Questioning Quora
A place where you can find answers. Yet latterly, a place chock-full of answers to disregard.
What’s that rule of thumb again? Something about 80% of everything is crap—?
Oh, okay: it’s 90% of everything. The rule is referred to as Sturgeon’s law, after science-fiction author Theodore Surgeon; he came up with it in the 1950s as a defense of science fiction (although it sounds like a criticism). His point being, science fiction is no different from anything else — the quality stuff is always just a little slice of the whole genre/experience.
…all of which segues, not exactly neatly, to my point in this post: an awful lot of the content on the Quora questions-and-answers site is really, really bad.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve enjoyed Quora, and learned from it, since I first heard of it. (My profile there tells me I signed up in June 2010.) I loved the idea: an opportunity to ask substantive questions of people qualified, and prepared, to provide substantive answers. I loved that when you posted a question, you were presented a list of recommended, uh, answerers, who would then get notifications asking for responses — based on their interest and competence in that realm of knowledge. You could check the qualifications — Quora calls them “credentials” — of anyone, recommended or not. (Granted, the qualifications were self-identified… which didn’t always lend credence to the claims. But you could at least check how they’d answered other questions in their fields, and make up your own mind.) And, damn, some of the best answerers on Quora were, and are, some of the best writers anywhere online.
[You are perhaps wondering about the credentials I’ve claimed for myself there. I opted for frankness and plain-spokenness rather than authority: “not an expert in much; probably interested in it anyhow.” I’m always pleasantly surprised, sometimes amused, when a questioner asks me to provide them with an answer; on the other hand, I always try to respond with an answer which takes their question seriously.]
I’m not sure when things started to feel like they’d gone off the rails. I don’t closely follow Quora’s policy decisions, but I’m sure they’ve grappled with the same hot-button issues confronting other social media sites: the widespread trolling and uncalled-for flame wars; whether and how to provide content moderation; validating users’ profiles; the dangers — and opportunities — which come with offering the option for users to simply create unprompted content. Whenever it first began, lately I’ve found myself just ignoring Quora, for reasons like this: “Answerers” who don’t respond to the question with a real answer, but instead post vacuous “teasers” as if they were real answers… with a “read the answer in the comments” link.
Here’s one such, with identifying information removed. Note that the answer currently has hundreds of comments, requiring one to scroll through a LOT to find the ONE comment allegedly containing “the answer”… but when you do find the relevant comment, all it contains is a link to a non-Quora site.
What happened to Ivanka Trump?
The reappearance of Ivanka Trump at the trial of her father left us with a new image of politics, with a reconfigured face and the suspicion of more than one aesthetic touch-up.
[before and after photos inserted]
Since Donald Trump lost the elections, not only has the controversial former president of the United States moved away (a little) from the media spotlight. His entire family has taken a discreet background.
Ivanka Trump, his daughter, and who was his advisor during his term, has been one of the characters who have disappeared the most from the public eye.
Read More Full Detail please see Comments box: [end of “answer”]
See what I mean? (And no, I didn’t follow the link to “the” off-site answer!)
Lately — in the last year, probably not coincidentally — I’ve also noticed a rise in the number of answers which do not link to elsewhere, and even sorta-kinda address the question. But the relevance is undercut by a tone and style resembling a stereotypical high-school student’s answer to an essay question. A Quora query like, say, “Why is [some assertion] true?” draws responses which state, for example, “The question of why [assertion] is true is an interesting one which has been addressed often by philosophers and scientists since ancient times… [blah, blah, blah — numerous sentences which probably do not name any actual philosophers or scientists] … Ultimately, it is up to each one of us as individuals to decide if [assertion] is true.”
(The high-school student here probably hopes both to (a) meet a word-count requirement and (b) run out of time before the buzzer sounds, automatically excusing their superficiality.)
One suspects this sort of answer to be AI-generated, not likely by Quora itself but by persons unknown, for reasons which probably have even the gods scratching their heads…
Which led me to visit Quora’s own AI engine, dubbed “Poe,” to see what it might tell me about Quora itself. I found an app of sorts, called Photo_CreateE, which is built on Poe and which could could generate images based on prompts. Interested in (as I thought) the people who answered Quora’s questions, I fed it a series of prompts about those people, including (or not) qualifiers which seemed to narrow the focus in ways which seemed reasonable. But, duh, just prompting “Quora answerer” gave me this wholly unsatisfying response:
I mean, really — a tiger-headed, uh, human (?) in vaguely 18th-century garb? In a light snowfall, at that? Adding various qualifiers like typical, human, female or male, elderly, and authoritative got me more, well, authoritative possibilities, like these:
These were interesting results, to be sure. But when I realized this post was really about the answers themselves, not about those providing them, I just prompted it with a simple but full question: “What would the typical Quora answer look like if it were a person?”
Results? The image shown at the top of this post. And that chimerical response, I realized further, pretty much summed up, for me, how best to describe the whole gestalt on Quora these days.
How about you? Have you used Quora much, as a questioner and/or answerer? If so, has it changed for you, too?
Back when you first recommended Quora, I wanted to use it, but...yeah, I just never was able to make time for it. I used to subscribe to it, but at some point, it just became more email I didn't read. So I unsubscribed. I felt like I was missing out, but I had to draw the line somewhere. (That damnable ever changing line.)