I am an ex-Quora user. I left some years ago due to all the now-typical enshitification of their services. You know, the AD injection, MODbots and stupid rules because person X had to ruin it for everyone. I had finally gotten used to those Ideas being the new normal for social sites when they are taking it further apparently.
I don't even go to Quora anymore, not for a while, so I have no idea when they started doing this garbage (I am guessing whenever GPT hit mainstream) but I happened to see one of their search results that contained a single answer from an "Answer Bot".
Didn't you sign up for Quora to ask and exchange questions and answers with...i dunno..maybe other...humans??? It just seems like doing something like that is really shittifing Quora, if I were still a member this would be enough to make me delete my account for sure.
It was bad enough when they started with the embedded answer-ADs and question-ADs.
It was bad enough when they added "premium answers".
It was bad enough when the mainstream joined in, in earnest.
But this takes the cake. So now you have to not only weed out all the crap responses, the ADs, and the moderator bots, you also have to deal with answer bots. I think their services now have finally hit an all-time low, and I am so glad I deleted my account years ago, even more so now that I've seen how much crazier things have gotten over there.
In other words, it would be like reddit adding AI reaction comments in posts (like this one) that directly address my post. (Not the auto-moderator nag posts or stuff like that, that is totally different as it isn't actually trying to "act human"). This just feels like overstepping to me.
I can only speculate as to why they decided to do this. I am guessing they are having a hard time competing with AI. But rather than making Quora a better place for humans to interact, they went ahead and kicked it up a notch by doing something that would make it not even worthwhile to go there. If I wanted AI answers, I'll go to GPT. And apparently if I want human answers, I won't be going to Quora.
Any thoughts?
We need Y! Answers back
I got a browser extension that blocks Quora a few years ago, never used the site but I was sick of 70% of Google results being from quora and half of the results were just links to different "answers" on the same page.
That and Google must have signed me in at one point because I'd constantly get quora emails about a question I'd searched months previously.
It's always been a shitty website.
Yup this is pretty spot on. I think Quora is shooting themselves in the foot.
But to be fair to Quora, there is no incentive to creating a website with high-quality information on it. It won't get noticed, and all of the content will just get stolen by AI. The tech giants will just continue to centralize the entire Internet and take all of the profit, without providing any content.
The only solution is AD block especially on Youtube/Google, use as few large cap tech services as possible, and block links to any domain that has AI content on (other than Youtube.com).
That totally defeats the purpose of the app. I thought they ruined it by not letting me us the website and needed just the browser.