A few short years ago, Quora was the darling of the tech world. A place where you could ask questions and get answers from people at the top in their chosen field. CEO’s, leaders, heavy hitters.
The fun part of Quora was how accessible skilled experts were, who would otherwise not be easy to reach. You could ask pilots questions about flying. You could ask police officers about their job. I mean, even astronauts were answering questions on Quora.
Quora has been around since 2010 and was once poised to take over the world.
Fast forward to late 2021, and Quora appears to be slowly fading into the ether, and nobody seems to notice (except maybe Quora themselves and their unfortunate investors).
One of the first signs of trouble for Quora revealed itself in 2020 when they laid off a bunch of staff. Fair shake of the sauce bottle here, a lot of companies laid people off in 2020 because of the pandemic, but the problems Quora have predated the pandemic.
And, I am kind of sad about the sorry state of Quora. I have been a member since 2011, and in that time, I accumulated a lot of views on my answers.
As you can see, I’ve amassed over 2 million views on Quora. Rookie numbers compared to others, but considering my engagement has varied over the years, still interesting to see.
But, what kind of pushed me away from Quora was how detached they became from what people wanted from the platform. The spaces feature, in particular, felt like a wrong move, and as you will see if you spend a few minutes on Quora, it is being used for spammy purposes.
It became pretty clear that Quora was focusing on SEO optimisation over fostering content creation on the site. It is now fast becoming a Yahoo! Answers type platform where the quality has slowly degraded. Eventually, it’ll be the fodder of memes and niche subreddits if Quora does not do something to stop the haemorrhaging.
I still check in to Quora from time to time, and some people still provide quality answers. Still, the missteps around monetisation features and incentives which promote people to spam have sent Quora into a downward spiral.
