Was the best source of Knowledge

This question lingered in my mind for a long time. Not unlike a typical millenial, I had an account on FaceBook and Twitter but the time spent on them was nowhere as close to that on Quora. Quora, the medium equivalent of “smart-is-the-new-sexy” enthralled me with it’s mature community. At least, in 2013, when I joined the platform, so it was. When I bought my first smartphone (2014 :), Quora and Pocket were the first two apps I installed. Within 5 months, I was in Top 5% of the readers among all Pocket users.

Come 2017 and Quora has lost “it” somewhere. It seemed to me that the refined 2013 community has been diluted somehow. I couldn’t explain it except the general sense that:

A huge amount of the questions were either duplicates or bullshit. (Quora recently held a Kaggle competition for identification of the duplicate questions. Hope they are working on it.)

Most answers were not so sincere or strongly written anymore.

The “facebook-vibe” had become too strong for me to deny it anymore.

By “facebook-vibe”, I refer to Upvoting and Following based on gender or profile pics, upvoting stupid answers over sensible ones beacause they’re “funny”. Fun has it’s place and so does sarcasm or limericks, but give it a break for questions serious enough.

Anonymous answers became too hard to believe.

Quora Moderation may as well be dead. Reporting people/answers, nothing seems to work.

The community didn’t feel as balanced as it did some years back. In 2014, it was easy to stumble upon a good writer on some topic not so apparent to me.

This made sense when I looked at the stats:

User Demographics

Top 5 Countries Quora Users Hail From

54.6% of Quora users come from just 2 countries!

Search Engine Traffic

Search Engine Traffic on Quora

The Way Ahead

Quora is still a strong platform, undoubtedly. It just has drifted off. We all do, as individuals. Then a community is, after all, the sum of it’s parts, no more, no less. But, the cause seems lost here.

Better people than me have tried to bring these points home on Quora as well.

A sample: Notice when it was written.

This is the link to the above answer.

Some of them were rebuked beacuse they were not “Top Writers”. I am not, despite being an Indian, offended by the claims of the dominance of Indian content on Quora, because it is True. But, people have been shot down for asking such questions on Quora. Hence, it seemed pointless about writing this on Quora itself.

Anyways, let this be known: