I feel like I owe it to my followers - however many of them there ever were1 - to explain how things have gotten to this point. This is not a eulogy, nor a prophecy of Quora’s demise; it’s just me moving on.
Warning: This is going to be a long post. Future posts will be more, shall we say, “editorially restrained”.
When I joined Quora in 2012, things were different. Quora answers were reprinted in major publications like Slate, where I first encountered it2. The Top Writer program was in swing. Meetups were all the rage, although sadly absent from St. Louis where I lived.
Quora was the place where you could read something amazing and new every day. People often ask me how I know so much random stuff, and the answer is… duh, Quora. Quora was the place where the wisdom of the crowd, through upvotes, was actually getting the best results. “Hypothetical Scenarios” and “Alternative History” were always giving you some well-written and well-thought-out, if often absurd, story. Movie scripts were commissioned based on some of these essays. Movie scripts! Scientific answers were written by PhDs and engineers who actually worked in those fields. Politics was present, but mainly in the form of arguments about economics and statistics.
Ugh.
There’s that word.
Politics.3
It’s hard to tell the story of Quora’s decline outside the context of social media’s role in how American politics has evolved over the past decade.
Politics attracts trolls - basement-dwelling neckbeards inflicting their pain on the society that made them, Russian bots, Chinese wumao, and unhinged partisans alike. Politics also attracts the sort of people who are drawn to Quora - education and expertise are correlated with interest and engagement in politics, so it’s only natural that Quora’s intellectual writing class (Top Writer and otherwise) would follow the topic, among their other interests.
Quora’s story of decline is that of a drip that became a trickle, a trickle that became a stream, the stream into a creek, a creek into a river, the river into a flood. There’s no single event anyone can point to where “it all changed”, it’s just millions and billions of questions, answers, upvotes, and comments that can be summed up into two trends:
As the polarization of IRL politics and the opportunity social media presented for mass influence campaigns grew, trolls saw Quora, with its anonymity protections, as one among many targets.
Quora’s writers took the bait. It was impossible to resist the growing stream of triggering, bad-faith questions, to which the writing of sanctimonious answers rewarded them with easy upvotes and instant popularity.
Quora itself is far from innocent in this. The tropes we see in its decline are recognizable to even the casual watcher of the last decade of Silicon Valley startup culture, new media, and vulture capitalism. The quixotic mores of each of these subcultures integrally shaped Quora’s fortunes.
From the start, Quora failed to monetize quickly enough. This was mainly due to a reluctance to resort to ads for revenue, which was pretty common in the late-2000s startup world (Twitter is another famous example). Part of it was an idealistic refusal to sell out, but it was also widely feared that ads would drive away users, and users were the key to the real revenue streams down the road. Startups and investors agonized over how to correctly time the decision to monetize.
Quora’s management also married itself early on to the idea that anonymity was critical to their business. They wanted writers with first-hand experience to be able to speak freely without professional repercussions4. This was not entirely incompatible with the fact that the Real Name Policy helped drive the high content quality: the best writers were motivated by the professional benefits of name recognition, and readers/questioners could be reassured that they were reading real experts who otherwise wouldn’t have had the platform to reach them. Rather, the foundational mistake on management’s part wasn’t merely allowing anonymity, but allowing too much of it. Quora has never had any practical limits on anonymity - no questions-per-day, answers-per-day, comments-per-day, nothing.
This came back to bite them.
As time progressed, more mistakes became apparent. Management exhibited what can charitably be described as a naïve approach to politics on their platform. At least give them credit for their idealism: they saw themselves as running an “advice from the experts” site (in the format of questions-and-answers), not a politics site. They didn’t mind politics to the extent that they could get real political experts on, but they weren’t interested in becoming just another message board for dumb debates - the internet already had plenty of those. In the early days, management regularly threatened writers that they’d shut down all political topics if things got too nasty. But that threat rang increasingly hollow, as management proceeded to steadfastly… do nothing. Precisely because management didn’t want this to be their problem, they never developed a coherent, timely, or well-considered strategy for dealing with it.
Instead, they got their nightmare scenario anyways.
Quora continued to see less revenue and investment than similarly-positioned (traffic-wise) social media firms like Twitter and Reddit. Twitter, as a media darling, simply was inherently faster-growing, and likewise immune to concrete trolling effects5. Reddit, on the other hand, actively segmented its communities from each other, which dovetailed nicely with its resource-conserving strategy of relying on a network of community volunteer moderators. But for Quora, expanding moderation was simply not an option financially, and even if it were, could never be scaled up without reconceptualizing the site’s basic organization à la Reddit. And the only other practical options left, such as limiting anonymous posts, were kept off the table because of management’s ideological commitment to the sanctity of anonymity.
So as anonymous troll posts began to plague Quora via the aforementioned “two trends”, politics gradually took over the site, and quality accordingly dropped. Management was faced with further crises. The site’s viral explosion in India saddled them with more users than they could handle, users who treated it more like Facebook, with an appetite for meme-y content and less interest in Quora’s bread-and-butter “expert advice”. This led to a global surge of more such casual users, and it was around this time that one started to see peculiarities like long posts with few words but dozens of exotic pictures of beaches, animals, and architecture. The ill-fated Quora Reviews feature attempted to harness this energy with little success; in a hilariously telling episode, political writers started reviewing each other to great rancor. Quora lost its reproduction deals (like the one with Slate), replaced them with worse reproduction deals, and like the rest of the New Media, began chasing SEO6.
Throughout this whole time, management obdurately ignored the advice of its Top Writers. Now, Top Writers are smart people: the cream of the crop, the most educated, the most familiar with the ins and outs of the user experience, and its biggest addicts. One of the quirks of Quora’s interface was that its user FAQ was totally hosted within the site’s question-and-answer engine, along with its official announcements. Top Writers regularly registered their opinions on these exact same announcement and FAQ threads, and despite our growing political rancor, we were pretty much of one mind in our advice to management. So it’s not like this stuff was fatefully invisible to management. No, management was merely fatefully blind. The repeated message from management’s habitual silence, only occasionally perforated by bland customer-service-speak statements that ignored our concerns, amply indicated that they believed they knew their own product better than those who used it.
In the background of all this, Quora’s conservative writers toxified along with Donald Trump’s GOP. I saw one prominent and amazing writer turn his earlier alt-history writing talents almost exclusively towards a sickening Patreon-enabled Trumpist political enterprise, using Quora as essentially a free ad/recruiting service. But it wasn’t just him: GOP Quora swiftly got organized. It’s not that no one else was at it among the various other Quoran political factions at that point; it’s that GOP Quora had a (1) head start, and (2) an edge, in the form of replicating the strength of the wider conservative movement’s self-sequestered media ecosystem, as well as (3) its tendency towards hierarchically massing around singular leaders.
Even before this, Quora was afraid of the power its conservative writers had amassed. Like Facebook, Twitter, and much of the rest of both social and traditional media, Quora was paralyzed into inaction by accusations of anti-conservative bias long before the danger of continuing to not fight or restrain right-wing trolls ever reared its ugly head. This gave them the time to toxify themselves further, and recruit even more allies, so as to be essentially untouchable down the road.
With their traffic numbers firmly ensconced in a long decline, management got desperate and turned towards repeated gambles for traffic, each doomed to counterproductivity. The fundamental problem has always been that management failed to understand their own product, and failed to ever turn a critical eye towards their founding myths.7
I’ve alluded to this idea of “not understanding their own product” several times, but we’re finally ready to expound on it. This issue is perhaps most (but not exclusively) embodied by the dogmatic adherence to a notion of question quality as the sole driver of content quality. And maybe this wasn’t entirely misguided! After all, I myself have argued here that anonymous questions were the core driver of poor quality. But the solution ought to have been limiting anonymous posting, not the tinkering around the edges that management engaged in. Overall, the real error was mistaking the questions as their most valuable asset, instead of the writers. Remember the popular neo-truism of the past decade? “If the service is free, you’re the product, not the consumer.” Quora’s writers were the product. Not questions. As I said earlier, Quora’s main selling point was “advice from experts” - IE, “not being Yahoo! Answers” - but management couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Thus the missteps kept accumulating. The aforementioned “Quora Reviews”. Removing question details8. The Quora Partners Program enabling the very trolls who were polluting Quora’s own platform to make money off them, often with bots churning out tens of thousands of questions at a time, to the tune of as much as thousands of dollars a month9. Abandoning the Top Writer Awards because they were judged an unnecessary extravagance by the bean-counters, instead of a prestige-generator and quality-driver for your most valuable assets. Wasting all that money on developing and releasing Spaces, when management clearly already had major problems with their approach to trolls and politics. Failing to even cheat successfully when goosing their own Spaces follower counts!
It’s possible that making all the best management decisions wouldn’t have made a difference. Maybe anonymity limits wouldn’t have kept politics from metastasizing. Maybe monetizing sooner would have driven users away and stunted growth. Maybe the alleged (my jury’s still out) inrush of trolls from Parler and Gab would always have overwhelmed Quora’s algorithm.
But I know one thing for sure: The recent management decision to kill off the Real Name Policy, whether it’s walked back or not, is the last piece of evidence that I need that this management team is irredeemably unable to competently manage their own product. This was a nigh-irrevocable step towards becoming the next Yahoo! Answers. The best we QuExiles can hope for now, is that the company dies a quick death, to be bought out by someone10 who knows what the hell they’re doing and how to build a healthy platform that welcomes and nurtures the creativity of its writers, instead of feeding trolls.
Personally, I’m ready to move on. I’ve been contemplating Substack for a while. I’ve been practicing my writing, and it was probably time for me to grow up a little anyways and stop cussing so damned much - to write more like a mature adult, less like an angry young man. I’m ready to stop writing to prompts, especially the hopelessly backwards and bigoted ones that my Quora feed only ever comes up with anymore. I’m ready to start writing for myself - and my followers! - because I believe the message I have to bring is more important than the logo on the website it’s delivered by.
And what is that message, you may ask? My chief goals remain the same, but perhaps it’s been a while since I’ve outlined them. First and foremost, I think too much of our political discourse is dominated by bad narratives. “False” is not enough to properly describe them, we need “bad”. “Bad” reminds us that narratives create their own reality, regardless of their initial or ongoing state of truthfulness. It reminds us that many of the worst decisions in history were made on such narratives. And identifying these narratives helps us become better scholars of both history and our present. Weeding out the bad narratives won’t make you always right, but it will help you stop being always wrong, like so much of our sad punditocracy. And that’s the ultimate goal here - rising above the mainstream’s failures, as independent citizens not beholden to the mainstream’s masters.
Second, I want to emphasize the criticality of historical study to modern political analysis, but without the vague platitudes that cloud most people’s minds with a pithiness that precludes original thought. History does not “repeat itself”, nor does it “rhyme” with any sort of intentionality. History is not an inexorable force, let alone one driving some magical pendulum11. History is not “great men”, nor “if-only” happenstance, nor an encryption key to imagined secrets of the future. It just is. History is trends, places, and people. History is multicausal, except the rare (and to me, joyfully interesting) cases when it’s not. History is both a teacher of and shaped by dynamics, like the chilling power of narrative, the brutal reality of zero-sumism, and Mike Duncan’s entertaining “Entropy of Victory”. Too many people treat history like a plain old cudgel to beat their opponents over their heads with, instead of trying to just learn from it.
Third, I believe that the only realistic path for the American Project to evolve to its true potential is through political reform, chiefly involving a popular movement towards Ranked Choice Voting. There are a lot of other issues packed in with that, like filibuster reform and multi-member districts, but I think it all starts with RCV breaking the two-party doom loop. I think it also most assuredly doesn’t include such perennial idiocies as term limits and the obsession with “getting the money out of politics”. That’s absolutely not to ignore entrenched incumbency and money in politics as problems, but rather to emphasize that they’re both downstream symptoms of deeper dysfunctions in the way we elect our politicians, and how that shapes our party system. It’s not for nothing that my mantra of the last several years has been, “You get the politicians your elections produce. Change the elections, and you change the politicians.”12
Finally, I want to breathe real life into the “con-prog” - that is, “conservative progressive”13 - ethos that I worked so hard to establish on Quora. This is my personal ideological brand, heavily influenced by my twin upbringings of Missouri pragmatism and Star Trek idealism. The basic way I like to put it is that I’m a radical progressive, who prefers to go about things in a prudently conservative manner. To me, this is not a Sorkinesque effort at riding an imagined fence in some vaguely agreeable “middle” of American politics; I frequently and vehemently take sides. Rather, this philosophy has very real implications in how I reason towards those sides I take, and I hope to take more time to elaborate about on this Substack someday. I’m laying all of this out right now because I want my biases to be transparent. Even the best pundits often get so caught up in the usual crossfire that they forget to disclose their priors, or even to ground their positions in those priors. It’s my genuine desire not to do this.
I have no delusions of becoming a real journalist. I like my day job. But I have to write. It keeps me from pouring my soul out onto Facebook, another toxified hellhole I’m glad to be mostly rid of. For a time, Quora was that safe space where I could get my message out to more than just friends and family, and was free to write what I wanted, but with relatively minimal risk of what the academics call “context collapse” - that is, when one’s social media posts get taken out of context and used to attack them. Substack fits the bill for that kind of safe space, perhaps not shared exclusively by savory characters, but certainly less than the hucksters and morons over at Medium. I’m following some of my favorite writers here - a new one in Noah Smith, and an old one in Matthew Yglesias - so I know I’m at least in good enough company.
But I’ll always need more company. And so I hope that you, my loyal Quora followers (all three of you!), come join me on this new journey.
Basically, the upshot here is that I never really had a good way of knowing how many active followers I had.
Back in 2012-13 when I joined Quora, I managed to somehow impress a few Top Writers enough to get my own TW nomination and award, which drove an initial burst of followers that I was never really able to convert to meaningful popularity. Both I and Quora plateaued over the next several years due to grad school, so a lot of those accounts probably went dead.
Later, in 2018-2019, I had another burst that was a little more sustained, and then when Quora released Spaces, the original Dave’s Daily Discourse follower count immediately exploded. I’m pretty sure that Quora was auto-following new users to goose their numbers, but 400,000 “followers” later, my actual engagement numbers clearly didn’t reflect that scale.
And yes, boy did I ever feel stupid when I found out that the 400k I got so excited about was pretty much fake.
That’s a whole ‘nother story for another day, but basically I think Slate’s demise is pretty simple: it’s a casualty of the polarization Trump accelerated/resulted from, where a formerly level-headed publication saw the need to abandon the appreciation for nuance and ambiguity that made it famous. From there, top talent simply just got driven away by the need to enforce rigid partisan discipline.
I personally detest the modern connotations attached to this word. Too many people use words like “political” as a slur to hazily assault the motives of their opponents, and it’s super stupid.
This coincided with the simultaneous rise of “confessional” journalism - all those by-now cringeworthy Vox essays that invariably feature the phrase, “As an [X]… ”.
Before you start, yes, Twitter’s been criticized endlessly for its moderation failures, but those failures didn’t actually inhibit its growth, prevent the platform from being what it was intended to be, nor prevent its management from successfully executing their business’s strategies. I’d also argue that the media criticism was itself emblematic of Twitter’s indispensability to them - if they didn’t need it so much, they wouldn’t have written so vehemently about it. Look no further than Reddit for contrast - its moderation struggles are far less frequently written about by the commentariat.
“Search Engine Optimization”. Basically, putting a crap-ton of words at the bottom/top of a page to goose its page-rank on Google.
A fellow Top Writer pointed out just the other day, that almost every empire falls victim to its founding myth. This feels fitting.
“Question Details” were optional sections where question-writers could explain themselves in depth without a character limit. This helped keep questions more concise and straightforward, if sometimes still awkwardly-phrased. Quora sought to “universalize” their questions - to make them less narrowly-focused - by eliminating the details. This would ostensibly have improved question quality in some vague sense, but the benefit never materialized. This is what happens when you rely on hazy thinking - I suspect because they were so married to a facile misunderstanding of their product.
This is one of the truly most incomprehensible, unforgivable business decisions I’ve ever seen. Also, it was a slap in the face to the Top Writers, whose (admittedly self-serving) consensus was that the path to quality lay in rewarding us for good writing, not inundating us with shitty questions written by trolls, bigots, morons, and bots.
Substack? Medium? Defector Media? As long as it’s not Facebook or Google. Or the ghouls who bought Gizmodo Media.
I find this to be one of the most comically absurd misconceptions about history, ever the more frightening because of its sheer, abominable popularity.
Future article topic(?): “Dave’s 30,000-ft Diagnosis of Direly-Needed American Political Reforms”.
Don’t worry. This will be an article at some point. But I’d like to gather feedback and ideas first, so don’t expect if for a while.
I'm sorry to see Quora's demise, too. I started in 2017 with an interest in answers on mathematics. That grew to several other interests. In the last few years, I found that I had to avoid upvoting answers that while I thought were good would ultimately "choke out" answers to topics of more interest. (Answers about the MCU are a prime example of this.)
It is now to the point that if I want to read answers from my favorite writers, I have to look them up manually. That might sound a bit like a "first world problem" but if I'm having to do that, then Quora isn't even as good as an RSS feed.
With regards to cussing... I've always tried to keep my answers "PG" for a few reasons but primarily, if I'm taking the time to write, I don't want anyone dissuaded by the language. Few people, if any, would say, "There isn't enough cussing in there for me to read it." The opposite certainly holds true.
Thanks for the thoughtful answers.