Quora.com — it’s a question/answer forum of unvetted, wildly-varying content quality — uses software to determine who sees which questions.
The Quora software knows I’ve written about operating systems. And it knows I’ve written about Windows in particular. And it knows I’ve written about bugs in software.
So, the Quora software sent me this question about windows and bugs:
Oy.
Quora also has a weird (and I think ultimately unsustainable) business model: They pay people to ask attention-getting questions, but not to write the answers!
(I’ve twice been solicited by Quora to become a paid question-writer (it doesn’t pay much); but they want the answers for free.)
Welcome to the wonderful world of clickbait, where provocative questions count more than accurate answers.
Permalink: https://langa.com/?p=3421
![[seperator]](https://i0.wp.com/langa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/SEPERATOR-short-grey.png?resize=104%2C6)
COMMENT / QUESTION on THIS ITEM? See the Comment box at bottom of this page!
NEW QUESTION? Ask here!
(Want free notification of new content? Click here!)
I was an early user of Quora, back when they first started and it was invite only. I was invited by a researcher and pioneer in Human Based Computation.
He invited me to Quora because he wanted my feedback on what they were doing. He had been the founder of his own Q&A site (3form) back in 1999, that took a different approach to choosing the best answers, where humans helped, but it was an algorithm that ultimately decided what was the best answer. While humans asked and answered questions and rated answers, it wasn’t very social and nobody had any knowledge of who was doing the asking, answering, or rating. There was never any direct interaction between any users. If you wanted a question answered, you had to work towards finding the best answer for other user’s questions. The more time you spent doing that, the more time the algorithm would spend on finding answers to your questions. And the system worked exceptionally well. But it didn’t qualify as a social network, by today’s standards
Back then, on Quora, I saw quite a bit of flaws in their Q&A format, especially in regards to how the popularity of a person translated into their answers being upvoted, at the expense of answers by actual experts. Quora employees dominated the service and decided who got to be popular and who didn’t. It wasn’t long before I quit the service and took all my answers with me.
I only ended up registering on the site again, because of my job. Someone had posted questions related to the company I work for, and I as the customer service manager of that company, was the most qualified to answer them. And I got downvoted by Quora’s popularity brigade, in favor of an answer that was factually incorrect, posted by someone more popular.
Quora started out with noble intentions, wanting to be a better quality source of information than Yahoo Answers, but ultimately being no better.
Today, they have devolved into becoming an entertainment site, for people that like Q&A style social networking, but they are not a better source of info than just asking your Facebook friends. (which we all know think they know everything, but actually know close to nothing)
They have also become an enormous source of sneaky spam, where spammers ask questions, then provide their own answers, which always point to their own websites. They often work in groups, or with multiple accounts, to upvote their own answers.
Ultimately, Quora has managed to combine the worst of Yahoo Answers with the worst of what Digg once was.