One of Our Best Websites Died While No One Was Looking
slate.com
The once-thriving site used to answer our most specific questions. But users are fleeing.

“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.

  • LvxferreEnglish
    30·
    9 months ago

    Modern Quora reminds me a lot Yahoo! Answers when I was a kid - it’s mostly a trolling playground. You can technically get some useful info out of it, but odds are that you won’t be able to sort it out.

    I’m from the firm belief that anyone using a chatbot to directly reply questions either 1) never interacted with chatbots enough to conclude the obvious (that their answers are often unreliable crap), or 2) doesn’t care about reliability at all.

    BNBR is never enough to create a nice and respectful community. You need to go a step deeper and analyse why and when users are hostile towards each other.

    “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,”

    One thing that corporate social media struggles to understand is that not all the users have the same impact in a platform. It’s extremely easy to take a mildly unpopular decision that only pisses off 0.5% of your userbase, and the platform becomes ruined because that 0.5% were damn important.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      17·
      9 months ago

      One thing that corporate social media struggles to understand is that not all the users have the same impact in a platform. It’s extremely easy to take a mildly unpopular decision that only pisses off 0.5% of your userbase, and the platform becomes ruined because that 0.5% were damn important.

      Pretty much what happened with reddit which lost all its power users.

      • LvxferreEnglish
        7·
        9 months ago

        Yes, with a difference: Reddit knows it but doesn’t care due to the imminent IPO.

          • isildun@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            5·
            9 months ago

            I’m almost starting to wonder if that’s the plan. Just keep saying “IPO IPO IPO” to get funding from over-eager VCs who want a piece of the IPO before it becomes widely available.

            But then you just never IPO. Keep making minor to moderate mistakes along the way so you can be all “weeeeell we would have IPO’d but insert thing here so we want to wait another 6 months to let it die down”. Repeat until you’re ready to quit, then actually IPO and ride the initial IPO high all the way down via golden parachute.

              • LvxferreEnglish
                3·
                9 months ago

                That’s what I’m predicting, too; past IPO the site will become a shadow of its former self. It won’t be just porn being banned, but also:

                • subreddits will be seized by the trademark owners, creating a chilling effect
                • content policy will be completely revamped. No more “we’re trying to protect you lol” façade, it’ll be right into “we don’t care about users or trash like this, we care about brands”
                • DMCA will be enforced on an “it’s a user so it’s assumed to be guilty unless it can prove the contrary”.
                • r/assholedesign and r/hailcorporate will get banned
                • they’ll revamp the ad spaces to give you a harder time blocking them
                • old.reddit? “I dun unrurrstand, y u live in the past? we remove it lol”

                I just wish that this all happened before the IPO. Sadly, it won’t.