How Quora died

UI/UX and Information Architecture

• Many say Quora is now “unusable” or a “UX trainwreck.”
• Core complaint: the default “all related” view mixes answers to the original question with answers to similar or only loosely related questions, often indistinguishable in style.
• Users report confusion about what is the question, what is an answer, and what is an answer to some other question; most casual visitors just leave.
• Ads are heavily interleaved with content and visually similar to it.
• AI-generated answers are increasingly mixed in, sometimes obviously wrong or off-topic.

Login Walls, Access, and Perceived Spamminess

• The historical login wall (and still-aggressive registration prompts) made many users permanently avoid Quora, similar to earlier sites like Experts Exchange.
• Several commenters actively block Quora (and often Pinterest) from search results.
• Notifications and digests are seen as low-quality clickbait or “ragebait.”

Content Quality, Monetization, and Enshittification

• Early Quora is remembered as high-signal: long, thoughtful answers from domain experts across many fields.
• The shift to revenue-sharing and paying for asking questions allegedly incentivized spammy, low-effort, SEO-driven questions instead of good answers.
• Over time, A/B-tested engagement optimizations, ad density, and “stickiness” are viewed as systematically degrading utility.
• Some former high-quality contributors deleted their content or left when incentives changed or moderation/community dynamics soured.

SEO, Google, and Metrics

• Many see Quora as an SEO machine: high search ranking despite poor signal-to-noise, driven by Google’s preference for long, content-heavy pages and forums.
• Several argue Google should down-rank or even de-index Quora; others note traffic and SEO metrics show it’s still very strong.
• More broadly, ad-supported, metric-driven design is blamed for “enshittification” across the web.

Comparisons to Other Platforms

• StackOverflow: praised for answer-focus but criticized for hostile/overzealous closure behavior; seen as another case of misaligned incentives and community burnout.
• Reddit: some say it has monetized without destroying UX; others call it a “worst website” full of low-quality, politicized content.
• Wikipedia and Ask MetaFilter are cited as examples of contributor-driven sites that have largely avoided this fate, partly due to non-profit or user-funded models (though Wikipedia’s politics and governance also draw criticism).

LLMs, Poe, and Data Value

• Some see Quora as an early casualty of ChatGPT: fewer genuine questions, more AI alternatives.
• Others argue the bigger issue was Quora’s own product and business choices, with LLMs only finishing the job.
• Quora’s large, structured Q&A corpus is viewed as high-value LLM training data; its partnership with OpenAI (via Poe/data licensing) is seen as a key remaining asset.

Governance, Incentives, and Alternatives

• Recurrent theme: VC-backed, ad-dependent, contributor-driven platforms naturally drift from serving contributors toward maximizing short-term revenue metrics.
• Suggestions include: non-profit governance, “ombudsman for contributors,” smaller human-scale communities, or federated/fediverse-style projects.
• Some believe sites like Quora “should have been” libraries or Wikipedia-style institutions rather than growth-at-all-costs startups.

Is Quora “Dead”? Diverging Views

• Many participants personally consider Quora “dead” in terms of usefulness or goodwill.
• Others note it still ranks extremely high in traffic and search visibility; by those metrics it is very much alive.
• The split reflects a distinction between business/SEO success and perceived value or trust from engaged, technical users.