I'd argue that Quora by itself is nothing more than a search engine optimization scam.
I'd also have argued the same about Medium half a decade ago. It still is, in my opinion, but the people putting content on it have significantly improved.
I agree fully. I feel like Quora has degraded more and more over time. A while back, it was actually useful for specific questions in different disciplines (a la StackExchange), but now every answer I find on there contains a small blurb related to the question followed by "Why you should choose X for this solution!", with X being someone's product or service they are pushing.
Former two-time Top Writer here. I agree. I quit when I realized that Quora were routinely manipulating answer rankings and selectively enforcing their community rules to maximize clicks. Now it's full of stupid questions and clickbaity non-answers, with any real information pushed far down the page if it's visible at all.
I frequently find lots of good content on quora. It may be a bad company, service, whatever. But it's definitely more than just "a search engine optimization scam".
I could apply similar reasoning to Medium. I don't like Medium at all, but it obviously houses a bunch of quality content.
I agree, and Quora is also my top of mind reference for creepy personalization. Click on one click-baity article and then get spammed continually about related questions.
The guy in the article openly admits he's only interested in the monetary gain from spamming questions, rather than asking questions due to genuine curiosity. So this spammer is complaining and labeling the whole program is a Scam? FFS
Here's what's most likely really going on:
- Quora is trying to incentivize searching for answers to genuine curiosities on Quora. To do so, they prod with money.
- Quora has rules to identify spammers who are gaming the system.
- This person was clearly a spammer who was only interested in making money at the bottom of the barrel and was banned.
Wait, so you think that people should not actually be incentivized by the money that Quora pays to incentivize writing questions, but should instead be motivated by "genuine curiosity", except uh, somehow more so when being paid money, they just mustn't ever admit that the money is also a motivation?
That is beyond silly.
The author does not in fact admit that he's only interested in the monetary gain, quite the opposite actually: he writes "asking questions became like a sport to me".
Motivation isn't and cannot be a criterium to judge what makes someone a spammer, only the quality of the content.
There's absolutely valid criticism of Quora here on the following points:
- "prodding" people to work for them with promises of money (actually more than just promises, the money was represented as already belonging to them).
- Then, when someone has provided a considerable amount of content for them over the course of a month, banning them without a warning and failing to pay out the promised money.
- Being unwilling to give proof for or even specify what the user was banned for.
It's really not much different from a company hiring someone and promising commission-based payments, and then one day before payday firing them without giving a warning or a reason, and refusing to pay out any commissions for the whole month the person worked for them.
But hey, it's the "sharing economy" now, so that makes it OK!
The OP was invited to the partner program by Quora who actually thought a financial incentive was a good way to get quality answers. You seem to have moral objects to that, but both partners in this partner program were obviously okay with it. Nowhere it is claimed that his answers where spam or of low quality. As I understand the system, money is awarded on the quality answers the question receives. Maybe he is just good at asking the right questions. There are lots of people making a career out of asking the right questions.
Now Quora would still be fine terminating the partner program with the OP for whatever reason they see fit. What is not okay is that he did not get paid for the questions he asked, because that was the nature of their partnership.
It looks like Quora is trying to avoid paying for a service (questions) they received within a contract (the partner program) they themselves proposed. The term scam does not seem too far fetched.
To me, the fact that Quora is offering money to people asking questions implies they WANT people to do it for monetary gain. If the system works right, Quora is sharing a portion of the income that they themselves gained from the question, which means that despite the intent of the partner, they still earned money off of it.
Of course, it will attract malicious actors, if the entity asking questions sends a bunch of bots onto quora to perform ad fraud or however Quora earns money on the asked questions. But Quora will probably never be able to prove the partner was behind the bots.
I'm sure there's plenty of companies that close their eyes to certain categories of specialized spambots or content farmers if they're earning money off of it and it's not malicious. It's only when the advertisers complain that they would start doing something against it.
I agree it's working fine, but in a POSIWID sense.
As a former Quora Top Writer [1], I'd say Quora's Partner Program is a bad idea. They're substituting an extrinsic reward, money, for intrinsic rewards (like wanting to know the answer to a question). That is proven to reduce quality, originality, and learning. [2] Like all affiliate programs, spam is not a side effect of the program; it's built in. In the POSIWID sense, it's the purpose.
Assuming his screenshot is correct, Quora must have been making plenty of money from him if they were willing to pay him $2k for a month's work. And now they're making even more money, in that they're going to keep the $2k, and all the profitable questions he asked. Plus they also get the feeling of performative virtue that comes with banning the naughty spammer.
In reality, it was always a double bind. They were paying people to do a thing, but not wanting them to act like they were paid to do a thing. And whichever side you fall on, Quora wins and you lose.
But this sort of doublethink pervades Quora. From the get-go, it was supposed to be an elevated discussion, a coming-together of great minds and great writers. But they have been burning something like $20m/year for a decade. That bill was always going to come due. They were always going to have to act a lot more like the grubby, money-motivated properties from which they pretended to be different. Now that they're at the 10-year mark, presumably their many investors are eager for return, so I expect this is just the start of the shenanigans there. And given the number of good writers in the audience, I'm sure we'll hear about it in detail.
I am a Quora Parner myself but I never took it seriously. I have 680 answers and only 84 questions. I mostly use it to find genuine advice when I need an answer fast. That being said, I have never had a good experience with their moderation team. I honestly feel like the site is run by a bunch of crooks but I have no evidence to support that. That's just my opinion formed over the past few years of operating on the site and the occasional run ins with their moderation team.
"Quora Partnership Program is a by-invitation-only program where Quora invites authors and other people to ask interesting questions"
I don't quite understand the program. I would've guessed this program pays people to ANSWER questions, not ask them. Quora has a shortage of questions, but not a shortage of answers? That surprises me, or are people also paid to answer questions as well?
It's about advertising. Each question provides an opportunity for many people to answer it. It's like a trivia game -- you don't pay people to answer trivia questions. They come to give an answer, and they get shown an ad.
If they get lucky, they may also be able to show an ad to somebody who got there via Google with a vaguely similar question. They spent a number of years getting a very good reputation with a "Top Writers" program, attracting people who wrote good answers in exchange for merch (but not cash). That provides a lot of inbound links, and now they're monetizing it.
I'm not sure why anyone contributes hours of their time to this sort of "incentive" program. The power lies entirely with the platform. They can pay or not pay on a whim. They can choose to explain their decision or not. There's no real recourse other than writing a blog post about it.
In fact, I'm not sure why anyone wastes time writing content at all for a business that uses that content to serve ads—at least not without a legally binding contract with clearly described payment obligations.
> I feel Quora's content quality is slowly becoming more like the dreaded Yahoo! Answers.
For some reason quite a few senior people in my field seem to take time to post extremely authoritative answers to questions on Quora. I don't see any other site coming close to the quality.
No matter what the intentions are on either side, this is still a user creating data inside the black box that is a web service/company/database and once you do that it's their data. They can shut you out at any moment for any reason, right or wrong. I try to avoid all of this where possible and if I have anything in the cloud I keep a backup of everything, say in the case of Fastmail or Gmail I use isync. Anything else that isn't critical I just accept that one day it might not be there. I know this isn't addressing anything in the article directly I just mean generally if people are going to be annoyed if a company has changed the goal posts in their domain then don't commit to using that service. Offline first!
Feels like there's a whole other side being left out - there's no correspondence with Quora posted, just "Long story short: they accused me of foul play and told me that they weren’t going to pay out my earnings. When I inquired about the whole ordeal they were neither able to provide proof for their claims nor were they willing to specify what they accused me of."
Definitely curious what foul play he was accused of.
They're famous for not explaining themselves. Nominally, they're trying to avoid getting bogged down with explanations and counter-explanations. Trolls will happily troll moderators with interminable arguments.
I hadn't heard them accused of doing so just to avoid paying out. I wouldn't put it past them, though it does seem like Hanlon's razor would apply -- that it's stupidity rather than malice.
In the case of Quora Partners, the program attracts large quantities of very repetitive questions with little guidance on which ones cross the line from merely boring ("Who was the star of movie X?") to unacceptable ("What fruit starts with A/B/C/D...?" "What is 74+1? What is 50-3?...") Even if I knew their questions, I couldn't tell you if they'd find it acceptable.
You used to be able to delete your account and content from Quora. At least I did it a few years ago after they started with sponsored content between answers.
Hmm ... I can't scam you out of free content any more but the image of your signature at the bottom of your blog post is going to be very useful when emptying your bank account.
[+] [-] inetknght|6 years ago|reply
I'd also have argued the same about Medium half a decade ago. It still is, in my opinion, but the people putting content on it have significantly improved.
[+] [-] kossae|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ckocagil|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bananamerica|6 years ago|reply
I could apply similar reasoning to Medium. I don't like Medium at all, but it obviously houses a bunch of quality content.
[+] [-] fergie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nazca|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treyfitty|6 years ago|reply
Here's what's most likely really going on: - Quora is trying to incentivize searching for answers to genuine curiosities on Quora. To do so, they prod with money. - Quora has rules to identify spammers who are gaming the system. - This person was clearly a spammer who was only interested in making money at the bottom of the barrel and was banned.
Sounds like everything is working fine.
[+] [-] brazzy|6 years ago|reply
That is beyond silly.
The author does not in fact admit that he's only interested in the monetary gain, quite the opposite actually: he writes "asking questions became like a sport to me".
Motivation isn't and cannot be a criterium to judge what makes someone a spammer, only the quality of the content.
There's absolutely valid criticism of Quora here on the following points:
- "prodding" people to work for them with promises of money (actually more than just promises, the money was represented as already belonging to them).
- Then, when someone has provided a considerable amount of content for them over the course of a month, banning them without a warning and failing to pay out the promised money.
- Being unwilling to give proof for or even specify what the user was banned for.
It's really not much different from a company hiring someone and promising commission-based payments, and then one day before payday firing them without giving a warning or a reason, and refusing to pay out any commissions for the whole month the person worked for them.
But hey, it's the "sharing economy" now, so that makes it OK!
[+] [-] ratel|6 years ago|reply
Now Quora would still be fine terminating the partner program with the OP for whatever reason they see fit. What is not okay is that he did not get paid for the questions he asked, because that was the nature of their partnership.
It looks like Quora is trying to avoid paying for a service (questions) they received within a contract (the partner program) they themselves proposed. The term scam does not seem too far fetched.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
Of course, it will attract malicious actors, if the entity asking questions sends a bunch of bots onto quora to perform ad fraud or however Quora earns money on the asked questions. But Quora will probably never be able to prove the partner was behind the bots.
I'm sure there's plenty of companies that close their eyes to certain categories of specialized spambots or content farmers if they're earning money off of it and it's not malicious. It's only when the advertisers complain that they would start doing something against it.
[+] [-] wpietri|6 years ago|reply
As a former Quora Top Writer [1], I'd say Quora's Partner Program is a bad idea. They're substituting an extrinsic reward, money, for intrinsic rewards (like wanting to know the answer to a question). That is proven to reduce quality, originality, and learning. [2] Like all affiliate programs, spam is not a side effect of the program; it's built in. In the POSIWID sense, it's the purpose.
Assuming his screenshot is correct, Quora must have been making plenty of money from him if they were willing to pay him $2k for a month's work. And now they're making even more money, in that they're going to keep the $2k, and all the profitable questions he asked. Plus they also get the feeling of performative virtue that comes with banning the naughty spammer.
In reality, it was always a double bind. They were paying people to do a thing, but not wanting them to act like they were paid to do a thing. And whichever side you fall on, Quora wins and you lose.
But this sort of doublethink pervades Quora. From the get-go, it was supposed to be an elevated discussion, a coming-together of great minds and great writers. But they have been burning something like $20m/year for a decade. That bill was always going to come due. They were always going to have to act a lot more like the grubby, money-motivated properties from which they pretended to be different. Now that they're at the 10-year mark, presumably their many investors are eager for return, so I expect this is just the start of the shenanigans there. And given the number of good writers in the audience, I'm sure we'll hear about it in detail.
[1] Specifically a top writer in 2013 and 2014: https://www.quora.com/profile/William-Pietri
[2] See, e.g., Kohn's Punished by Rewards: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004MYFLDG/
[+] [-] Vysero|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blakesterz|6 years ago|reply
I don't quite understand the program. I would've guessed this program pays people to ANSWER questions, not ask them. Quora has a shortage of questions, but not a shortage of answers? That surprises me, or are people also paid to answer questions as well?
[+] [-] jfengel|6 years ago|reply
If they get lucky, they may also be able to show an ad to somebody who got there via Google with a vaguely similar question. They spent a number of years getting a very good reputation with a "Top Writers" program, attracting people who wrote good answers in exchange for merch (but not cash). That provides a lot of inbound links, and now they're monetizing it.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|6 years ago|reply
Sometimes asking the interesting question is the hard bit.
[+] [-] jcmoscon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veen|6 years ago|reply
In fact, I'm not sure why anyone wastes time writing content at all for a business that uses that content to serve ads—at least not without a legally binding contract with clearly described payment obligations.
[+] [-] sonicxxg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|6 years ago|reply
For some reason quite a few senior people in my field seem to take time to post extremely authoritative answers to questions on Quora. I don't see any other site coming close to the quality.
[+] [-] MrFantastic|6 years ago|reply
Most of the question could be easily answered with the first result from Google or are purely opinion based.
[+] [-] ec109685|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roryrjb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awillen|6 years ago|reply
Definitely curious what foul play he was accused of.
[+] [-] jfengel|6 years ago|reply
I hadn't heard them accused of doing so just to avoid paying out. I wouldn't put it past them, though it does seem like Hanlon's razor would apply -- that it's stupidity rather than malice.
In the case of Quora Partners, the program attracts large quantities of very repetitive questions with little guidance on which ones cross the line from merely boring ("Who was the star of movie X?") to unacceptable ("What fruit starts with A/B/C/D...?" "What is 74+1? What is 50-3?...") Even if I knew their questions, I couldn't tell you if they'd find it acceptable.
[+] [-] gmuslera|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sulam|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackrock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeboy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Macha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoyer|6 years ago|reply