The tragedy of Q&A sites is the story of the internet.
Every day or two for the past seven months, I’ve received a “personalized” email containing a bunch of recent, user-generated questions from the website Quora. Here are some examples:
“I caught my son playing his Xbox at 12:00 in the morning on a school night. As a result, I broke his console and now he won’t talk to me. How can I tell him that it is his fault?”
“My husband accidentally pushed our 4-year-old daughter off the 40th story window out of anger. How do I prevent my husband from being sentenced to jail? He doesn’t need that hassle.”
“Was Hitler actually a nice guy in person?”
If I ever signed up to get these emails, I don’t remember. In fact, I didn’t even know I had a Quora account to begin with. This is apparently a common experience: In 2018, when the site informed users that their personal information may have been compromised in a data breach, a common response was, Wait, I’m a user? Even easier to forget is the fact that Quora, now more than a dozen years old, was once lauded as the future of the internet. Serious people proclaimed that it would be the biggest thing since Facebook and Twitter, that it would eclipse Wikipedia as an online reference source, that it was the modern-day Library of Alexandria. Today, perusing the site feels more like walking through a landfill.
A large number of the questions are junk. Many are not really questions at all; they’re provocations. On those occasions when users do seem to be in search of useful answers, the ones they receive are, to put it mildly, uneven. Whatever scant kernels of quality exist on the site are tough to sift from the mountains of inanity—at least in part because Quora tends to place the inane front and center, as in the so-called digest emails I receive. Perhaps the most common question type in these is the request for personal advice on how to handle some outrageous scenario contrived for maximum shock value. Other popular topics include college admissions, narcissism, and, yes, Hitler.
Last month, I posted my own question to the site: What the hell happened here?
I’m not the only Quora user asking. A quick search of the site reveals that, over the past five years, a version of this question has been posed many times in one form or another (“Why has Quora turned to crap lately?”; “Why do so many of the questions on this thing feel fake?”) and answered with varying degrees of helpfulness. My own post was met, by turns, with expressions of agreement, an exhortation to stop being “a lazy sack of shit” and read the previous responses to queries like mine, and a handful of genuine attempts to explain the site’s changing nature. But no one disputed the premise: that Quora had once been great and no longer was.
Quora emerged during a boom time for internet Q&A sites. From the late aughts through the mid-2010s, people could try to crowdsource information on brand-new forums such as Aardvark and Blopboard. They could go to recently rebranded mainstays such as Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves) and Pearl.com (formerly JustAnswer.com). Or they could post to the beloved Stack Overflow, the more exclusive Ask Metafilter, or the unadulterated chaos of Yahoo! Answers. Some of these other sites “were a mess, but they were still popular,” Adam D’Angelo, one of the co-founders of Quora, told WIRED in 2011, the year after his site became available to the public. “That told us that we were onto something.”
Read: The story behind that 9,000-word Quora post on airplane cockpits
Quora proposed to do much the same thing, only better. It would be free, general interest, and high quality. It would be like Facebook to the other Q&A sites’ MySpace and Friendster. And for a time, D’Angelo and his co-founder (both of whom had worked at Facebook themselves) seemed ready to make good on their promise. The community they built had an intimate, neighborhood feeling about it. A user would ask, “What does [Facebook co-founder] Dustin Moskovitz think of the Facebook movie?” and Moskovitz himself would drop in to supply the answer. Quora was providing smart, knowledgeable answers from bona fide experts, The Guardian wrote in 2011, in describing how the site was helping to push social media “away from pure search to more intelligent information systems.”
Venture-capital money poured in accordingly. “Rock-star team with a rock-star product” was the verdict from one major Silicon Valley funder. By 2014, the company had raised more than $80 million and was fast approaching a $1 billion valuation; Barack Obama was logging on to answer questions about the Affordable Care Act. Within a matter of months, though, some members of the tech press were describing Quora in the past tense, as a site that had “failed.” Not in the sense that the business was foundering or that its user base was contracting, but in the sense that it was maybe not the intelligent information system its founders had set out to create.
The site grew more cluttered with ads as the years went by, Suman Kalyan Maity, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT who has studied Quora since 2013, told me. Provocative content started to take over, perhaps because it led to more engagement and then, in turn, to more advertising revenue. Dipto Das, an information scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has published multiple papers on Quora, noticed something similar. As clickbait-type questions proliferated, he told me, the highest-quality users—including the “tech insiders and pundits” over whom The Guardian had earlier marveled—were discouraged from contributing at all. The introduction of the Quora Partners Program in 2018 only made things worse. In response to a shortage of posted questions, the company started paying users to come up with them. This system, which was discontinued last year, provided users with more topics on which they might weigh in. But not everyone appreciated the output: The program created “a giant factory for absolute crap questions,” as one longtime user put it. (In a blog post a few years ago, D’Angelo defended the program: “By all of our internal metrics, questions asked by partners are on average higher quality than questions by non-partners.”)
Read: Stop trying to ask “smart questions”
How exactly these developments affected Quora’s traffic and revenue is hard to know, because the company doesn’t typically share those numbers. The company has no backup or export tools and no public interface that would allow for queries from external software. It is one of relatively few social-media sites that prohibits the Internet Archive from keeping a record of its pages. Maity told me that Quora had threatened him with legal action if he and his collaborators shared the data they’d collected from the site.
A current executive at the company who spoke on its behalf but refused to be named acknowledged that Quora’s efforts to surface high-quality content sometimes falter. “We work very hard to sort the good stuff from the bad stuff,” he told me. But as the site has grown—and traffic levels are higher than ever, he said, more than 100 times what they were in the early days—this has gotten harder to do: “So it is accurate to say that the average quality of what’s written is lower than in the early days, even as the absolute amount of good content has increased.” Part of the challenge is striking the proper balance between quality and engagement. It’s a trade-off, and if you put too much stock in the former, the latter suffers. “You’ll get a very boring experience of the service,” he told me. It’ll be like an encyclopedia, or worse, a restaurant that serves only healthy food.
In its current form, Quora certainly doesn’t serve a lot of healthy options—but at least it’s still in business. In the years to come, the company may be serving something else entirely. D’Angelo, who is still Quora’s CEO, has sat on the board of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, since 2018, and over the past year, his company has focused on developing its own in-house chatbot service, Poe. For now, at least, Poe is not actually a large language model unto itself. You simply type your query in a search box and choose an existing chatbot or image generator—ChatGPT, Google-PaLM, DALL-E-3, etc. Poe is a separate site from Quora proper, but Quora now also offers answers written by ChatGPT alongside those written by humans. “Most of Quora’s energy right now is going to Poe,” D’Angelo said at a recent event.
What that means for the long-term future of Quora is not entirely clear. For the moment, though, the site is likely to remain in a state of thriving failure: Traffic is up; excitement is down. This is perhaps a natural phase in the life cycle of any social-media company, when users are still numerous but all of the initial hype has drained away. Quora once encapsulated a central premise of the internet, that connecting people with questions and people with answers across the globe would create an exchange of information unlike anything before it; that rather than seeking answers from a friend or in a library, you could put your query to … everyone. Today, the website spams my inbox with questions such as “Has your husband ever shared you with another woman?”
Fourteen years into its run, Quora now provides an answer to one fundamental question: How has the internet evolved? From idealism to opportunism, from knowledge-seeking to attention-grabbing, from asking questions to shouting answers.
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