Any company that relies on SEO content is basically going to disapear. Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes. Not only that, other lower ranked content can be verified to be "true" using neural network based NLP, meaning that the value of content has gone down.
Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content.
Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets. This is theft!
My guess is that Yelp is next.
EDIT:
I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now. The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?
> The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?
TripAdvisor, Quora, and Yelp are just as rent-seeking and profit-driven as Google.
If I write a review on TripAdvisor or Yelp or answer a question on Quora, I, the author, certainly don't get compensated for it. If Quora fails and another company takes their place, it's no loss to me - I'm no less (and no more) willing to write for the new company for free. If I write the review on Google itself, I lose nothing. Perhaps something is structurally lost for the internet by allowing Google to be a monopoly, but there aren't any incentives for me to care.
If you want a thriving internet, fix that. Ideally, make it the case that when I write a good answer to a technical question on my blog, it's as likely to be seen as when I write a good answer to a technical question on StackOverflow - the idea of companies relying on SEO content is a structural failing in the first place. Then figure out how to motivate me to keep posting to my blog (which might be letting me, the actual author, monetize my blog somehow, but might just be me writing for the pleasure of writing and knowing other people are seeing it - or perhaps the quantified pleasure of seeing trustworthy upvotes in some way).
Sure but atleast Quora did the hard work of building the website, getting the users, etc. They own that. I think we need to increase awareness and outcry about google stealing content from websites. They should be required to pay part of the revenue from page views to the content owners.
I'm not sure Quora's problems are entirely on Google. The site has a shit reputation due to the whole "create an account if you want to look at anything." In fact, didn't Quora try really hard to game google results to funnel people to its site? I've no love for Google's steady erosion of the Web, but Quora strikes me as a company that is just sad it hasn't managed to get big enough to do what Google is doing.
What's the paradox there? Google has its own review system for restaurants / hotels / etc., so they can definitely survive TripAdvisor and Yelp disappearing. They'll just collect the data themselves.
For Quora and StackOverflow, they can (and do) index personal blogs etc., too. Google is a search engine; they don't need a single fixed third party to be the first search result to all questions in a category.
The problem with Google is that everything is attached to your name. I never write any review on Google knowing that anybody can judge me based on that review alone. Reviews are between me and the target of the review. My coworkers don't need to know what I've bought, where I've been and all my opinions about those things.
People generally use their real name on sites like Quora, Yelp, Amazon, etc. and they seem to work fine. You can also choose to use a fake name pretty easily on these sites - or on Google.
Just having a review site is missing the big picture. People want authenticity and trusted reviews. Google doesn't know if you really bought the Amazon item, booked the hotel through TripAdvisor, etc. Google can collect data, but is it any good if they do it themselves?
Do TripAdvisor or Yelp know if I really visited that restaurant or that hotel? Does Quora or StackOverflow know if I really worked on that project or studied that subject? Clearly, there's widespread public internet in reviews without the automated verification.
And if you want it, Google sees most credit card transactions. In 2017, they said, "Google’s third-party partnerships ... capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States." https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal... (Later reporting found a deal with MasterCard, at least.) So they could absolutely know if you bought the Amazon item or booked the hotel, if they wanted.
I wholeheartedly agree that there's a centralization concern about letting one company have so much power, but that doesn't change that there doesn't seem to be much advantage in another party being the review aggregator. If we can't figure out how to return control to the actual reviewers, Google is no worse of an aggregator.
> If I write the review on Google itself, I lose nothing.
There are distinct advantages to having a single cloud, with a single set of protocols/APIs/etc. The only issue I see is if Google starts filtering/blocking in a significant way, then the blocked communities will build their own infrastructure. But Google wouldn't want that data, since they are filtering it out in the first place, except perhaps to train their filters more accurately.
Probably because nobody understands the ramifications of what Google is doing deeply enough to build a solid-enough case. Justice is slow, too slow for modern times and laws are inadequate.
Ianal, but an additional issue, is from my (limited) understanding, copyright applies to presentation not facts or the idea of something. If you take some info and reword it so the original presentation is gone and only the factual idea is the same, i think you are in the clear.
Again, ianal and dont really know what im talking about
I can't find anything about a lawsuit but they were using shady seo methods and Google deindexed them. Rapgunius stopped what they were doing and apologized for the dishonest behavior.
Looks like rap Genius hasn't filed suit as of yet. But they published the findings of their sting operation to prove that Google was stealing lyrics from their site. I must have been conflating two separate stories.
> If I write a review on TripAdvisor or Yelp or answer a question on Quora, I, the author, certainly don't get compensated for it.
But you do get 'compensated' you get a good feeling from it.
Along those lines there are many things that people do in which they get 'compensated' not by money or that money isn't the primary motivator.
Jeff Bezos does not get up and go to work every day because he wants to amass more money 'be compensated for what he does'. Yes it's a by product but I would argue it's not what drives him. He does it for other reasons and has other motivations.
Another example - A woman who volunteers at a hospital and doesn't get paid a salary does it to keep busy and to feel good not for 'compensation'.
Not saying money isn't important. But nobody comments on HN and gets paid although some people have made money as a result of commenting but my guess is that is not what led them down that road or kept them at it. [1]
[1] I say this from personal experience having made (to this day) a boatload of money making comments in another place (really you have no idea). But 100% never did it for that reason at all.
I don't disagree with you - but then there's no harm in the Quoras or TripAdvisors of the world failing to make a profit, is there? Those of us who review for the joy of reviewing and of being useful will keep doing it even if other people can't figure out how to rent-seek, and there is no risk to a vibrant internet.
How do you know this? The only published program is paying for questions, and they had a trial of "knowledge prizes" years ago as a contest for the best answers but it was shut down. As a "top writer" for 2 years, I've heard nothing about any payments for writers.
It's quite profit-perverted: the overarching goal is to conflate in the mind of engineers the idea of "hackers" - a group that traditionally is interested in the inherent joy of hacking and is skeptical of business-types - with the goals of venture capitalists and the lives of founders. It's not very explicit, and obviously I nonetheless find value here, but if you've ever seen someone build a technically interesting project and thought "Hey, they should get some seed funding and work on this full-time," then the HN gambit has been successful.
Have you considered that Quora is failing because it's user-hostile? I do not visit Quora links on Google because I know it's going to tease me with a snippet and force me to login.
And those two facts are related. Quora actively drives casual users away with the forced-login behavior. So the only people on Quora are the people with strong incentives to do so... that is, people who are being paid. Marketeers.
That's interesting. I only "follow" (or whatever they call it) a few people on Quora, and Quora sends me an email of what some of them have said over the last two or three days, and I pop over to see what the opinion is about. And, then, there's already some sort of conversation or fight underway - but usually pretty light.
Generally, I find Quora to be a pretty "ok" place to have a conversation. Better than most of Reddit, for sure. (Reddit does have some fantabulous subs to be sure, but not very many! :-) )
EDIT: HN is good for conversations in threads, although they can veer off track pretty wildly. Reddit can get pretty vitriolic. You could have a conversation, but the participants destroy it. Twitter? Fuggedaboutit. Are there sites I ought to look at where I can have a polite discussion with people that I may or may not agree with on various topics? [FWIW - Before 2008, Reddit itself was pretty close to this, except for maybe /r/politics]
The thing about Quora is that I would never use it to get an answer to a question.
I only go there to read a few people's opinions on things. If you restrict yourself to those people then Quora seems ok. If a Quora link shows up in my search results -- I know it's going to be useless.
The only problem is Quora seems to aggressively promote clickbait scammers / self-promoting twits. I find myself actively logging on to Quora very rarely these days as it becomes harder and harder to repel useless content from my feed.
HN is not valuing itself at 2B dollars, that is the problem.
It is Quora itself that needs to justify against that valuation, not anyone else. Where that is fine or not, I think the news itself is self-explanatory.
It's interesting how the value the owners get from HN is more kudos and relevant discourse.
I'm finding it hard to think of other domains with succesful quasi-public institutions run by for-profits without monetization. Are there other examples?
Exactly ! I'm never quite sure where to see the "click-bait" answer and when does a new question or answer stop or starts.
Quora has good content.. But its HARD to read it...
It used be alright but their noise factor has increased a lot since half a decade ago.
Before that, Quora felt like a small community similar to HN. They had founders and executives answering questions. They were still spamming email afair but not as aggressively as today and it didn't have what is x + 3 = 10?
I deleted it after I reached a million answer views from a sudden growth. The users that moved in completely destroyed the whole thing.
That day, I learnt acquiring users via heavy marketing or SEO may not be a good decision for a community. They are better as spectators or consumers.
It would be nice if there was a way to block certain domains from Google (or any other search engine) results. There are also a lot of sites that seem like they scrape posts from StackOverflow that I would like to block too.
> Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes
This frustrates me, but I think Quora's UX and marketing decisions greatly exacerbated this effect. Quora shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun thanks to their sign up walls. At one point (and probably still true), you couldn't even click a link to a related question within Quora itself without being forced to sign up.
This acts as a resistance, causing people to essentially bounce from Quora back to Google after the first click, so they can get a related question or answer, which Google provides thousands of pages of for free.
Google was on one corner selling fresh-pressed lemonade, and Quora opened a lemonade stand for 10x the price on the exact same corner. Rumor has it, Google's lemonade tasted better anyway.
>but we shouldn’t need to do that to have a decent user experience.
Not only that, this (as well as many other simple "tricks" or "workarounds") creates (arbitrarily) two kinds of users, those that know the trick and those that don't (and likely create two different sets of user opinions).
I mean, to me (because I know the little trick) usage of Quora is relatively painless (though I still try my best to avoiding using it because of the mostly terribly bad content) whilst another user that doesn't know the trick and doesn't want to login may have the illusion that the content, once accessed, may have some value.
Also, this might constitute a fellony, basically you're "hacking" Quora, using technical tricks to circumvent security measures they put in place. And no, it doesn't matter that the trick is so trivial.
Which reminds me Facebook's wall worked perfectly for them. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind signing up yet another account among the hundreds of accounts I already have.
Yea exactly ! If you make it hard for the user to do simple stuff... Read and answer... They won't come back or like you much.. i.e #DontMakeMeThink from the user :P
I think there is a symbiotic relationship here. Google still needs to feed enough traffic into their main training sets so it can keep training. If these training sets were to fully die (or become stale) then the Google NLP would be equally useless. So Google has an inherent desire to prop up Quora, if anything.
Anecdotally, Quora has taken a top spot in SEO alongside Stackoverflow for a lot of my searches (and Reddit). I think that over time this will improve actually and I don't think this layoff is because they are doing poorly, rather the opposite, I predict they're doing well enough to go IPO soon and need to clean house.
Right, i don't think google displays the entire quora answer set, i see the google snippets of a quora answer set as an ad the click the quora link and read all the quora answers. I certainly don't trust that Google has actually extracted the complete set of valuable info from a quora page. Just like Stackoverflow i want to read many answers and many opinions. I would bet the when google presents a quora snippet, the quora page has MORE traffic.
So far what I have seen is Google search giving snippets or Google AMP optimizing for mobile. Still the content is physically from some page verbatim. The AI/NLP comes in only in top 0.1% kind of queries like “what is the weather” or “what is my IP address”. Saying Google’s AI is learning everything is like blaming Chinese for stealing all tech. Yes, it happens at some cases, but not likely. I am surprised to see so much Google hatred here.
The newest research out of the Google AI labs is all centered around extractive summarazation. Led by a researcher from CMU named William Cohen. Their next big business is content extraction.
The extracted content on their search page is just the beginning. They are spending huge efforts to get better at it. Specifically, extracting information from multiple pages at the same time. Eventually it will mostly be a query interface that surfaces information for fact based queries.
Tripadvisor has a great mobile app, and actually a mobile app makes sense, as I want to browse local results, filter and compare restaurants and activities easily.
As for quora, it's more like entertainment where I just want it to be part of my internet browsing experience, just like Reddit, where I don't want to load a mobile app just so see a result.
I haven't used Yelp in years. AFAIK it's a USA only thing. Most other countries I've visited there are far more reviews on Google than Yelp. No idea how I can trust either of them (the reviews, not the companies) Yelp, yes the writing is on the wall.
An no, google didn't steal anything from yelp. They just let users review places and post pictures.
Yes, Google entered into a settlement with the FTC in 2013 for, among other things, scraping sites like Yelp and presenting the info directly in search results. Google didn't have any of their own reviews at the time.
"In its 2013 settlement, the FTC ruled against Google on scraping. Rivals can now opt out of having their content lifted, without fear of being demoted in the search rankings."
So can they block the google crawler? If they do not then they not really care about being crawled.
The problem is not the monopolistic and profit-driven practice. It is that consumers are not willing to pay for anything and do not mind for their data to be mined, hence the only way for B2C are ads.
Is there any data to back up this claim? Anecdotally I can't think of a single query that I used to click through to an answers site like quora or stack exchange that is now addressed my the knowledge box snippet.
>"Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets."
I understand that Google competes with Trip Advisor with their own travel offering but might you or someone else explain how they use NLP algorithms steal business from them? Also could you elaborate on how they might be using NLP on Quora to their advantage. Where or how do they compete with Quora exactly? Thanks.
> The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?
Judging by the number of copycat sites surfacing in Google search results I don't think there is anything monopolistic in stealing the content.
Remember internet portals? Google is slowly transforming from search engine into one.
Its even bigger than that. You can book an appointment through the google.com search results if the company (lets say a barber shop) has connected their booking system with the Google My Business page. No need to visit the website at all. How long until a percentage is automatically taken for every booking?
>Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content.
Most of the companies I've worked for are largely oblivious to this and continue to invest heavily in making their pages appear attractive to Google - even when the end result is negligible at best. It seems to be a really good way of draining developer resources at the expense of innovation. But perhaps that was the intention all along.
They can (and do) put their content behind a login sometimes to prevent this. Either way Google only gets answers as long those answers exist somewhere so I doubt Quora and its alternatives are going away. The site should be rather cheap to run as well (although it's easy to mismanage millions these days).
no, I left my door open to share my indoor library with neighbors does not mean you can take them away, google is supposed to help me to locate those original content, it should stay as a search engine to keep fair play of original content providers.
I don't know what the legal definition of theft is, but to me if you take something without permission (even if it is just a copy) it is theft. Of course, I'm nobody, so it doesn't matter what I think. However, if we all acted like humans instead of lawyers (which by definition are no longer human), I think most people would agree with the above definition.
It seems to me, conflating copyright infringement with theft is little better than conflating it with piracy. Both are hyperbolic.
To be honest, it's not even clear to me that what google did was copyright infringement. It seems distasteful, even dishonorable, but I'm not convinced it goes beyond that.
We will probably see a great rift occur, its really mind boggling. The internet is ... plastic. All these algorithms, and mass herding of the human flock ... and the centralization ... it goes against basic natural laws if you ask me!
I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now.
I used to enjoy Quora, but it lost its charm and I quit once my feed became mostly filled with questions such as:
- As a software engineer, what makes you roll your eyes every time you hear it?
- What did your mother say that made your jaw drop?
- What can I learn in one minute that will be useful for the rest of my life?
Those open questions just feel clickbait-y, with no real value added.
I occasionally see questions similar to the last one on HN (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913129), it’s OK once in a while, but I hope it doesn’t become the norm. I think the HN userbase’s mindset and strong moderation guarantees that for now.
These kind of questions where most likely generated by paid question askers who receive a cut of the ad revenue.
I have first hand knowledge of somebody who made pretty good money doing exactly that. His rule of thumb was: the dumber the question, the more profitable it was for him.
What has always amazed me about Quora is that for every dumb one line question in the vein of "How do we know that the moon is not made of cheese?" there would be 500 word very well researched reply from an ex NASA chief of lunar mission. It always was baffling for me that such low effort questions would get such amazing answers.
It's more that some people genuinely love sharing their knowledge and investing their time to help others. These people generate the most value for Quora but unfortunately don't get anything out of it.
At one point years ago I signed-up for Quora, and the question feed was filled with stuff like:
* Did Picard violate the Prime Directive in TNG S6E13?
* If five ninjas attacked you, how you would you physically defeat them?
* Here's the intellectual take on Spiderman fighting Batman, do you agree?
* Men who have dated supermodels, what was it like?
I thought it was supposed to be a somewhat serious site but it obviously wasn't. I don't think I ever went back. Perhaps the whole point was just a glorified PHP BBS, with a nice theme, better seo, and SV in-crowd early adopters. I never got it.
> Did Picard violate the Prime Directive in TNG S6E13
I know you typed that randomly, but for anyone wondering:
> Geordi La Forge falls in love with a woman accused of murder in an isolated communication relay station. The Enterprise crew investigates the crime, the only other suspect is a Klingon officer who frequently visited the station.
> In 2019, ScreenRant ranked it the ninth worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation based on IMDB ratings, which was 6.1 out of 10 at that time.[3] They were critical of the Klingon subplot and described Geordi as a sexual predator.[3]
> If five ninjas attacked you, how you would you physically defeat them?
Don’t let them circle you?
> Here's the intellectual take on Spiderman fighting Batman, do you agree?
Batman would win. Bruce Wayne is smart and has a bat cave and Peter Parker is just a junior intern at buzzfeed.
> Men who have dated supermodels, what was it like?
Like any UGC site, your experience is entirely shaped by who you follow. You can read follow any number of scientific people there if you want hard technical answers.
To be fair Ask HN questions are often clickbait-y too. Like:
- "What book made the most impact on you"?
- "Best tech talk you watched in 2019"?
- "How you beat procrastination"?
This is definitely because of paid questions - if you take a look at the most revenue generating questions they are all pretty dumb - I spent some time trying to think of some good questions to see whether it was possible to make money, but soon realised I couldn't bring myself to participate in such stupidity - if a good question is worth nothing from a financial perspective, why bother?
They need to start incentivising answers in someway soon otherwise it's going to go even further downhill.
FTFY: It's like r/askReddit with a mostly South Asian audience.
My wife is Indian and used to be the quora top writer for 2014, afaik. The audience is quite dominated by Indians.
The moderation is done through downvoting the question or leaving it unanswered. There are actual moderators but Quora is much more passively moderated.
There's plenty of good content, it's just overloaded by crap questions since Quora pays people to ask (but not answer).
But yes, the quality of discussion on AskReddit is low, which is why I unsubscribed more than half a decade ago. Thankfully, there's other sections of reddit that are in a better state. Quora, however, is a one-trick pony. It's just AskReddit and nothing else. There's no AskHistorians (with it's high standards) or askscience.
Every answer to a “recommend x” question is just self promoters pitching their own product too. It’s just advertising at that point, not real information
I've said it in a few other posts but post WeWork, a lot of the big D, E, F companies are expected to hit profitability/break-even soon.
Some other threads are talking about Google stealing a lot of the content. That's definitely true for weather, flights, but things like long form content is still long form. I would argue these layoffs aren't a function of the GMachine at work, but more generally all the big tech firms with lofted valuations are being 'called in'. Every week, I see at least 1 large name running lay offs here on HNews.
The bubble at the 1B+ vals has started to correct. Firms are expecting people to prove their worth. Lots of times this means IPO and then trading on a multiple of earnings. Many of these guys aren't even near net positive so it's very scary.
I expect 2020 to be the year startups have a lot of trouble at the Series C.
This feels insightful. I work for a big tech company (not faang) and we're doing a bunch of insane cost cutting bullshit and we've had a hiring freeze for maybe 10 months now.
It's interesting to see the inside view but see that none of it hits the financial press, or even the analyst stuff like seeking alpha.
Keep notes? I'm sure I'm not the only one on here that would love to compare/contrast what you are going through with what the rest of us have as well.
This is just tech being reset to the rational expectations of any other industry. How many new businesses outside of tech can get a decade of runway to exit or show a profit? Quora et al are just the beginning and there is a lot of deadwood to be cleared out. The expectations of the last decade - that you could just get a company to a reasonable point of maturity and then just wait to be acquired - are no longer valid.
Instead of bemoaning this reality check we should all be grateful that so much of the world's wealth was redirected into overcompensating us for unproductive work for so long. How many of us are paid over $200k to perform unprofitable work? Its crazy! But its been going on so long it has become accepted as the norm.
Larger/profitable tech giants surely recognize there is no need to rush in an acquire startups for a premium...they will soon all be on the clearance rack...no one believes the valuations these companies and their VCs assign themselves anymore. Quora valued at $2 billion? I doubt they could get an offer for more than $100 million at this point.
Interestingly since so much of the deadwood never made it to IPO, this culling could end up being a nonevent to investors. They'll stay invested in AAPL and MSFT and not miss Bay Area private startups imploding.
I have recently interviewed at one of the largest, oldest educational institutions in the US, and also interviewed at one of the largest tech companies in the world. Both of them used the phrase “want to work at a startup?” in the job descriptions and both hiring manager said something along the lines of “we have a great startup culture”.
At this point the word is meaningless to me. If anything I have noticed that “we are like a startup” is really code for “we are incredibly disorganized and chaotic but for some reason we are proud of it.” Any time something went wrong with one of these companies (was late to a meeting, forgot to attach something to an email, etc) the excuse was "sorry, that's just how it is working at a startup haha!"
I recently had an interview at Mozilla. I remember the interviewer responding to one of my culture questions with "We aren't a startup by any measure... Firefox is one of the oldest software artifacts on the internet still being maintained."
I do consulting and have worked with clients ranging from 3 person seed stage startups to Intel and Nike, so pretty much the whole spectrum.
Really the only difference to me is that startup executives treat your time like it doesn't matter, 100% of the time. At bigger companies, we will schedule a meeting and talk about something. Many of my small inexperienced clients just send Slack messages one after the other at 6PM on a Friday that make no sense and clearly have no thought behind them beyond "this worked for my friends startup, lets try the same thing!!"
It just feels like 95% of startup founders I meet nowadays are so scatterbrained they can't communicate and will certainly never prepare for anything, all while expecting their employees to always be 100% prepared.
Often people use the word "startup" simply to mean "private company which plans on an IPO but hasn't had one yet" (as opposed to public companies, and private companies that have no plan to ever IPO)
Sometimes a private company can take 10 or more years to reach the IPO stage. This is probably especially true for bootstrapped companies which can grow at a more steady pace than those VC-backed from very early on
Startup has been used at least somewhat frequently for public companies as well. I’ve seen it used with tech companies that have been public recently. I think I’ve only seen it used on public companies that are losing money. So at least that part seems to be consistent. Still though, makes the word diluted.
This definition seems to reflect usage. The question then is: what is the operational difference between a company aiming at an IPO, and one aiming to maximize the total expected profit (that is, every company)? Or is the difference just in intent?
It’s a shame really that the meaning has been diluted; there are startups worth over $1 billion (not funny money, realistic multiples of ARR based on an arms length offer for shares) that are profitable, and startups that are a VC furnace and will never turn a profit.
Startup was originally meant to describe a company trying an entirely new business model. If there's nothing new then it's just a small business (until it graduates to medium/large/public/etc).
Unfortunately the venture capital industry decided to just call everything they invest in a "startup" and the usage grew from there.
Startup is a company with unproven business model.
Barbershop on a corner is not a startup, it is known how this works and what it takes to make it profitable.
Barbershop in World of Warcraft or some other MMO which makes haircuts to your virtual Orcs is a startup, cause no one knows if this is viable as a business at all.
Every website has different ways of acquiring traffic. Quora's way of doing business isn't yet shown to be self-sustainable, which makes their business model unproven.
Quora is a site that is somehow successful despite its product development decisions. They seem to constantly make the site and community worse with every update.
There's still a decent amount of amazing valuable answers from real verified experts but the experience of using it is horrendous and I've completely stopped trying to write anything anymore.
I can't decide whether I hope that whoever decided that iOS Safari users on Quora would get a blocking "F you; use our mobile app" experience after scrolling a short distance is included in the layoffs or will be allowed to stay on and continue the destruction of the company.
Yeah I think the downfall of quora is partly due to their product managers decision making and the machine learning recommendation engine. Both of which are abysmal even with all that Harvard and Stanford talent they have
The recommendation is highly sensitive to who you follow. Many of the long-time users have a great feed, but starting out with a clean slate presents rather poor results.
When you start reading something interesting from the Digest on your phone, and then it stops you with an inescapable popup telling you to use their shitty app instead of your browser.
Like others I'm amazed that Quora still exists. In my experience it's accessible to people outside the programming bubble, but eschewed a lot of deliberate choices that StackOverflow made back in the early days. The result is that it's more of a question and opinion site, than a question and answer site.
There isn't anything wrong with this differentiation in some ways, but it has driven the company further down the SEO path and they don't seem to have tried other things. It feels like SO has built up a recruiting business, tried many times to get their Q&A software into companies with varying success, really managed the costs of their business, and invited public scrutiny of their tech. I can only imagine how much Quora are hemorrhaging from running costs and bad tech choices.
Not sure if a bit of confirmation bias on my side but seems like there is a recent big uptick of layoffs at Silicon Valley companies? Popular ones like Quora, TripAvisor, Ebay, Mozilla, Uber, 23andMe, etc we hear about but among my own network, i am even hearing it from smaller startups & businesses.
Just wondering if it is just me but I am surmising that it seems to indicate a wider systematic.. issue? Maybe issue is not the word for it. Symptom is probably a better description and it feels we are at the precipitous of an incoming storm/crunch/etc.
Please tell me I am imagining things.
Edit: I guess my question is more are all these layoffs an indicator of an incoming recession or is it something more nefarious like the big tech (FAANG) are taking steps to widen their positions while they are still in a "strong" position to do so (e.g. google).
I mean, there's barely been 2k layoffs that I've heard of in a year. Google's hired more than that in The Bay alone. I'm sure Facebook and Apple have hired just as many.
This might just be a post-holiday rush. It's a dick move to lay people off between ~Nov 15 and Jan 1, and if you can afford to avoid it, it's best to avoid burning people affected and making the remaining employees a little more bitter and anxious.
Modern recessions are caused by 2 things: 1) Some very inflated assest class being spread out among a large number of folks suddenly failing or 2) the fear of 1) happening, which can lead to a self fulfilling prophecy. Since we’ve always seen recessions in the past, nobody believes we can achieve sustained economic growth... and they are mostly right. If enough people believe there is a recession they will start behaving in ways that ironically contribute to the recession.
What’s really protecting us from recession today, in my humble opinion, is that all of humanity is so interconnected and so hates recession that we’re willing to help out others who are on the brink of disaster of limit their failures to a small region rather than let it blow up in everybody’s face.
Also... small layoffs are not necessarily an indicator of recession, they can also be course corrections by overly optimistic companies whose wildly grandiose plans didn’t pan out as planned. While these well known businesses lay-off folks, my inbox is flooded by recruiters looking to fill multiple positions in a bevy of startups. In other words, business as usual.
For what it’s worth, I came to say the same thing, then saw you already did.
It’s hard to disentangle the effect HN has on our thinking, though. Just because layoffs have popped up on HN, are we both imagining that it’s part of a global trend? Or do global tech trends inherently appear on HN? Hard to say.
I read a few comments before I realized they were written in 2010, and not 2020. It's surprising how many of those predictions (easily most of the ones I read) seem completely applicable to the coming decade.
I keep waiting for someone to realize Bay Area rents have gone up 100%-200% since 2008, but the max unemployment in CA is still $450 per week. I was laid off in 2009, and between that and severance, I could manage. It's going to be a lot harder in the next recession.
Suppose you rent a one bedroom for 4k in SF. You can do better than this, but let's go with it. And suppose your mortgage is 2k, and you make a solid salary of 200k in Atlanta.
It seems like a no brainer to move. But you're ignoring the fact that someone of equivalent experience could get a paycheck of 500k here.
That pay differential swamps trying to optimize by tightening the budget.
My total comp (salary plus RSUs) is 400k, and my (now fully vested and liquid) stock options are worth 2.5M. I realize not everyone can replicate that, but I did this in Atlanta, not SF.
I also can drive 7 minutes to work or run 30 minutes on the Beltline and shower when I get in.
There are more trees here than SF, and we have full seasons. It's also way more diverse. Not everyone is in tech. The dating scene is great.
SF is pretty much exactly what it's made out to be. The odds of getting a high paying job in tech are vastly higher in the bay area than in Atlanta, and SF is much friendlier to non-car methods of transportations. That said, yeah it's expensive as all hell.
> The dating scene is great.
Yeah, assuming you're a dude, the gender balance in Atlanta is probably much better, plus you're making excellent money in an area with much fewer people making bank; in SF, making 250k isn't even really that unusual, that's a mid-level dev position at Google, not even senior.
Re:diversity, I find there's this thing in the states where people count the percentage of black and Hispanic people as highly relevant to diversity, but Chinese and Indian people don't count, hence all the articles about how big tech companies are "mostly just white guys". Because the bay area really isn't very white, compared to the US as a whole.
I've actually been thinking of moving to Atlanta recently. I live in Portland OR right now, so the sprawl of Atlanta scares me, but I've heard there are good walkable pockets of it.
I walk my dog 2 hours a day; are there places where the sidewalk density is high enough and the busy road density low enough that I could do that and have some route optionality so I'm not just doing the same walk all the time?
The Beltline plus Piedmont Park is a perfect fit. The Beltline is linear, but long (it circles the city), and all of the connected neighborhoods are extremely walkable.
My point wasn't that CA rent is expensive, just that benefits need to keep up with cost of living, and I'm ~fine with paying for in taxes for it.
I'm fully aware that I pay the "California Tax" to live somewhere with good weather, outstanding universities, and to work with some of the smartest people in my industry. But that's what I value right now. Different people are looking for different things.
By tracks, by any chance? Doesn't narrow it down much in Atlanta (specifically with mills), but if you're talking where I think you're talking, I'm ~2 mi from you. ;)
The Fed is pumping money, the yield curve inverted, job openings are flat/declining, people have been predicting recession for 2 years... the precise date of an actual recession is not declared until long after the fact, but I certainly wouldn't bet on the recession not having started already. And there are strong political reasons to avoid any mention of recession, so we might see economic indicators getting distorted in the coming months.
The fed is ensuring liquidity in the overnight markets via short term loans which are paid back the next day (no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there, could be higher asset values require greater liquid reserves, or some form of capital outflow tightening usd liquidity due to the strength of the dollar, or something else?)
Unemployment is exceeding low, which means more jobs are filled, which means there are less job postings.
People have been predicting doom since the dawn of mankind and sometimes they’re right.
Not sure about the yield curve enough to offer any explanation or even what it means when you say it’s inverted.
Not sure who’s right or what signs are meaningful. Dimension reduction of a search space is a difficult problem. Lots of times people see what they want to see.
I can’t help but just throw my hands up these days and go back to ViM, if it was Vegas I’d split my money fifty fifty on doom and gloom and outstanding success.
Job openings were a leading indicator in the last recession, see "Planned Next Three Months and Current Job Openings" in https://www.nfib.com/assets/SBET-December-2019.pdf (I ignore planned as it seems noisier). There has been no substantial decline since 2010. The decline in recent months is bigger than in 2017 but could still be noise.
Unemployment is used to define the recession so once that starts increasing again the process is already well underway.
I agree though, predicting a recession is like reading tea leaves. The data is so fuzzy and updated so infrequently that it's useless for practical decisions.
> no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there
It's because JPMorgan Chase and friends think there is too much risk of intraday bankruptcy right now and no one wants to be left hanging on their loan.
Sure the fed is doing repo market operations (the overnight lending you talk about), but the vast majority of that money is going to bond buying. 300 billion (or some gigantic number like that) has been infused in the econ. This is much of the reason stock market does well. Since money doesn't go to consumer price inflation, it goes to a different kind of inflation, inflation of real assets, like stocks.
People do know why there is less liquidity there. Something like the repo crisis doesn't happen out of the blue.
Right. For example, after the yield curve inverted in 1998, it normalized and inverted 4 more times before the 2001 recession started. It doesn't say much besides "something weird is happening with the economy".
Federal reserve; the central bank that keeps interest rates below natural market price in order to pump growth, thereby putting too much cash in investors hands to possibly use constructively.
Years ago, I would occasionally answer a question on Quora, which usually seemed like a real question from a person trying to figure something out (for example, software career questions).
In recent years, oddly, even the questions seem fake, as if somebody somewhere is being paid to come up with questions. Why would I spend time to answer if not even the person asking seems to really care? Perhaps, I am not the only one to stop seeing the point in Quora a while ago.
That's because they started paying people to post questions, which is completely absurd since the real value is in the answers.
Unfortunately, as predicted by pretty much everyone, it led to a massive influx of generic, repetitive, and trivial questions spammed endlessly to the top writers who have now stopped contributing. Most questions are just spam sinkholes in an endless battle by fake accounts for top position.
I commented on that, about politics. I had a quora account for about one year and answer many questions, but then it became worst and I couldn't participate anymore.
I used to be quite active on Quora, but have noticed a decline in content and ux quality - seems like they are trying to 'growth hack' in a way that is not benefiting users, e.g.:
- Links to other questions open in new tabs
- Most content is not shown unless you login, they are really trying to push being logged in and their mobile app
- Answers with images seem to be ranked higher (even if poor quality)
- Clickbait-y questions and answers
I hope they can return to quality since in the beginning it was such a great resource - it was awesome to be able to get answers from domain experts, celebrities, etc... and the site was very usable.
The ads are also very well-disguised, as if they were native content. I understand they’re trying to stay alive, but at some point you end up driving people away.
I've met more than one Quora engineer who were stone cold convinced that they hired the absolute best and brightest engineers _in the entire industry_ and that they were destined for greater things than Google, Amazon, etc.
All I was left with was impression that Quora hires people that are batshit.
I get where you're coming from. But I have to admit, I read my Quora digest email really often. I'm impressed how often I not only click through to read an answer, but enjoy the answer and find it valuable.
Quora definitely does some questionable things nowadays, but I'd also argue they are still getting some key things right too.
The difference I'm seeing in the comments seems to be between actual Quora users and people who just keep stumbling on Quora via search. My impression is that Quora does well at tailoring content for its users while being obnoxiously aggressive about getting non-users to sign up.
Sounds very similar to Pinterest; a spammy clickbait-ridden excuse for a website serving only to deceive you when you search for products or images for non-users, or an amazing tool you can use to categorize all the things, and find inspiration for similar items for users.
Yup. Just when I finally gave in and made a user with a backup email it turns out they're also demanding I download their app?
I definitely would've created an account long ago, with my regular Gmail, if they didn't demand it from me. And probably have their app too. But now I'm just determined to not give in further.
And yes, I get they're doing it because it presumably works better on aggregate than not being assholes. That just makes me hate it even more.
Quora just makes me irrationally pissed off. I realize my dislike is over the top, some of the content isn't terrible, I'd love for the basic format to somehow work out, but the package is somehow worse than Trump tweeting and I sincerely hope it fails as soon as possible.
Nah, Pintrest is somehow amazingly good at offering similar content. People must love making those boards because I get good enough results that there must be a lot of users doing good work in categorizing and organizing those images.
Perhaps people shouldn't make startup with something as difficult to make profitable as question and answers type content, and instead leave it for an organization that is oriented to that mission.
That way, something like quora would grow more valuable instead of becoming more useless as they attempt to make money out of a squeezed lemon.
My understanding is that Stack Overflow started as a direct competitor to Experts Exchange and their SEO shenanigans, although based on recent goings on, Stack Exchange would’ve been served better as a non profit entity similar to Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap.
The odd thing about Quora is that there's actually a lot of good content, but it doesn't show up in search results because the questions that trigger it are of the format "Tell me something interesting about history / technology / whatever"
The "hard fact" questions have answers that suck. Absolutely. SO is wildly better for that.
It's really a place to go to follow certain people you can rely on to post interesting stuff (ex, there's a lot of really good ASOIAF content), follow niche topics and waste time. Like an entirely text-based reddit.
You also have a huge amount of questions like “What’s the cheapest ticket I can get from A to B?” Or “Do I need travel insurance?” followed by answers with links to various spammy sites.
Say what you want about how bad Quora content is, Quora has the most engaging email digest I ever knew.
Every day they send me an email with some answers on topics I'm interested in, and I can't help but click on 6-8 of them from EACH email. The median CTR in any other of email digests recieved by me is zero.
I had the same interaction but one day their algorithm flubbed and sent me a question that had very obvious Avengers: Endgame spoilers in the title. I had to unsubscribe after that.
I used to be on the side of “why do we need Quora” camp but over the last few years I see that they have some really good content that no one else has, particularly content about obscure questions that wiki is not meant for. So I end up visiting often. The problem is they don’t have a way to monetize the content. They can only survive on cash so long.
Companies like Quora should provide at least three or six months of severance in cases of layoffs. There's no reason they can't. They surely knew three or six months in advance that they would likely be making this move.
As startup workers, we should shame loudly and publicly companies that don't provide sufficient severance packages. It's the difference between causing a slight disturbance in worker's lives and potentially huge financial hardship.
(Of course all employees should have a financial reserve. The fact is many people don't though. And even if they do, it hurts a lot to make them burn it down.)
Someone should make a blacklist of startups that did layoffs without sufficient severance. Maybe I'll get around to it.
You should should loudly at the state of California for still paying a max of $450 per week for unemployment.
If you're playing the startup game, you're trading job security and pay for potential upside. I know people who've been burnt just as bad as a layoff because the company got sold for scraps. Don't expect big company benefits out of a startup; that's not how the game works.
Can they accidentally delete the breadcrumbs of questions I read, which they appear to keep about me, on the way out? Initially I loved Quora and participated, but some magic default setting toggle changed and suddenly I'd get emailed about something I clicked on due to a Google search result which took me to a Quora question or answer - pre-authenticated of course.
Most of that is my fault, but now that info is available someplace forever.
Quora used to be OK, many years ago. I wrote a few detailed technical answers about C, C++ and embedded programming.
Then it basically became GeoCities or MySpace or whatever. Garbage, filled with ads and posters shilling their services and goods, just yucky. Plus, as others have mentioned, doing a simple search, going over to quora, and then being forced to login.
I stopped using it when they pulled the same “you can read this public user-provided comment, but if you want to read the NEXT one, you need to log in” shit that Facebook does.
My thoughts exactly. Two scenarios:
- the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO, which is when they get paid, so lots of companies are now doing layoffs instead of just getting more VC money
- or, the economy (which hasn't had a real recession in a long time, since not even 2011 was quite a recession) is just due for a recession and tech startups are the canary telling us this is so
>the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't has caused most VC's to decide that you really need to demonstrate profitability before you can IPO,
That's a polite way to put it.
I'd say the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't was the public saying don't foist your shit on us. How many VC bagholders are now sitting on "billions of dollars" in meaningless paper gains based on nothing but SoftBank's and others nonsense valuations?
EBay has probably been feeling at least some pinch for a while from Amazon creeping in on their B2C channels. When I used to work at a small retail shop, we boosted sales by selling on Ebay. Nowadays, I imagine it would be Amazon instead.
23 and Me is IMO a result of people NOT wanting their genetic data leaked/sold/etc. and the market reflecting that.
Quora is like StackOverflow but with different drama and worse layout.
Tripadvisor IMO is feeling the squeeze of AirB&B and it's ilk.
Still -could- be a sign, but I don't think it's entirely unexpected.
I'd be curious to know if there's any organization that tracks layoff rate over time. It seems like the US Bureau of Labor Statistics used to do it, but Obama cut their funding [1].
Working at a company where the founder is so wealthy from a past exit can be really frustrating because they have little financial incentive to be running the company in a way that is in the best interest of the common shareholder (e.g. employees).
Quora’s web page restrictions were always annoying.
You can search for something from Google, and the site allows you to view the page. Then the page suggests other links, and when you click on it, it forces you to sign in.
The trick is to copy that link, and open the page in a new incognito window.
I don’t know why they did it this way, but it’s thoroughly annoying, and I try to avoid visiting the site if I can. And I roll my eyes whenever that site comes up in a search result.
I don't understand what's going on with Quora. It used to be full of insightful answers that improved the quality of my life. But now my feed is cluttered with clickbait's being recommended by random people saying "Good article." and -- just in general -- very low quality answers written by people without experience and who fail to back up their claims with evidence. It's become a big source of frustration reading these "verbal vomit" answers and trying to sort through the misinformation.
Whoever the ML engineers on the recommendation stack were.. really fucked up imo.
A few days ago a search about CNAMES landed me on a Quora page which I quickly left. Like a fool I wasn't incognito. And less than 24h later I got an email from Q to highlight other stale and incorrect information on their site.
Creepy and bad.
Unfortunate that layoffs don't start with upper management.
Personally I love reading some answers on Quora. But it's not because of Quora; the answer could be on any other site. I tried Quora Ads and lost some money only to discover that the returns are comparatively the worst among all the channels we tried, and off by several folds. That takes me and my money off of Quora Ads. If the company wants to monetize by selling ads, they should probably spend time making the advertisers' experience better. Because at the end of the day the advertisers are the people who are paying them.
Disclaimer: I didn't write this to badmouth or (un)recommend them. I am only curious if other people's experience is the same.
There used to be quite a few very interesting and insightful people who answered questions over there. These days it's all people trying to shamelessly self-promote with very low quality answers, something Quora should have banned a long time ago.
Half the answers are by people calling themselves the CEO of some dinky Saas thing with five bucks recurring revenue. I don't even click on it if it comes up.
I don't understand why Quora had so many employees. I don't intend to harsh on them: I literally don't understand their business.
To my naïve understanding: they have an authentication system, a moderately high throughput CMS with a search engine, and...? + User-generated content. OK, some DevOps people, some people who negotiate with the CDNs. They seem pretty snappy so some serious work presumably went into the back end, but still. WhatsApp had only 50 people!
What am I completely missing here? why did they have 200 people?
IMO these types of companies never had a future. They only succeeded because of monetary inflation in the corporate sphere due to ultra-low interest rates.
If the interest repayment on a bank loan is less than 2%, then it means that any business which can make more than 2% profit on their activities is profitable. But do such businesses deserve to exist? The Fed sets the interest rate so they decide what kind of business is profitable and is allowed to exist.
It's obvious why the current economy has benefited tech companies that operate at high scale with ultra-low or close to 0 profit margins.
California Employment Development Department said the company had not filed the type of notice that is required for mass layoffs, suggesting the cuts in the state involve fewer than 50 employees.
“We need to reduce our burn rate to a sustainable level from which we can focus on pursuing the mission and growing the business over the long term.”. The question is: what mission?
So they overestimated what Quora really could be and burned way more money? Or is Google suffocating smaller tech companies?
Content curation doesn’t scale as well as search algorithms. It reminds me of Yahoo and other portals who relies on editorial staffs (not meant it in a bad way).
Quora used to be my favorite place to find interesting answers. Now the site is filled with marketers. It's mystery for me how the site still show up on Google every time I need to search something.
burn rate? so they are still running on vc? i guess it doesnt surprise me. they arent the worst thing to get massive vc. i will be very entertaining to see when the next recession hits and all these shitty companies dry up overnight. and it will be nice to have fewer arrogant tech peoples around who only have money because of misguided investors who have more money than sense.
“Quora, a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup”
Companies that are ten years old are no longer startups.
“IBM, a 109-year-old software & services startup, will enhance the red carpet livestream with Grammy Insights with Watson this Sunday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles."
Quora was a good product. I remember the first time I used it, I was amazed by the quality of their answers. Even Jordan Peterson betseller book was based on a Quora answer.
Sadly, they decided to focus on questions instead. Now, it's filled with garbage questions and it is just slightly better than Yahoo answers.
I stopped using Quora because Latin-American Political Right never, absolutely never, were censored, but if I would post something favoring Peron's Government, Allende's or the first Chavez, they would censor me. I was talking about political and social advancements, while they would be claiming that the dictatorships never disappeared innocent people, they never stole to their victims and a long etc.
Every year was becoming worse, it was like the US government explicitly put people to shape political comments against Latin-American governments. Community was getting worse. So many people like me just left.
According to the article, the number of layoffs is unknown (though I assume we'll know shortly since they're required by law to report it in California). They have approximately 200 employees, it also mentioned.
According to a quick search, they were certified for 57 H1B visas. You read that right: 57 employees, in just 2019, of an approximate 200 person workforce, are foreigners that CEO D'Angelo claimed he was required to hire because he could not find US workers.
It looks like another 50 or so in the previous two years.
So half their employees are foreigners? How many US citizens are being laid off?
Some of these jobs, according the Department of Labor's data, are paying as low as $60K... in Mountain View.
Truly disgusting that this company is abusing the system like this. A fair punishment for these companies, along with all their visas being immediately revoked and a massive fine to discourage others, would be for the executive board to be forced to move their company to S. Asia, since apparently that's where their talent pool originates. If they aren't willing to hire US workers, they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the infrastructure, laws, capital markets, etc. that are provided by US taxpayers.
Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content.
Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets. This is theft!
My guess is that Yelp is next.
EDIT:
I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now. The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?
TripAdvisor, Quora, and Yelp are just as rent-seeking and profit-driven as Google.
If I write a review on TripAdvisor or Yelp or answer a question on Quora, I, the author, certainly don't get compensated for it. If Quora fails and another company takes their place, it's no loss to me - I'm no less (and no more) willing to write for the new company for free. If I write the review on Google itself, I lose nothing. Perhaps something is structurally lost for the internet by allowing Google to be a monopoly, but there aren't any incentives for me to care.
If you want a thriving internet, fix that. Ideally, make it the case that when I write a good answer to a technical question on my blog, it's as likely to be seen as when I write a good answer to a technical question on StackOverflow - the idea of companies relying on SEO content is a structural failing in the first place. Then figure out how to motivate me to keep posting to my blog (which might be letting me, the actual author, monetize my blog somehow, but might just be me writing for the pleasure of writing and knowing other people are seeing it - or perhaps the quantified pleasure of seeing trustworthy upvotes in some way).
There is no moral high ground in this story.
For Quora and StackOverflow, they can (and do) index personal blogs etc., too. Google is a search engine; they don't need a single fixed third party to be the first search result to all questions in a category.
And if you want it, Google sees most credit card transactions. In 2017, they said, "Google’s third-party partnerships ... capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States." https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal... (Later reporting found a deal with MasterCard, at least.) So they could absolutely know if you bought the Amazon item or booked the hotel, if they wanted.
I wholeheartedly agree that there's a centralization concern about letting one company have so much power, but that doesn't change that there doesn't seem to be much advantage in another party being the review aggregator. If we can't figure out how to return control to the actual reviewers, Google is no worse of an aggregator.
There are distinct advantages to having a single cloud, with a single set of protocols/APIs/etc. The only issue I see is if Google starts filtering/blocking in a significant way, then the blocked communities will build their own infrastructure. But Google wouldn't want that data, since they are filtering it out in the first place, except perhaps to train their filters more accurately.
Again, ianal and dont really know what im talking about
But you do get 'compensated' you get a good feeling from it.
Along those lines there are many things that people do in which they get 'compensated' not by money or that money isn't the primary motivator.
Jeff Bezos does not get up and go to work every day because he wants to amass more money 'be compensated for what he does'. Yes it's a by product but I would argue it's not what drives him. He does it for other reasons and has other motivations.
Another example - A woman who volunteers at a hospital and doesn't get paid a salary does it to keep busy and to feel good not for 'compensation'.
Not saying money isn't important. But nobody comments on HN and gets paid although some people have made money as a result of commenting but my guess is that is not what led them down that road or kept them at it. [1]
[1] I say this from personal experience having made (to this day) a boatload of money making comments in another place (really you have no idea). But 100% never did it for that reason at all.
It’d be interesting to study how does HN thrives; more deeply understand the incentives that sustain the HN ecosystem.
If you want a thriving internet, get out of the way. Too many big companies and governments are trying to force us to see only certain things.
Stop that! Back to the early 90's.
Generally, I find Quora to be a pretty "ok" place to have a conversation. Better than most of Reddit, for sure. (Reddit does have some fantabulous subs to be sure, but not very many! :-) )
EDIT: HN is good for conversations in threads, although they can veer off track pretty wildly. Reddit can get pretty vitriolic. You could have a conversation, but the participants destroy it. Twitter? Fuggedaboutit. Are there sites I ought to look at where I can have a polite discussion with people that I may or may not agree with on various topics? [FWIW - Before 2008, Reddit itself was pretty close to this, except for maybe /r/politics]
OTOH a lot of legitimate questions were answered by specialists or people very familiar with the subjects
I only go there to read a few people's opinions on things. If you restrict yourself to those people then Quora seems ok. If a Quora link shows up in my search results -- I know it's going to be useless.
The only problem is Quora seems to aggressively promote clickbait scammers / self-promoting twits. I find myself actively logging on to Quora very rarely these days as it becomes harder and harder to repel useless content from my feed.
I just don't click Quora links anymore.
To me Quora is just a more entitled/self-righteous version of Reddit, and much less fun.
It is Quora itself that needs to justify against that valuation, not anyone else. Where that is fine or not, I think the news itself is self-explanatory.
I'm finding it hard to think of other domains with succesful quasi-public institutions run by for-profits without monetization. Are there other examples?
It works really well for blocking quora from google results.
Before that, Quora felt like a small community similar to HN. They had founders and executives answering questions. They were still spamming email afair but not as aggressively as today and it didn't have what is x + 3 = 10?
I deleted it after I reached a million answer views from a sudden growth. The users that moved in completely destroyed the whole thing.
That day, I learnt acquiring users via heavy marketing or SEO may not be a good decision for a community. They are better as spectators or consumers.
This frustrates me, but I think Quora's UX and marketing decisions greatly exacerbated this effect. Quora shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun thanks to their sign up walls. At one point (and probably still true), you couldn't even click a link to a related question within Quora itself without being forced to sign up.
This acts as a resistance, causing people to essentially bounce from Quora back to Google after the first click, so they can get a related question or answer, which Google provides thousands of pages of for free.
Google was on one corner selling fresh-pressed lemonade, and Quora opened a lemonade stand for 10x the price on the exact same corner. Rumor has it, Google's lemonade tasted better anyway.
Links from within Quora miss that and then you are prompted to login, but if you add the question mark you can access the target without logging in.
Not only that, this (as well as many other simple "tricks" or "workarounds") creates (arbitrarily) two kinds of users, those that know the trick and those that don't (and likely create two different sets of user opinions).
I mean, to me (because I know the little trick) usage of Quora is relatively painless (though I still try my best to avoiding using it because of the mostly terribly bad content) whilst another user that doesn't know the trick and doesn't want to login may have the illusion that the content, once accessed, may have some value.
Anecdotally, Quora has taken a top spot in SEO alongside Stackoverflow for a lot of my searches (and Reddit). I think that over time this will improve actually and I don't think this layoff is because they are doing poorly, rather the opposite, I predict they're doing well enough to go IPO soon and need to clean house.
I'll be happy to see Yelp go down too, I don't like the idea of extortion under the threat of bad reviews.
Tripadvisor has a great mobile app, and actually a mobile app makes sense, as I want to browse local results, filter and compare restaurants and activities easily.
As for quora, it's more like entertainment where I just want it to be part of my internet browsing experience, just like Reddit, where I don't want to load a mobile app just so see a result.
An no, google didn't steal anything from yelp. They just let users review places and post pictures.
TripAdvisor also has somewhat reasonable coverage internationally.
In my experience, none of these sites are great but they’re probably better than walking into a random restaurant.
"In its 2013 settlement, the FTC ruled against Google on scraping. Rivals can now opt out of having their content lifted, without fear of being demoted in the search rankings."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-il...
The problem is not the monopolistic and profit-driven practice. It is that consumers are not willing to pay for anything and do not mind for their data to be mined, hence the only way for B2C are ads.
I understand that Google competes with Trip Advisor with their own travel offering but might you or someone else explain how they use NLP algorithms steal business from them? Also could you elaborate on how they might be using NLP on Quora to their advantage. Where or how do they compete with Quora exactly? Thanks.
Judging by the number of copycat sites surfacing in Google search results I don't think there is anything monopolistic in stealing the content.
Remember internet portals? Google is slowly transforming from search engine into one.
Most of the companies I've worked for are largely oblivious to this and continue to invest heavily in making their pages appear attractive to Google - even when the end result is negligible at best. It seems to be a really good way of draining developer resources at the expense of innovation. But perhaps that was the intention all along.
Not that I see them much anymore. I switched to DDG and will not be switching back.
Lots of startups do that and most of those don’t get far. Quora did and now they need to fix it. Just like code debt.
To be honest, it's not even clear to me that what google did was copyright infringement. It seems distasteful, even dishonorable, but I'm not convinced it goes beyond that.
- As a software engineer, what makes you roll your eyes every time you hear it?
- What did your mother say that made your jaw drop?
- What can I learn in one minute that will be useful for the rest of my life?
Those open questions just feel clickbait-y, with no real value added.
I occasionally see questions similar to the last one on HN (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913129), it’s OK once in a while, but I hope it doesn’t become the norm. I think the HN userbase’s mindset and strong moderation guarantees that for now.
I have first hand knowledge of somebody who made pretty good money doing exactly that. His rule of thumb was: the dumber the question, the more profitable it was for him.
* Did Picard violate the Prime Directive in TNG S6E13?
* If five ninjas attacked you, how you would you physically defeat them?
* Here's the intellectual take on Spiderman fighting Batman, do you agree?
* Men who have dated supermodels, what was it like?
I thought it was supposed to be a somewhat serious site but it obviously wasn't. I don't think I ever went back. Perhaps the whole point was just a glorified PHP BBS, with a nice theme, better seo, and SV in-crowd early adopters. I never got it.
I know you typed that randomly, but for anyone wondering:
> Geordi La Forge falls in love with a woman accused of murder in an isolated communication relay station. The Enterprise crew investigates the crime, the only other suspect is a Klingon officer who frequently visited the station. > In 2019, ScreenRant ranked it the ninth worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation based on IMDB ratings, which was 6.1 out of 10 at that time.[3] They were critical of the Klingon subplot and described Geordi as a sexual predator.[3]
> If five ninjas attacked you, how you would you physically defeat them?
Don’t let them circle you?
> Here's the intellectual take on Spiderman fighting Batman, do you agree?
Batman would win. Bruce Wayne is smart and has a bat cave and Peter Parker is just a junior intern at buzzfeed.
> Men who have dated supermodels, what was it like?
I would click that
They need to start incentivising answers in someway soon otherwise it's going to go even further downhill.
The constant notification/email spam and ad/suggestion riddent pages didn't help either.
I'd wish something like quora would relaunch on Federation or something - surely hosting a simple QA platform can't be that difficult or expensive.
There's plenty of good content, it's just overloaded by crap questions since Quora pays people to ask (but not answer).
But yes, the quality of discussion on AskReddit is low, which is why I unsubscribed more than half a decade ago. Thankfully, there's other sections of reddit that are in a better state. Quora, however, is a one-trick pony. It's just AskReddit and nothing else. There's no AskHistorians (with it's high standards) or askscience.
Some other threads are talking about Google stealing a lot of the content. That's definitely true for weather, flights, but things like long form content is still long form. I would argue these layoffs aren't a function of the GMachine at work, but more generally all the big tech firms with lofted valuations are being 'called in'. Every week, I see at least 1 large name running lay offs here on HNews.
The bubble at the 1B+ vals has started to correct. Firms are expecting people to prove their worth. Lots of times this means IPO and then trading on a multiple of earnings. Many of these guys aren't even near net positive so it's very scary.
I expect 2020 to be the year startups have a lot of trouble at the Series C.
It's interesting to see the inside view but see that none of it hits the financial press, or even the analyst stuff like seeking alpha.
[1]: https://venturebeat.com/2008/10/10/the-sequoia-rip-good-time...
D,E,F companies?
Instead of bemoaning this reality check we should all be grateful that so much of the world's wealth was redirected into overcompensating us for unproductive work for so long. How many of us are paid over $200k to perform unprofitable work? Its crazy! But its been going on so long it has become accepted as the norm.
Larger/profitable tech giants surely recognize there is no need to rush in an acquire startups for a premium...they will soon all be on the clearance rack...no one believes the valuations these companies and their VCs assign themselves anymore. Quora valued at $2 billion? I doubt they could get an offer for more than $100 million at this point.
Interestingly since so much of the deadwood never made it to IPO, this culling could end up being a nonevent to investors. They'll stay invested in AAPL and MSFT and not miss Bay Area private startups imploding.
Has the word "startup" simply replaced "company"? I'm thinking we should at least draw the line at a full decade.
At this point the word is meaningless to me. If anything I have noticed that “we are like a startup” is really code for “we are incredibly disorganized and chaotic but for some reason we are proud of it.” Any time something went wrong with one of these companies (was late to a meeting, forgot to attach something to an email, etc) the excuse was "sorry, that's just how it is working at a startup haha!"
+10 for candor
Really the only difference to me is that startup executives treat your time like it doesn't matter, 100% of the time. At bigger companies, we will schedule a meeting and talk about something. Many of my small inexperienced clients just send Slack messages one after the other at 6PM on a Friday that make no sense and clearly have no thought behind them beyond "this worked for my friends startup, lets try the same thing!!"
It just feels like 95% of startup founders I meet nowadays are so scatterbrained they can't communicate and will certainly never prepare for anything, all while expecting their employees to always be 100% prepared.
I am a "full-stack developer" (because I once worked through a React tutorial).
Recruiting and interviewing is a crapshoot, all around.
Sometimes a private company can take 10 or more years to reach the IPO stage. This is probably especially true for bootstrapped companies which can grow at a more steady pace than those VC-backed from very early on
Unfortunately the venture capital industry decided to just call everything they invest in a "startup" and the usage grew from there.
Barbershop on a corner is not a startup, it is known how this works and what it takes to make it profitable.
Barbershop in World of Warcraft or some other MMO which makes haircuts to your virtual Orcs is a startup, cause no one knows if this is viable as a business at all.
There's still a decent amount of amazing valuable answers from real verified experts but the experience of using it is horrendous and I've completely stopped trying to write anything anymore.
Yeah, that’s wrong. There’s no check for isLoggenIn().
I thought the recommendation is pretty good in terms of catching some attention. What's wrong with it?
There isn't anything wrong with this differentiation in some ways, but it has driven the company further down the SEO path and they don't seem to have tried other things. It feels like SO has built up a recruiting business, tried many times to get their Q&A software into companies with varying success, really managed the costs of their business, and invited public scrutiny of their tech. I can only imagine how much Quora are hemorrhaging from running costs and bad tech choices.
Just wondering if it is just me but I am surmising that it seems to indicate a wider systematic.. issue? Maybe issue is not the word for it. Symptom is probably a better description and it feels we are at the precipitous of an incoming storm/crunch/etc.
Please tell me I am imagining things.
Edit: I guess my question is more are all these layoffs an indicator of an incoming recession or is it something more nefarious like the big tech (FAANG) are taking steps to widen their positions while they are still in a "strong" position to do so (e.g. google).
I really doubt we're at a net negative.
What’s really protecting us from recession today, in my humble opinion, is that all of humanity is so interconnected and so hates recession that we’re willing to help out others who are on the brink of disaster of limit their failures to a small region rather than let it blow up in everybody’s face.
Also... small layoffs are not necessarily an indicator of recession, they can also be course corrections by overly optimistic companies whose wildly grandiose plans didn’t pan out as planned. While these well known businesses lay-off folks, my inbox is flooded by recruiters looking to fill multiple positions in a bevy of startups. In other words, business as usual.
It’s hard to disentangle the effect HN has on our thinking, though. Just because layoffs have popped up on HN, are we both imagining that it’s part of a global trend? Or do global tech trends inherently appear on HN? Hard to say.
My mortgage on a huge historic cotton mill loft with brick walls, 23'' ceilings, and city views in Atlanta is less than your rent.
You could consider getting out.
It seems like a no brainer to move. But you're ignoring the fact that someone of equivalent experience could get a paycheck of 500k here.
That pay differential swamps trying to optimize by tightening the budget.
I also can drive 7 minutes to work or run 30 minutes on the Beltline and shower when I get in.
There are more trees here than SF, and we have full seasons. It's also way more diverse. Not everyone is in tech. The dating scene is great.
SF isn't all it's made out to be.
> The dating scene is great.
Yeah, assuming you're a dude, the gender balance in Atlanta is probably much better, plus you're making excellent money in an area with much fewer people making bank; in SF, making 250k isn't even really that unusual, that's a mid-level dev position at Google, not even senior.
Re:diversity, I find there's this thing in the states where people count the percentage of black and Hispanic people as highly relevant to diversity, but Chinese and Indian people don't count, hence all the articles about how big tech companies are "mostly just white guys". Because the bay area really isn't very white, compared to the US as a whole.
I walk my dog 2 hours a day; are there places where the sidewalk density is high enough and the busy road density low enough that I could do that and have some route optionality so I'm not just doing the same walk all the time?
The Beltline plus Piedmont Park is a perfect fit. The Beltline is linear, but long (it circles the city), and all of the connected neighborhoods are extremely walkable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeltLine
Piedmont Park and Ansley are beautiful.
The Beltline will eventually connect to the Silver Comet trail, which is a completely paved bike path that extends all the way to Alabama.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Comet_Trail
If you're willing to get in the car, the Palisades, Kennesaw Mountain, and more are not far. They're extremely dog friendly, and I visit them often.
https://www.atlantatrails.com/hiking-trails/hiking-east-pali...
Also, Fetch Dog Park is freaking amazing. It's a dog park with alcohol. It blew up, and now they're opening four more locations in two other states.
https://atlantapetlife.com/fetch-dog-park/
You shouldn't have any problem.
I'm fully aware that I pay the "California Tax" to live somewhere with good weather, outstanding universities, and to work with some of the smartest people in my industry. But that's what I value right now. Different people are looking for different things.
Fingers crossed Atlanta makes good moves on the housing / transportation front in the next 20-30 years.
This part (and the city as a whole) feels like it could go either way.
The fed is ensuring liquidity in the overnight markets via short term loans which are paid back the next day (no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there, could be higher asset values require greater liquid reserves, or some form of capital outflow tightening usd liquidity due to the strength of the dollar, or something else?)
Unemployment is exceeding low, which means more jobs are filled, which means there are less job postings.
People have been predicting doom since the dawn of mankind and sometimes they’re right.
Not sure about the yield curve enough to offer any explanation or even what it means when you say it’s inverted.
Not sure who’s right or what signs are meaningful. Dimension reduction of a search space is a difficult problem. Lots of times people see what they want to see.
I can’t help but just throw my hands up these days and go back to ViM, if it was Vegas I’d split my money fifty fifty on doom and gloom and outstanding success.
The yield curve is relatively standard economic news: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/12/31/th...
Unemployment is used to define the recession so once that starts increasing again the process is already well underway.
I agree though, predicting a recession is like reading tea leaves. The data is so fuzzy and updated so infrequently that it's useless for practical decisions.
It's because JPMorgan Chase and friends think there is too much risk of intraday bankruptcy right now and no one wants to be left hanging on their loan.
Or the entire bank can be purchased/merged in which case your loan becomes an asset on the purchaser's balance sheet.
Bankruptcy doesn't mean "all bets are off".
People do know why there is less liquidity there. Something like the repo crisis doesn't happen out of the blue.
The yield curve is no longer inverted.
You end up with an investment bubble, which pops.
In recent years, oddly, even the questions seem fake, as if somebody somewhere is being paid to come up with questions. Why would I spend time to answer if not even the person asking seems to really care? Perhaps, I am not the only one to stop seeing the point in Quora a while ago.
Unfortunately, as predicted by pretty much everyone, it led to a massive influx of generic, repetitive, and trivial questions spammed endlessly to the top writers who have now stopped contributing. Most questions are just spam sinkholes in an endless battle by fake accounts for top position.
- Links to other questions open in new tabs
- Most content is not shown unless you login, they are really trying to push being logged in and their mobile app
- Answers with images seem to be ranked higher (even if poor quality)
- Clickbait-y questions and answers
I hope they can return to quality since in the beginning it was such a great resource - it was awesome to be able to get answers from domain experts, celebrities, etc... and the site was very usable.
All I was left with was impression that Quora hires people that are batshit.
Quora definitely does some questionable things nowadays, but I'd also argue they are still getting some key things right too.
And yes, I get they're doing it because it presumably works better on aggregate than not being assholes. That just makes me hate it even more.
Quora just makes me irrationally pissed off. I realize my dislike is over the top, some of the content isn't terrible, I'd love for the basic format to somehow work out, but the package is somehow worse than Trump tweeting and I sincerely hope it fails as soon as possible.
Oh, here's a bunch of Quora links. I'm screwed.
But to everyone else I'm sure it's really annoying.
That way, something like quora would grow more valuable instead of becoming more useless as they attempt to make money out of a squeezed lemon.
But Quora grinds my gears so hard that I can't separate the two.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210444
While it’s SEO is fantastic, the actual content is pretty marginal.
I have no idea what the ultimate point is like I do with, say, Wkipedia.
The "hard fact" questions have answers that suck. Absolutely. SO is wildly better for that.
It's really a place to go to follow certain people you can rely on to post interesting stuff (ex, there's a lot of really good ASOIAF content), follow niche topics and waste time. Like an entirely text-based reddit.
I don’t think there’s any better Q&A site?
Every day they send me an email with some answers on topics I'm interested in, and I can't help but click on 6-8 of them from EACH email. The median CTR in any other of email digests recieved by me is zero.
Exactly same to me as well!
If you or someone you know is affected, feel free to use this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hk4REpHkCCTS74MGGRNR...
As startup workers, we should shame loudly and publicly companies that don't provide sufficient severance packages. It's the difference between causing a slight disturbance in worker's lives and potentially huge financial hardship.
(Of course all employees should have a financial reserve. The fact is many people don't though. And even if they do, it hurts a lot to make them burn it down.)
Someone should make a blacklist of startups that did layoffs without sufficient severance. Maybe I'll get around to it.
If you're playing the startup game, you're trading job security and pay for potential upside. I know people who've been burnt just as bad as a layoff because the company got sold for scraps. Don't expect big company benefits out of a startup; that's not how the game works.
You know, good news story.
You're missing the forest for the trees.
It's Quora. It's Softbank imploding. It's WeWork. It's Wag. It's Uber. It's Tesla. It's Doordash. It's Lyft. It's Casper. It's 23andme. It's Digital Ocean. It's Mozilla.
Who knows what the financials of the giant private companies actually look like?
This is classic late economic cycle: the companies still appear to be succesful, but the fundamentals are shifting.
Most of that is my fault, but now that info is available someplace forever.
Then it basically became GeoCities or MySpace or whatever. Garbage, filled with ads and posters shilling their services and goods, just yucky. Plus, as others have mentioned, doing a simple search, going over to quora, and then being forced to login.
That's a polite way to put it.
I'd say the WeWork IPO-that-wasn't was the public saying don't foist your shit on us. How many VC bagholders are now sitting on "billions of dollars" in meaningless paper gains based on nothing but SoftBank's and others nonsense valuations?
Ebay and TripAdvisor are public companies.
EBay has probably been feeling at least some pinch for a while from Amazon creeping in on their B2C channels. When I used to work at a small retail shop, we boosted sales by selling on Ebay. Nowadays, I imagine it would be Amazon instead.
23 and Me is IMO a result of people NOT wanting their genetic data leaked/sold/etc. and the market reflecting that.
Quora is like StackOverflow but with different drama and worse layout.
Tripadvisor IMO is feeling the squeeze of AirB&B and it's ilk.
Still -could- be a sign, but I don't think it's entirely unexpected.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/bls/sequester_info.htm
You can search for something from Google, and the site allows you to view the page. Then the page suggests other links, and when you click on it, it forces you to sign in.
The trick is to copy that link, and open the page in a new incognito window.
I don’t know why they did it this way, but it’s thoroughly annoying, and I try to avoid visiting the site if I can. And I roll my eyes whenever that site comes up in a search result.
Whoever the ML engineers on the recommendation stack were.. really fucked up imo.
Creepy and bad.
Unfortunate that layoffs don't start with upper management.
Disclaimer: I didn't write this to badmouth or (un)recommend them. I am only curious if other people's experience is the same.
To my naïve understanding: they have an authentication system, a moderately high throughput CMS with a search engine, and...? + User-generated content. OK, some DevOps people, some people who negotiate with the CDNs. They seem pretty snappy so some serious work presumably went into the back end, but still. WhatsApp had only 50 people!
What am I completely missing here? why did they have 200 people?
If the interest repayment on a bank loan is less than 2%, then it means that any business which can make more than 2% profit on their activities is profitable. But do such businesses deserve to exist? The Fed sets the interest rate so they decide what kind of business is profitable and is allowed to exist.
It's obvious why the current economy has benefited tech companies that operate at high scale with ultra-low or close to 0 profit margins.
There was no interest at the time and advertising was a sole focus for business model.
CEO never followed up.
Sad.
Content curation doesn’t scale as well as search algorithms. It reminds me of Yahoo and other portals who relies on editorial staffs (not meant it in a bad way).
Companies that are ten years old are no longer startups.
“IBM, a 109-year-old software & services startup, will enhance the red carpet livestream with Grammy Insights with Watson this Sunday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles."
;)
I did not see that one coming.
Every year was becoming worse, it was like the US government explicitly put people to shape political comments against Latin-American governments. Community was getting worse. So many people like me just left.
According to a quick search, they were certified for 57 H1B visas. You read that right: 57 employees, in just 2019, of an approximate 200 person workforce, are foreigners that CEO D'Angelo claimed he was required to hire because he could not find US workers.
It looks like another 50 or so in the previous two years.
So half their employees are foreigners? How many US citizens are being laid off?
Some of these jobs, according the Department of Labor's data, are paying as low as $60K... in Mountain View.
Truly disgusting that this company is abusing the system like this. A fair punishment for these companies, along with all their visas being immediately revoked and a massive fine to discourage others, would be for the executive board to be forced to move their company to S. Asia, since apparently that's where their talent pool originates. If they aren't willing to hire US workers, they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the infrastructure, laws, capital markets, etc. that are provided by US taxpayers.
* ReportH1BAbuse@uscis.dhs.gov
* https://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Quora/1096469.htm
* https://h1bsalary.online/extended_lca_data.php?LCADataID=781...