 2013] has a grim prediction for the future: "Eventually Quora will be robot questions, robot answers, and nothing else." I wonder how the site will answer the question of why Quora died, if anyone even bothers to ask.
The article notes that Andreessen Horowitz gave Quora "a much-needed $75 million investment — but only for the sake of developing its on-site generative-text chatbot, Poe."
The site has faced moderation issues, spam, trolls, and bots re-posting questions from Reddit (plus competition for ad revenue from sites like Facebook and Google which forced cuts in Quora's support and moderation teams). But automating its moderation "did not improve the situation...
"Now Quora is even offering A.I.-generated images to accompany users' answers, even though the spawned illustrations make little sense." To top it all off, after Quora began using A.I. to "generate machine answers on a number of selected question pages," the site made clear the possibility that human-crafted answers could be used for training A.I. This meant that the detailed writing Quorans provided mostly for free would be ingested into a custom large language model. Updated terms of service and privacy policies went into effect at the site last summer. As angel investor and Quoran David S. Rose paraphrased them: "You grant all other Quora users the unlimited right to reuse and adapt your answers," "You grant Quora the right to use your answers to train an LLM unless you specifically opt out," and "You completely give up your right to be any part of any class action suit brought against Quora," among others. (Quora's Help Center claims that "as of now, we do not use answers, posts, or comments added to Quora to train LLMs used for generating content on Quora. However, this may change in the future." The site offers an opt-out setting, although it admits that "opting out does not cover everything.")
This raised the issue of consent and ownership, as Quorans had to decide whether to consent to the new terms or take their work and flee. High-profile users, like fantasy author Mercedes R. Lackey, are removing their work from their profiles and writing notes explaining why. "The A.I. thing, the terms of service issue, has been a massive drain of top talent on Quora, just based on how many people have said, Downloaded my stuff and I'm out of there," Lackey told me. It's not that all Quorans want to leave, but it's hard for them to choose to remain on a website where they now have to constantly fight off errors, spam, trolls, and even account impersonators....
The tragedy of Quora is not just that it crushed the flourishing communities it once built up. It's that it took all of that goodwill, community, expertise, and curiosity and assumed that it could automate a system that equated it, apparently without much thought to how pale the comparison is. [Nelson McKeeby, an author who joined Quora in 2013] has a grim prediction for the future: "Eventually Quora will be robot questions, robot answers, and nothing else." I wonder how the site will answer the question of why Quora died, if anyone even bothers to ask.
The article notes that Andreessen Horowitz gave Quora "a much-needed $75 million investment — but only for the sake of developing its on-site generative-text chatbot, Poe."
Quora Has Been Useless for a Good While Anyway (Score:5, Informative)
At one time you could go to Quora for good answers and intelligent discussion on those answers. It's been a good while since that was the case. They've been pushing popular or flame-bait answers for a good while over factual or quality answers. I used to work as a landlord and would work hard to write good answers to questions so I could actually help people. I got thanked for them, but the answers to similar questions that kept showing in my feed, ones that were getting all the views and reactions, were usually inaccurate and often even advised people to do things that they could get sued or sent to jail for. I'd report inaccurate answers or bad advice that could get some arrested for larceny or worse and nothing happened.
Quora hasn't been about answers or helping people or exchanging information for at least several years. If it goes tango-uniform and the bigshots behind it lose their stock equity and get loans called in and lose houses and yachts, it's nothing more than poetic justice.
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Unclear if you're not serious, but you seem to be not joking. I saw the similar thing. Articles are posted in twos with something new and then something vomited but it is the same meal! To inexperienced looker, it looks like ad sellers, but maybe there is a different path option. If not guilty, can the CCP tell the truthful story?
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It seems not only stories get posted in pairs but so do comments...
Re: Slashdead Has Been Useless Since BIZX Anyway (Score:2)
Yo dawg... We heard you like articles so we put an article after another article so you can waste time while wasting time!
Maybe Xzibit can become relevant again.
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I missed that era but I'm not surprised it played out like that.
I've been here on n off over the years since the very earliest days. I worked with a guy who claimed to be the originator of the hot grits meme. (He was extremely proud of himself). And a buddy of mine was telling me I needed to sign up fast to get a 3 digit uid but I don't care about that sort of thing and posted/read anonymously for a great many years.
It's just a pale shadow now but a few times a year someone still posts something very coo
Re:Quora Has Been Useless for a Good While Anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Quora is getting flooded with questions that are really assertions in a very thin "question-like" wrapper, usually on clickbait topics. And there is not even a category to report such questions that should be simply deleted for being sloppily worded and insincere.
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That's been going on for years. It was a problem back when I was active and one of many reasons I left, even though I was a Top Writer (or whatever that title is) in one category. Top Writer? Yeah, still meant not getting much in terms of newsletter mentions when compared to the people giving answers that, if followed, would land people in court, or jail, or out on the street when evicted.
The vast majority of the ones I saw like that were political or dealing with anti-vax or other conspiracy theories.
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Worse yet there use to be a category to report them, but it has been removed. Either because it was too expensive to pay humans to take action on the reports, or because too many questions that got reported using that category were successful at driving engagement so economically in the short term Quora "wants" them.
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Ack. Well, your comment has convinced me that I should simply stay away from Quora. I took a recent break because it was annoying me with too many crap questions. Now I know that it is not never going to get better; the algorithms are going to favor a short term increase in activity over long term value (as I perceive value).
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I didn't get anything banned, but I left for similar reasons. I think they were going with cheap mods who probably had poor English skills (because they were from whatever country where labor was cheapest by the hour). But in many ways my issue was the opposite: The answers that were getting in the newsletter and getting all the attention and were not getting banned were the ones giving advice that would get people evicted, arrested, or just in court because it would make it easy for the landlord to sue to
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A lot of interesting questions and good answers are still on Quora, but all the growth is clearly in machine generated word salad questions, and way to many answers aren't someone who "lived it" but some ChatGPT copy pasta that frequently people don't even smooth the obvious GPTisms out of.
It isn't a forgone conclusion that this means collapse is inevitable, but it
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I never found it useful. (Score:3)
Quora was ever useful? (Score:3)
I have *never, ever* found Quora to be useful. It would occasionally show up in my Google search results (before I dropped Google search for becoming even worse than Bing), and the results were always useless crap. It was always flooded by outsourced scammers looking for pray and spray upvotes so they could put them on their resume.
So my condolences to anyone who ever found this useful, but to me it seems entirely fitting, just taking the site to the logical end game.
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-site:quora.com (Score:2)
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But yes, Quora is high on the list of sites that, if a major search engine delisted them, I would seriously consider switching to that search engine.
Obligatory XKCD: (Score:1, Interesting)
https://xkcd.com/350/ [xkcd.com]
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It was the "some people just have aquariums" part that made it seem relevant to me. How much you wanna bet they're gonna try to fix it with even more AI?
Subscription required (Score:3)
Corporate enshittification (Score:2)
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Another one bites the dust. It seems that high quality knowledge & discourse are incompatible with corporate greed.
The corporate enshitification has gotten so bad that it's like a continuous convoy of dinosaur turds floating down the Mississippi River. It;s clogged the Mississippi Delta and backed up under a bridge at this point.
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Not only that, but we live in a world with far too many actors having an interest to dilute and poison the well of information with their own spin, so even with a corporation behind that would be interested in preserving quality knowledge, they'd be fighting a flood of con artists trying to bullshit people into believing their preferred spin.
You cannot win that war. Not unless the one that seeks knowledge actually seeks knowledge instead of a reinforcement of their already established beliefs. And that just
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1st on the list is to get religious or any metaphysical discourse out of the political & public spheres. People should definitely
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There is nothing special about Quora (Score:2)
AI will do the same to everything else too. The few who are not going to be pissed off by AI mooching off their contributions will be drowned out by floods of random remixes of poorly reviewed AI regurgitations. We've all seen the hazards of an open world-wide internet, the trolls, the disinformation, the bullying. But we've also seen the benefits of people making their contributions openly available to everyone. This is coming to an end.
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Betteridge's Law is Irrelevant in this case (Score:3)
The only correct answer to the headline is "hopefully".
I never even knew what Quora was until it started appearing in search results with bad answers to searched questions
india (Score:4, Interesting)
You're missing the point (Score:1)
Quora is fairly useless for people looking for technical information. Quora is *great* for people looking to connect to one another on a shared topic of interest. Usually that topic is a narcissistic ex-partner, but that's beside the point...
I started writing on Quora six years or so ago to help me deal with the struggles and heartache of a divorce and sudden single-parenthood of two recently adopted children that my ex-wife decided she no longer wanted, apparently. My answers tended to be formulaic (open w
Why on Earth does making Poe... (Score:2)
... take $75M dollars? What, are they making an entirely new foundation? Give me a tiny fraction of that and I'll custom tune a Mixtral model for whatever purpose you want.
Quora's been terrible for years (Score:2)
At one point in the distant past I do remember Quora being a decent, "thinking man's Yahoo Answers" sort of site. Then at some point they went all-in on a terrible redesign that was clearly intended to keep users clicking around on Quora at the expense of usability. Spammy barely-related questions thrown into the middle of the page with very little to immediately distinguish them from different answer-threads and the best (or least-worst) answers being buried towards the bottom of the page, sometimes requir
Quora has its use all right (Score:2)
In a nutshell, it facilitates letting steam out. It can be satisfying, after a long work day, to unleash your fury on parties who squarely deserve it - like e.g. racists, religious fundamentalists, etc. - even if they are just bots, rather than real people. This aside, some of stories published in there, real or imagined, can be hilarious, sometimes thought-provoking. And, yes, every so often one can come across interesting, thoughtful threads. I never visit it on my phone, only on my desktop, which implies
when forums can go bad (Score:2)
I left Quora long ago because of its arrogant management. A friend who had been a prosecutor was framed for vote stuffing he did not do, by some European teens - who boasted about it online - and then was banned per their complaints swarm. After Quora rejected my supporting evidence for his reinstatement I went to Quora headquarters to personally make a case for him to be reinstated. They refused to talk with me and basically told me to go away. Next came crazy: later, I was banned for posting what gorilla
Well Duh (Score:2)
I, for one (Score:2)
am honored to have the opportunity to train our future overlords with my Quora posts.
Not really seeing the issue here...
uh what (Score:2)
To anyone in a developed country with a triple-digit IQ, Quora has 95% dick-waving bullshit of various types for like a decade-plus. Its only use is as a goddam parody of the internet with front-page questions like "Since the theory of evolution has been conclusively debunked, why do atheists still believe in it? Are they dishonest or are they just ignorant?" and answers like "As a sniper with ten kids, an IQ of 182 and a Degree in Technological Sciences, foo is blah blah blah..."
Opinion (Score:2)
I was a top writer on Quora for several years and can comment on its demise. The value of Quora, what made it special, was the signal-to-noise ratio. They listened to the good idea fairy and implemented a bunch of changes to try and grow the site. These changes hurt that SNR, and now they're no better than e.g. Reddit or Google.
What kind of changes? They broke the points system where you could attract writers to good questions or readers to great answers. They screwed up the moderation system in a way
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Ding! Ding! Ding!
100% yep on all points, although the moderation is now no longer broken in the way you describe. It is now broken by not actually existing. I should probbably leave it, but I still find some interesting things, mostly from the same people that have had interesting answers all along. I haven't found any interesting new authors and clearly some of the prior interesting authors have stopped writing, or at least dramatically reduced output. Which isn't surprising given the reduced quali
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There's one writer there that I genuinely miss reading, a Brit that works for NASA, is Robert Frost. I popped over to Quora to check in on him and it looks like he's moved on as well.
Damn shame.
No. (Score:2)
Quora has always been shit.
Well, if so... (Score:1)
Can we get it to eliminate Pinterest as well? Please?
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Can we get it to eliminate Pinterest as well? Please?
We can dream...
What's it good for? (Score:1)
I get e-mails from them and the stuff it's sending to me is 2, 3, sometimes 5 years old. They want me to look at and respond to a 5 year old post? How absurd.
Looking around I don't see anything useful. No post is less than a week old that it's showing me. Maybe they should change the top page to show an old ghost town. An occasional tumbleweed blows across the screen.