Why Quora Sux
Quora - “The Best Answer to Any Question” serves as a Q&A site that intends to capture the Expert Answer market outside of the domain of Stack-Exchange. Meaning, questions that are more subjective, or about experience, and that do not have a difinitive answer.
This sounds great, so what’s wrong with Quora?
Technical Reasons
The technical reasons are already widely acknowledged, so I won’t go into them here, but briefly, they fall into the following categories:
- Quora is spammy
- Quora is a walled garden
- Quora abuses SEO
- Quora has bad scrollback / link-follow / refresh behaviour
- Quora has bad load-more behaviour
Community Reasons
- The top questions are almost all ridiculously stupid
- The top answers almost always serve to show how smart and good at outside-the-box thinking the respondent is, often explicitly ignoring the drive of the question
Dumb Questions:
Who could they possibly be hoping answers this?
What?
How many times can peope ask this???
Is this really something you need to ask on Quora? Who else would be interested in this??
DO THEY???
I swear I read this every week.
- So much military stuff
- Ask rich people dumb stuff
- Relationship advice for idiots
- Easily googleable stuff that makes Quorans feel special, so let’s ask them!
Dumb Answers:
- Let me tell you why your question is dumb, and then not answer it (very popular response)
- I’m so cool
- Detailed tangental boring answers
Other points of view
It’s funny, I’ve had this reinforced experience with Quora over the last few years and my convictions have become so strong that I’d accepted that my oppinions were almost certainly fact. Until I had a conversation with my friend…
I sat down for a drink and started to talk about Quora, I opened with something like “Do you read Quora? How about that Quora hey?”, expecting to begin a fun hate-session where we both agreed how much Quora sucked.
Much to my surprise, his impressions of Quora were almost the exact opposite of mine, and this wasn’t because he interpreted the same content differently from me. No, he was being shown an entirely different set of content. After describing what he was seeing, it seemed that his perspective was also totally reasonable.
Something quite interesting is going on here :-)