not being ready for prime time.” Now Quora is even offering A.I.–generated images to accompany users’ answers, even though the spanwed illustrations make little sense. Instead, they “made up some really generic, and oftentimes first-grade-level questions,” wrote user Steven P. chatbots offer good questions or answers. Needless to say, it did not improve the situation on the site. As the spamming bots got even worse, Quora changed the terms of service and did away with BNBR, then automated the moderation process.

Loyal Quora users attempted to report bigoted, transphobic, and obscene content without adequate support from the company.Īnd then came A.I. Further, as Quora launched “Spaces”-basically, private user–run community blogs-problems with moderation continued to spiral, with ugly ideologies running rampant. “When real users tried to take down demonstrably false answers, troll farms with multiple servers were able to overpower users,” he wrote to me in an email. Nelson McKeeby, an author who joined Quora in 2013, said that things got worse in a post-Gamergate internet, with alt-right, Trump-loving trolls invading online forums, aided by anonymity and weakened moderation. All these choices led to more unchecked spam and a deluge of trolls, which volunteer users could not hold off on their own.Īnnie Rauwerda On Wikipedia, Anyone Can Be a Model Read More Other originating features-the requirement that Quorans use their real names, “ Suggested Edits” that readers could propose for answers that had mistakes or typos-were also cut. So, the company slashed budgets, shrinking the moderation teams, the customer support apparatus, and the Top Writer initiative. Investors hesitated to continue pouring cash into Quora in light of its steep expenses. This was all downstream of the fact that Quora was also slow to monetize, and it didn’t help that the site, popular as it was, was aiming for pieces of the same digital-advertising pie that was rapidly overtaken by Facebook and Amazon (as well as its No.

You could report people over and over, and nothing happened.” Even though the partner program didn’t earn participants all that much money (maybe a few thousand dollars at most), the people who made bots soon learned that this was the easiest way to cash in quickly. “With the partner program, it became clear that quantity meant more than quality. “The quality of the writing had taken a back seat to a pure volume of traffic,” said Bethann Siviter, another former Top Writer. That was a unique offering in an age when Facebook and Twitter were coming to dominate the social internet, and YouTube was doing its own thing.

This, she said, allowed Quora to stand out as an accuracy-focused, knowledge-centric text platform. One of those Slate-via-Quora contributors, author and researcher Erica Friedman, joined the site back in 2011, when it was “starting to get a little bit of new traffic” thanks in part to Yahoo Answers’ decline in reliability and activity. Most people have encountered Quora in some form, whether they know it or not: in Google search results, in writing samples from famous authors, or perhaps in reprints of certain Q&As in digital publications, like Slate. “ 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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