Quora's Path To Annihilation

The ‘beginning of the end’ started on 28th January 2016. The image you see above isn't photoshopped. It was an official announcement by the company itself.

What was this?

It was a new public beta feature where anyone can announce a prize i.e money, for any question. The prize would go to the writer with the best answer. The catch was that the best answer was supposed to be selected by the sponsor. And, the sponsor can remain anonymous!

Basically, a cigarette company can sponsor the question ‘Can I smoke and still be healthy?’. And can reward the answer that is in favour of smoking. And still get away with it, because they can remain anonymous.

What would Quora get from this? Quora used to collect some fees from the sponsors. The amount was undisclosed.

What a terrible idea of monetization!

Ahh, the monetization, the killer of many startups, the slayer of giant companies. See, money is everything. Be it business or people, to survive you need money.

It was 2016, seven years had passed since the Quora was founded, so quite naturally not only the founders but also the investors were desperate to monetize it.

Before 2016, the company didn't try out any significant ways of monetization. In my opinion, this was a very serious attempt. Since that feature never saw the day’s light and doesn't exist anymore, it is quite evident that it must have failed miserably.

So, they introduced advertisements in April 2016.

In the pilot project, there were only four advertisers - Lever, Uber, Wealthfront and Sunrun.

(An early sample of advertisement, April 2016)

Two years later, in April 2018, Quora introduced the Quora Partner Program, another way of monetization. That seems to have failed terribly as it is dusted down these days.

Quora had the ideas and the user base to monetize its platform and had already implemented those ideas.

But, there was one problem.

Quora knows no demographic information about its non-registered users, which makes its copious content less monetizable. And while 300 million monthly users sound like a lot — about the same number of monthly users as Twitter, a $30 billion public company — Quora’s are not nearly as engaged, often brought to a particular individual page because of a random search or two.

The reason behind this was that as late as 2018, Quora was serving a very specific and niche audience. The site policies were very strict. You could not add irrelevant images and memes to answers. You could not have a fake name.

There were many such strict policies which kept Quora very clean and separated it from other similar platforms. These policies also helped Quora retain its core beliefs which made it an actual knowledge-sharing platform.

But, although this idea is plausible for its integrity, having a platform that caters to only a specific group of people is a bad business model and it is difficult to sustain it in long run.

So, the founders decided to make Quora the very thing they swore to destroy.

Gradually, all those policies were scrapped and moderation was made very liberal.

On April 19, 2021, the founders hit the final nail in the coffin by scrapping the real name policy. Finally, God can thank me for my answers.

Along with the scrapping of strict policies, Quora introduced Spaces.

As far as I understand, Spaces were introduced to gather like-minded people in one place so that they can be easily targeted by relevant ads. For example, in a space-related to technology, advertisements of a smartphone company will be very effective and will have maximum reach. Without spaces, it would have been really difficult to show the same ad to all those users.

All these deliberate attempts were made to make more and more people engaged in Quora. And, sadly, they succeeded.

Since the start of 2019, a new category of people started conquering the Quora.

These people were interested in clickbaits, memes, pictures and the daily routines of other people.

Gradually, Quora became totally opposite of what it used to be.

Long, insightful and intellectual answers started getting lost in the shadows of memes which were getting thousands of upvotes.

This is a very usual sight these days. Answers with nothing but a single picture have thousands of upvotes.

Why is it so?

Because the user base has changed totally. These new users are active aggressively and spend a considerable amount of time on Quora. This new wave of users overtakes the old users in terms of engagement. The new users are hyperactive in Spaces they love.

People are addicted to political spaces because there their biases get confirmation. That leads to more and more engagement. On top of it, this move has made Quora a place for everyone, and not just for a specific group of people.

Not just memes or clickbaits but porn is also now a significant part of Quora.

Basically, now Quora is actually a platform where you can share anything, literally anything.

All these factors which are results of the need for monetization have made Quora terrible.

And, this is the truth, the ultimate harsh truth. It is what it is.

Nothing is going to change until and unless the old users overtake the new users in terms of engagement. And, don't be hopeful, because that is never going to happen.

Quora has changed, Quorans have changed. And, that's an indisputable fact.