Quora used to be cool. I haven’t had the energy to move everything from there to a currently sensible place, because those don’t have a working import function. Copy-paste breaks so much.
It was social media for intellectuals. Barack Obama wrote a few answers during his presidency. Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) used to write there. Alan Kay (computer scientist from ARPA IPTO and Xerox PARC) still writes there.
In 2012, Quora’s other co-founder was smoked out. The remaining co-founder-CEO, a libertarian techbro who doesn’t use Quora, let smart people lead it until ~2017 when he started enshittifying it. Top writer promotion program ended. Real name policy ended. All answer wikis deleted without warning. Suggest edits function disabled. All community editing disabled, now stupid bots make a mess. Fired 99% of human moderation, bots fail at it, professional spammers moved in. Quora’s own AI-generated slop answers on the top of everyone’s feed. Every year the CEO does more damage.
Quora used to be cool. I haven’t had the energy to move everything from there to a currently sensible place, because those don’t have a working import function. Copy-paste breaks so much.
Cool how? What changed?
It was social media for intellectuals. Barack Obama wrote a few answers during his presidency. Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) used to write there. Alan Kay (computer scientist from ARPA IPTO and Xerox PARC) still writes there.
In 2012, Quora’s other co-founder was smoked out. The remaining co-founder-CEO, a libertarian techbro who doesn’t use Quora, let smart people lead it until ~2017 when he started enshittifying it. Top writer promotion program ended. Real name policy ended. All answer wikis deleted without warning. Suggest edits function disabled. All community editing disabled, now stupid bots make a mess. Fired 99% of human moderation, bots fail at it, professional spammers moved in. Quora’s own AI-generated slop answers on the top of everyone’s feed. Every year the CEO does more damage.
Quora 2013:
https://www.quora.com/How-does-monoamine-oxidase-MAO-cleave-monoamines/answer/Alex-Siegel
Quora 2016:
https://www.quora.com/Which-theory-best-explains-why-humanity-screws-up/answer/Rob-Ennals
About Quora in 2026: https://blog.franklinveaux.com/2026/01/quora-what-went-wrong/