brainwagon

Back around 2016 I had a tough time. A vertebrae in my neck began to pinch on the nerves that run down my left arm and began to cause pain and weakness. In the end, I had to have an injection into my spine to calm the pain, and spent months in physical therapy. I missed some of the first visits with my youngest granddaughter: while my wife flew out to Florida on an extended visit, I remained home on pain medication waiting for it to subside.

About this time I discovered the question and answer website Quora. On it, people posed questions, and people wrote answers. It had a number of unique features compared to other websites:

• It wasn’t a forum for debate. The purpose was to allow people to ask and answer questions, and the answers would be evaluated by a system of up or down voting.
• Comments on answers were allowed, but they were entirely at the discretion of the person who originally provided the answer. If a particular answer was especially ignorant or hateful, the author could simply delete it. This feature alone was an enormous benefit to maintaining reasonable discussions: obvious trolls simply found no traction.
• It proclaimed that their policy was “Be Nice, Be Respectful.” Unlike platforms like Twitter which have allowed all kinds of hateful or even threatening content to persist on their platform, hateful comments were generally deleted by authors, and hateful answers were generally reported and removed.
• Quora policy was that people use their real names. Fake identities were not permitted, and when detected generally quick action was taken to remove them. This also helped elevate the quality of discourse.

I found it fun and a useful distraction from my arm pain. While flat on my back, I started writing. I don’t believe that I was a particularly good writer, but I had a few good moments. My answers spanned a wide variety of topics (for a while I was one of the top ten writers on the subject of “Peanut Butter” or “Cats”) but I spent a lot of time musing about various political themes in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election, and answering a large number of questions about atheism, topics which I never thought to cover here on my own blog.

And, without doubt, my own blog suffered as many of you observed. Since I was flat on my back, many of my own projects lapsed. It was simply easier to answer random questions than it was to develop a coherent project and document it for the enjoyment of all.

But on Quora, I reached a much broader audience than my blog had ever reached. In my best week, I was getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. I rocketed past one thousand followers (a level that I’ve never reached on any other platform, even Twitter) and then two, three, five thousand. I got my first “Top Writer” status in 2016. Today the number of followers I have has slowed, but I still have over eight thousand followers and have been consistently ranked as a Top Writer.

But as of this week, I think I may have written my last Quora answer.

The platform has changed. I’ve no idea what their business model or business plan is, but many of the things that I liked about it in the beginning began to be blunted or removed.

It really begins with the quality of questions. I spend a lot of time in the political arena, and I was not immune to the increasingly partisan nature of political communication in the United States. You might expect some degree of partisanship to creep into answers, but what’s really become annoying is how often it creeps into the questions themselves. I routinely downvote such questions. More often than not, when I investigate other questions by the same author, I find a questionable identity that has been creating dozens of questions in the span of a day. Sometimes they are all on a particular theme, but as time goes by, it seems like some are deliberately injecting different but relatively anodyne questions to (I presume) create an illusion that they are in fact a real person.

But it goes further. Recently Quora instituted a program where people could get paid some small amount of money for writing questions. Writing good question is indeed valuable, or even key to Quora’s value. But this has created an odd kind of perverse incentive. It isn’t hard to find people who are doing nothing but writing questions, at a rate of several per hour, in an obvious attempt to game the system and make money. I spent another minute and found another. My feed (and probably everyone else’s) is clogged with crap of this sort, and there is no getting away from it. Far from incentivizing the creation of good, thoughtful content, Quora has instead provided an incentive to open the fire hose of drivel so that a few people could make a few pennies.

But something bothers me even more.

There are tons of fake identities on Quora. I am normally not opposed to anonymous posts. I recognize that there are some legitimate reasons to want to hide your identity. Perhaps you don’t wish your employer, family or friends to know some particular details about your life. But more often than not, anonymity and false identities are used to create poor quality content that may created to manipulate public discourse on topics that clearly need sober and lucid discussion. As more information comes out about state actors using Facebook prior to the elections in 2016, it raises the distinct possibility in my mind that the increasing popularity Quora makes it increasingly desirable as a vector for injecting disinformation into the minds of the public. Even if you aren’t a state actor, there are likely other groups or people who are gaming Quora to drive traffic to other websites or perhaps just to influence the public narrative about topics of the day. Judging by the number of complaints from other Top Writer colleagues, I’m not alone in noting an increase in obvious spam-related answers. It’s not hard to find posts or Youtube videos about “how to drive traffic to your website using Quora.”

Bleh.

One last thing: Quora is almost entirely opaque as a platform. I can get some basic statistics about my own answers from a webpage, but Quora provides no API or analytics that allows me to gain more insight about Quora answers. I can give you this overview of my views over the last 30 days:

But I can’t answer all sorts of meaningful questions like “How many views per day am I getting?” “Is the trend up or down?” “What topics that I’m writing in are the most viewed?” “What are the views per day for a particular answer that I wrote?” And likely dozens of more questions that I haven’t thought up.

On a related topic, there is no meaningful way to search Quora. It’s impossible to find an answer that you wrote with keyword search, much less anyone else. Among other things, this means that many questions are asked over and over again, with slightly different wording.

Sigh.

But really, in the end, the thing that depresses me the most is that it seems to me that Quora simply doesn’t scale. Maybe it’s simply impossible for public discourse of this kind to scale, and that it will always generate 99% chaff and 1% wheat, but it felt like it was doing a better job before, and now it is fundamentally broken.

So, a couple of days ago I simply logged off with no intention to return. Breaking the habit is difficult, but as you may have noticed one positive benefit is that I’m back to boring you all with reports about cleaning my garage, which at least has the virtue of being a true story about me, who is an actual person.

And for the most part I’m happier writing about vacuum cleaner repair than talking about the increase in hyperpartisanship in the United States. I hope that overtime I will recover my desire to talk about the nerdy and mundane, and that somebody’s life will be better for the effort, even if it is only mine.

I’m back to thinking about radio and electronics. Tools and woodworking. The upcoming Maker Faire. And maybe even some new topics, like building ships in a bottle or model railroads. I think that even though fewer people will read this stuff, more people will feel happier having done so.

At least, I hope so.