Once likened to “Facebook for the wise”, why is Quora slowly dying while Facebook still dominates the world?

Have you heard of the concept of a dead site? One fine day, you visit a website you haven’t returned to in a long time, and you discover that it has turned into a completely different website. In other words, the previous website has completely disappeared and been replaced by another website. This is called a dead site.

Quora shouldn’t have gone downhill like that

Quora was once a good candidate for the ranking of the top 100 best websites in the world in 2010. At that time, whenever you typed a question into google, the first result displayed was always Quora.

The way this platform works is very simple. In this there are only two main activities that ask or answer questions. At that time, Quora was the largest question-and-answer website in the world and was voted by users as one of the ten websites that cannot be ignored if you want to exercise your intelligence.

In other words, Quora is like a social network similar to Facebook, but it will be a place to share knowledge from the community. In addition, the father of Quora Adam D’Angelo used to work for Facebook. That’s why Quora has some characteristics that are quite similar to this social networking site.

I started using this site in 2016. Honestly, I also have to thank this site because it has helped me a lot in my writing career. But just a year later, things started to go downhill.

The owner of this website had to rack his brains to come up with new features for the site. And the first feature they added to this platform is the video reply feature. This feature allows users to record a video to answer a question instead of writing it down. However, Quora leaders quickly realized that this feature has two disadvantages:

1. Most people are terrible at audio and video recording.

2. It is very difficult to optimize an algorithm for both video and text.

Then they launched a program called Questions Partner. And this program will pay people who have unique questions. Although there was a time when this program did not work, it still exists today and offers certain benefits. But every 6–12 months, they take a 50% cut in the payments to the participants of that program, citing an unusual increase in the income of expats in the platform. While, 99.9% of users barely earn a dime.

However, it is the Spaces program that makes the platform increasingly degraded. Spaces is considered a combination of Medium’s Publications and Subreddits platforms. It seems that this program will be great, but no, it makes users even more uncomfortable.

The purpose of this program is for people to be able to share interesting answers with others through other platforms. However, when sharing, it was discovered that not only was the sharer’s name almost invisible, but the content they shared was inappropriate and difficult to interact on the platforms they wanted to share. However, the creators of this program have even greater goals, which is to allow users to manage their own feeds. However, it is far behind what Medium has done.

One problem also contributed in no small part to the decline of Quora. It’s that Quora doesn’t pay their users or discourage them from finding good content to post on Quora. Self-management allows users to build their own content. That’s why there are two situations: One is that the content they post may not be written by themselves but copied somewhere. Second, they may post useless junk content.

It is commendable that the leadership of Quora also realized this limitation and posted a job advertisement to find content moderators. But it’s ridiculous that a job like that offers such a low salary. You imagine if you take this job, maybe you have to sit censoring all night and all morning, maybe you will only earn 5-10 USD a month. With such a salary, who can do it?

What’s more, Quora doesn’t even value the role of writers and isn’t geared toward sharing knowledge. This is like digging their own grave. The problem here is that users don’t like to read things that are already there that they can find all the time. They need something new.

Quora doesn’t know that good authors can attract users to the site. If users receive a notification that a famous author they have been following for a long time has just posted, they will probably immediately visit the site and read it.

Quora is dying day by day. Many users as well as authors have left here. So where is the future of Quora going?

What does a dying foundation look like?

Since Quora doesn’t have a dedicated team to moderate it or, to be more precise, it can’t hire anyone, the platform is increasingly chaotic. There are many virtual accounts appearing, many people even post violent and vulgar content, not to mention that people even post selfies on the website to get likes.

Quora is forgetting what its mission is. It’s their website whose mission is to act as a bridge between readers and authors. Therefore, the distance between them and the user is getting farther and farther. In the first place, they put off monetizing the platform and now they see the consequences.

Why am I so sure Quora is going down?

First, the company had massive layoffs in January 2020. I’ve heard insiders say that investors are worried because the company’s revenue is still showing no signs of increasing that meanwhile. costs continue to increase.

Also, for the past 24 months, I’ve been tracking Quora’s monthly Alexa ranking. But its rank keeps decreasing over the years: 150 → 175 → 250 → 300

And now, it has dropped to 372th place. Traffic and time spent are two important factors of a website. In other words, they are like the health indicators of a website-based trading company. And now these two indicators of Quora are at an alarming level. As a result, SEO and its revenue just kept going down and down. Now Quora is like an old car with no brakes, it just keeps going downhill and shows no sign of stopping.

Initially Quora was very successful in attracting users by not charging any fees. But now this tactic is outdated because too many other websites have switched to using the strategy of paying users if their article meets the necessary conditions.

This is a lesson that those who intend to do business in this field should note. It is your content that needs to focus on the user (reader). And if your authors are helping you attract readers, you might consider giving incentives to possibly retain them. And you should remember “free” has a very low ceiling.

According to BM