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www.quora.com

Tech-savvy power user’s experience exposes Quora being led like a sinking ship. Hundreds of millions of users are at risk of having to find a replacement. Fediverse to the rescue?

Quora has been going down for a while already:
https://slate.com/technology/2024/02/quora-what-happened-ai-decline.html

I remember two downturns:

  • 2012 stagnation of development about that time when the other co-founder was fired or something
  • 2018 beginning of the gradual removal of valuable features, I assume to “save money on maintenance now, suffer consequences later”

There is Trust Café,
https://www.trustcafe.io/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Café

…as of November 7, 2019, [the founder Jimmy] Wales stated that he had just learnt about ActivityPub and was looking into it.

“Sounds interesting. Reading! Not likely to do anything like this soon as we are underfunded and just getting going. But it sounds interesting! […] Ok. I am always interested in decentralization as a principle. I don’t know of anything I could actually use in this case though. […] Also, to be clear, I’m not being dismissive. I’m reading up on ActivityPub to see if there’s a way to support it natively. If real tools are being built that I can interoperate with, that’s a clear win all around.”

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    8 hours ago

    The real issue is that AI bots are making Q&A forums de-facto redundant. StackExchange posted its stats recently, and activity is dropping through the floor there too.

    Of course, this leaves the question of what the AI bots are going to do in a few years when they have no new original content to eat. But right now they still have a banquet.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
    141·
    11 hours ago

    I think before any technical aspects are considered, you need to figure out what to do with the gibbering hordes of idiotic users who seem to be drawn to these sorts of forums as if by powerful magnetism.

    I have been led in desperation many times to a Quora thread in my search results. I have never in many years, not even once, arrived at a Quora thread that actually contained the correct answer to the question being asked at the top. It’s useless cesspit and insofar as I can be bothered to determine it always was.

  • Pamasich@kbin.earth
    5·
    11 hours ago

    I understand the need for features when it comes to StackExchange (though Piefed has that functionality now), but what did Quora do that existing fediverse services like Lemmy can’t replicate?

    • Tehdastehdas@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      3·
      9 hours ago

      Quora used to have a fantastic crowd-edited question topic ontology/taxonomy for precise feed shaping with thousands of disambiguated topics interlinked in a graph/tree structure, but they enshittified the system away 2023, and now it’s all LLM misunderstandings of what the question topics should be. The bot thinks a question is about apples when the question is a mathematics word puzzle; “How many apples…”. The excuse for AI tagging was “tags can be abused” when in reality the crowd corrected the abuses quickly and reported the offenders. With the new AI tagger, my feed turned from a valuable place for learning into viral trash from Quora-celebrities, mostly about current news.

      They never made the obviously needed features of:

      • being able to topic tag answers, not just questions (for when the question is general and the answer is specific, like “What do you think everyone needs to know in 2026?”).
      • the ability to follow a topic from a user, because most people write about many topics, so a follow-a-user brings uninteresting topics to my feed, but not all people write well about that topic I want to follow, so I’d need to follow that topic from good writers only.