How AI Is Making Quora Dig Its Own Grave for the Writing Community
And the writing community must know about it.
Hi there! I’m Vritant, and you are receiving this newsletter because you signed up for White Space, a weekly must-have newsletter for digital writers. I share key developments in the space, commentary, and more useful resources here.
In this White Space edition we discuss:
3 reasons behind the downfall of Quora (#2 being the most subtle one)
What should you do if you are writing on Quora or plan to start writing?
This Week From Medium: The Best Marketing Strategy for This Decade (Writers Edition)
Hello dear readers,
If you’re a writer, it’s impossible that you haven’t heard about Quora’s downfall. It’s a masterpiece that was years in the making. One fucked judgement at a time, though taken very consciously. You should take note of this because it marks the first major company succumbing to the AI wave. Or rather, it’s consciously making the primary purpose of its platform wash away with AI.
I have been an avid reader and a writer with 1,800,000+ views on Quora. So yes, there was this personal bias that was stopping me from criticising it. I keep believing that the management will reverse the downfall and the good ol’ days will come back. Just like what happened to Medium, if you’re familiar. But it looks like everyone at Quora wants the platform to die.
They want to move on. “We’ve had enough of fostering a community,” they might have thought. They are investing heavily to replace humans with bots. So much so that they have created a whole new vertical for the same, a new website, and are heavily pushing it into the Quora ecosystem and feed. They want to redirect as much traffic as they can. The platform’s doomed. It’s just going to get worse from here.
But how did this tsunami start? And what distractions would it bring before it comes to an end? Let’s have a look!
#1: The introduction of the AI-powered chatbot
It was late 2022 when AI chatbots were on the rise. The wave that started with the launch and stellar rise of ChatGPT continued with the introduction of many more tools like that. It changed the entire tech landscape, and suddenly AI became the next big thing for all the multi-billion dollar tech companies.
Google has Gemini, Meta has Meta AI, Apple has Apple Intelligence, Microsoft has Open AI and Copilot, and Amazon integrated Amazon AI into its AWS infrastructure. It’s suddenly all about AI for every other company.
So what’s the problem, Vritant, if Quora follows the lead and does the same to itself, you might ask?
There’s a catch: The integration of AI was a threat to Quora in the first place. But Quora not only introduced AI within its platform, it also made clear it wanted to steer away from human stories and answers. While writers aren’t at the centre of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon’s business, they are for Quora’s business.
So, some smarty-pants at the company thought “Hey, why not just change our business and become a company where writers aren’t at the centre because if we don’t then we’re doomed, with them.”
Let’s see how it turns out for them, but as far as it concerns us, the writers, the platform is more or less dead for us.
#2: Quora became a haven for growth hackers and marketers
I want to quote from Joan Westenberg’s article here because she puts it comprehensively:
“As Quora ploughed forward with AI-driven enhancements, things got weird. Unscrupulous users — the digital marketers and growth hackers who lurk in the shadows of every platform — realised the AI could be exploited.
“They could dupe the system into heavily promoting their content by packing their answers with SEO-friendly keywords and exaggerated claims.
“Moreover, they learned that the AI struggled to discern between human-crafted text and machine-generated content — meaning a user could feed a question into a language model, paste the output into Quora verbatim, and watch the algorithm shower it with upvotes and attention. Almost overnight, the site began to drown in a swamp of spammy, incoherent, AI-generated text.”
I can feel every word she wrote because I have been interacting with this platform for more than 5 years, with my interactions peaking and staying there around 3 years ago.
It’d sound dumb, but platforms have feelings, and they make you feel a certain way when you spend your time. Quora used to feel like a place where writers spilt their naked thoughts without worrying about getting judged. Now, after all this game and gimmicks, it’s just an echo chamber of awful content getting all the views.
The scope of pure writing is dead because there’s no incentive left for the writers. On Quora. Needless to say, there are still a couple of good platforms for showing your craft. Let’s reserve that for the next issue of White Space.
#3: Excess advertisements
In short, you can’t stand this platform without enabling your ad-blockers. I don’t know why advertisers are still paying for this platform where there is barely any human interaction left; it’s all just spammy schemes and dubious profiles.
We all can agree that ads degrade the reading experience.
Take for example this research published in the American Communication Journal: ‘The impact of online disruptive ads on users’ comprehension, evaluation of site credibility, and sentiment of intrusiveness,’ which confirms that disruptive ads are perceived as intrusive and annoying, creating negativity on the affect level.
Quora, in that regard, is no more readable at all. And seasoned writers as well as readers who spend a lot of time on the platform can’t stand it, so they left.
Offering low CPC to the companies may have flooded the bank accounts of Quora with dollars but at what cost? It’s main business? The trust factor that I had in this company is now all gone, just like what happened to hundreds of thousands of writers and readers.
What should you do if you are writing on Quora or plan to start writing?
Simply don’t.
Here’s my explanation: I don’t think writers come anywhere near the top in the priority list of Quora. It’s all set to pivot. Look at its AI-bot platform, Poe, for example.
When you try searching for something on Quora, it shows you Poe’s AI-generated text instead of the answers written by its users. That’s enough red sign for you to stop.
Had it been just that they are creating a brand-new website and trying to integrate all the different AI bots onto that, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But what they are doing instead is shoving AI-generated answers on the face of the human audience that’s majorly there to read human experience and human answers.
Quora is treating its users like products more than Google or Facebook ever did. That’s just pathetic.
Get off the platform. Or don’t go there if you were hoping to. It’s doomed, if they don’t try actively to revive it, which we all know they won’t. It’s against their business plan. It’s against their corporate interests. It’s against their profits.
This Week From Medium
Read it here: The Best Marketing Strategy for This Decade (Writers Edition)
“Appeal to your audience. Talk to them, even when no one’s reading your work. Go for a conversational style of writing as long as you aren’t writing an academic essay. Trust me, it’ll be more fun for you as well.
“Tell them a story. We all love to know the journey behind an accomplishment. Give it to your readers. Be it a lesson, success or failure story, coincidence, or anything, let your readers sneak a peek.
“You are human; you are bound to make mistakes. Don’t shy away from accepting it. Improve, and you’ll have yet another beautiful story to tell.”
See you soon,
Vritant