I was working at the Institute of Customer Service when Quora launched, and I suggested we set up an account. This was early on in my web career, and I naïvely believed the way organisations got new customers was by providing quality information and a user experience that differentiated them from their competitors. One reason the Quora idea never took off was because writing good quality answers to complex questions takes a lot of resource.
WTf Quora: how a platform eats itself is a good read:
The introduction of Poe, backed by significant funding from populist-cosplaying investors like Andreessen Horowitz, shows how completely Quora has surrendered to the AI trend. The platform that once prided itself on being a home for human-generated content has now become a farm for AI-powered responses. Poe's monetisation features, which allow bot creators to earn money through subscriptions and per-message fees, incentivize the proliferation of AI-generated content at the expense of authentic human interaction.
Chat GPT and its like are distinctive products because you can add them to lots of things, regardless of whether a chat interface really makes sense, or whether the answers they generate are just plausible sounding strings of words. No doubt Quora would have offered some sort of crypto feature if it could have somehow been integrated into the service to make money.
The other reason we lost interest at the Institute was because Quora answers were so patchy and had that Silicon Valley, LinkedIn, see my TED talk vibe. It always felt fairly low quality. Was Quora ever that good? Maybe it did start out as a place where people “would altruistically gather and engage in stimulating discourse and knowledge sharing”, but that’s not my experience of it over the last 15 years.
Quora – like Facebook, Substack, Twitter et al – is a market-creating middleman. Its development followed a pattern we’ve seen many times. Quora drew users and unpaid content creators in with the promise of a free, gamified, “visionary“ service (in this case, access to knowledgeable, ‘altruistic’ answers) – and then they monetised it. In Quora’s case knowledge itself is marketised – the most valuable answers are those that create the most engagement with the platform, or exhibit the most breezy confidence. Experts have to provide “engaging”, attractive answers to gain a foothold in the market. AI is simply the latest means of creating that engagement on the platform – it just dispenses with the experts.