I was a hardcore user of Quora till a few years ago. In fact I was in the top 50 or so most followed users back when the site was growing (mostly thanks to a couple of my answers that ended up blowing up)
For me personally, Quora was special because the people on it were so different from each other. My first few follows were a NASA engineer, a published author, a student with radical views on theology etc.
But over time, with popularity, the site has devolved into a homogeneous mixture of people with similar views on most topics, from the same strata of society, mostly from the same country(/ies), with the same educational backgrounds, same sense of humour (My friend used to joke that the average writer on Quora is INTP Engineer from IIT who is working at a MNC but wants to change the world through NGO-work).
I think the change came about when Quora stopped charging for asking questions. This led to a flood of nonsense questions and a flooding of experiential questions over factual ones (eg. What is it like to be an older sibling vs. Why is the Attack on Normandy considered a turning point?). And of course experiential questions have waaaaaay more people who want to share their experiences on the same.
I think the day I lost hope entirely was when I was A2A "If Pakistan kidnaps Sachin Tendulkar, what would India government's response be?" (Yes, I'm Indian, but this question is silly in itself and the chest-thumping answers on this were even sillier).
Today, I still use Quora, though the last answer I wrote was about 3 years ago. I still have about 9K followers, but I follow a carefully curated list of about 70 accounts. It's utility as a website to "share knowledge" is very limited and I look at it today as essay-Twitter (Similar noise, similar debating, but just like Twitter, once in a while something good shows up)
For me personally, Quora was special because the people on it were so different from each other. My first few follows were a NASA engineer, a published author, a student with radical views on theology etc.
But over time, with popularity, the site has devolved into a homogeneous mixture of people with similar views on most topics, from the same strata of society, mostly from the same country(/ies), with the same educational backgrounds, same sense of humour (My friend used to joke that the average writer on Quora is INTP Engineer from IIT who is working at a MNC but wants to change the world through NGO-work).
I think the change came about when Quora stopped charging for asking questions. This led to a flood of nonsense questions and a flooding of experiential questions over factual ones (eg. What is it like to be an older sibling vs. Why is the Attack on Normandy considered a turning point?). And of course experiential questions have waaaaaay more people who want to share their experiences on the same.
I think the day I lost hope entirely was when I was A2A "If Pakistan kidnaps Sachin Tendulkar, what would India government's response be?" (Yes, I'm Indian, but this question is silly in itself and the chest-thumping answers on this were even sillier).
Today, I still use Quora, though the last answer I wrote was about 3 years ago. I still have about 9K followers, but I follow a carefully curated list of about 70 accounts. It's utility as a website to "share knowledge" is very limited and I look at it today as essay-Twitter (Similar noise, similar debating, but just like Twitter, once in a while something good shows up)