- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
“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.
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Kinda sad neither the article nor comments here mention https://ask.metafilter.com/
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.
I think that’s because Quora paywalls responses from volunteers, preventing others from seeing them unless they pay a subscription. Pretty scummy.
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.
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
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.
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.
But Wikipedia aren’t charging people to see the work you contributed for free. That’s a significant difference.
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.
Here’s hoping at some point search engines will return Lemmy links when people look for answers, but we’re not there yet
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.
It’s not just that it’s not unique, but any single instance is less heavily viewed, even if the overall response is
The problem with Lemmy is the federated content gets duplicated on multiple sites, word for word, which isn’t good for SEO
That is a search engine problem, not a lemmy problem.
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.
search engines are thoroughly crap right now. Abandon all hope that they will become better.
You say that like it’s true for all search engines. Which isn’t the case and is incredibly dumb to think.
Lemme guess, you’re a kagi cultist.
Kagi now has a lens for focusing results from the Fediverse, I’ve seen it pull Lemmy links before!
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.
Quora still has answers to some old math problems so it’s not all that useless.
I worry that it will abruptly die one day and we’ll lose that. Perhaps someone should be archiving good quora information lol.
Another social media site which followed the enshittification paradigm. This playbook has played out so many times until now. Start it with “good intentions” as a for-profit startup. People join and volunteer their time because the founders say all the right things and the site culture is so new and exciting. Once the site gets popular though, all the fancy talk from the founders goes out the window.
When will people learn this lesson? Don’t ever volunteer your time on a for-profit proprietary social network. You will get rugpulled! We are all the value in all these sites. Why do we let them control our interactions, ffs?!
PS: Would be interesting to get a fediverse version of Quora. Or Maybe we can make something using Lemmy communities instead.
You mean like /c/asklemmy or /c/nostupidquestions?
I think we just need more biomass.
Volunteer your time, but do it with your eyes open.
If you’re okay with how it’s going to end up, it’s all good.
Would be interesting to get a fediverse version of Quora
A Fediverse version of Stack Exchange would be easier - since the content is creative commons you could start with a full catalog of already answered questions…
But honestly, competing with the real Stack Exchange on one end and Large Language Models on the other end… never going to work.
You mean like c/asklemmy?
I think Reddit almost had it for awhile. There was a point when stuff like r/askhistorians and the like actually worked, and you’d get fairly good answers. That’s one place where the Fediverse isn’t up to speed yet, for that sort of thing you need a critical mass of “everybody uses it” to really achieve.
So far Lemmy is at its best in the hobby subs because three people with the same hobby will still have fun talking, but if I say “nutritional anthropologists of Lemmy: when and where did humans begin eating cheese?” it’s gonna be crickets because there’s probably not a nutritional anthropologist to be found among us.
We could call it Fedora!
Haha well played
Cute, but already taken by the OS.
ThatWasTheJoke.heic
That .heic made my eye twitch. Reminded me of my coworkers at work not being able to open a photo they took on their iPhone, and that they want to use on the intranet
I think it’s so fucking stupid how it it always defaults to “similar questions” instead of just showing us the actual answers.
Just another example of throwing as much shit at an audience to drive up “engagement.”
A horrible user experience with an insufferable userbase. I can’t believe it even lasted this long.
Who thought it would be great if similar questions overpowered the one you searched for?
The Quora experience:
“Hey Quorans, how many carrots go in a carrot stew?”
Answer to a similar question: “Why does Bugs Bunny eat carrots?”
unfunny joke “I have an IQ of 128” sarcasm Anyways to answer the question, it’s because he needs good eyesight.
Stack Exchange
Anyone else getting a massive wave of spam from quora lately? They have completey gone to shiite
Either they’ve forgot about me or I blocked them and forgot about it
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.
Have you been there? It doesnt take long to come across the exact same thing they are highlighting.
Yahoo answers used to be great
how is babby formed
gerganant?
Only for being laughably awful. Quora was in this place where the answers were just good enough that you probably wouldn’t be able to dispute any obvious flaws without being a subject matter expert already. Yahoo Answers was only a meme factory.
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
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
Since when did it die? Seems like it’s still up and runny to me.
Quota was just Ask Jeeves 2.0… Both relied on human “experts” and neither could figure out a long term monetization plan.
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.
People who fucked their mothers, how did it happen? How was the experience? (In great detail) ((Asking for a friend)) (((Only serious answers)))
Never used it, noticed it was infected with Chinese and Russian propaganda.
Yeah nah. I didn’t need to know how babby was formed
