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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

quora is so unreal. i wonder constantly what the scam is

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

i finally got up the courage to google it and yeah the scam is exactly what i assumed

they pay people to use the site. of course they do. and they pay them to both answer and ask questions, apparently at an incredibly low and nondeterministic rate, and only if you post questions and answers for a while until you get an "invitation" to their Partner Program. presumably both the invitations and payouts are based on a big ugly swirling soup of algorithm bullshit. people say they've had many super popular questions that barely earned them a dime and then other times they make significant money off one question, and no one knows why.

in other words, they've incentivized a ton of people with no better prospects to ping-pong fake questions and barely-relevant, drawn-out fake answers off of each other, both sides hoping that they'll accidentally make enough money to afford food this month. the gig economy!!

this is pretty much what i figured was going on. i assumed they were paying people at least to answer questions, but the site wouldn't be nearly as weird if that were the case, i knew they had to be paying the askers too. also, apparently every question has to be unique - that's why i keep seeing incredibly bizarre questions about clearly made up family drama and other "yeah that definitely happened" type situations. presumably the answers are weird and off-topic because the answer-ers have all gotten together and worked out that the algorithm that runs all of this can't tell whether an answer is correct or even actually relevant, but is just looking at word type and quantity and similar shit.

remember my post the other week about how any time you go "hahaha what's the explanation for this wacky thing i'm seeing on the internet!!!" the answer is always the same and always sucks all the air out of the room? yeah

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

sirocyl
@sirocyl

quora is a plot by SAE and the oil industry to ensure people remain unaware of oil ratings and always put exactly the oil their car uses in.
signed: someone using SAE 80 crank oil in an engine that "takes" 0W-20

edit: fuck my car blew up

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sarksus
@sarksus

thank you for your very important question. i am an oils man from 1940s texas from a little outfit called Texaco and we had a saying, if it aint in the ground it's in the air, anyway back then there were only two kinds of oil, ground oil and air oil, and air oil is what we put in the cars before the regulators got a hold of it and turned it into 50 different kinds of oil, back then we just played a game of darts to decide which oil to use but apparently that didn't meet "standards" so now you need to be an engineer to even know what to put in your car! anyway thanks for the question

-Ralph "Big Man" Rig

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Lexie-Plays-Fast
@Lexie-Plays-Fast

quora is a web site that solicits and produces information and opinion that I can only describe as consisting of "store brand knowledge". Like, it all seems sort of correct, or at least correct enough for most uses, but it's all sort of strange and has a weird aftertaste.

I answered some questions and left some comments on quora in the long long ago, before they did… whatever they did? Even their VC-fuelled pivot (or whatever? it is they're doing?!) seems to be pivoting form question mark to question mark exclamation point question mark.

Anyway, I occasionally get comments on my answers on comments from the long long ago, from people who at first glance seem like creationists (or, in the style of quora, store brand creationists), but who instead of being angry about the idea that, for example, dinosaurs existed and evolved into birds, are extremely angry about an extremely narrow point about the exact details of bird/dinosaur lineages.

It's a strange place, and has been made even stranger by a combination of perverse incentives relating to essentially paying people for engaging with the site in different ways.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

this is pretty much what i've been assuming. in some way or another, even if not directly or literally, they are paying people by the word to not answer questions.

sometimes i come across a quora post from like 2016 and it reads like the better stackexchange threads: a question, and then a few well meaning answers that are sometimes even correct. it's clear that the website Did Something a couple years ago that now incentivizes thousands of people (all of whom are somehow retired navy colonels) to post padded high school essays that do not actually respond to the question.

like that's what weirds me out. i can understand a scheme like "quora pays people to answer questions lengthily in order to make their site look active and bump it in the rankings without just pumping it full of machine generated sludge that might get them banned from google." sure, yes, okay, typical mechanical turk crap. but what specific terms did they come up with that (unintentionally?) incentivized all those people to invent military careers and then answer every question as obliquely as they can while using the haughtiest, most condescending tone possible?

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

okay i finally looked it up and yeah they pay people to both ask and answer questions, apparently at an incredibly low and nondeterministic rate, and based on algorithm-driven "invitations" where you're picked to participate in this based on, presumably, a big ugly swirling soup of statistics

this is what i figured was going on. the weirdness of both the answers and the questions can't be explained any other way. apparently every question has to be unique, which is why i keep seeing quora headlines with bizarre questions that make no sense, made up family drama situations that would never happen, etc. It's a whole bunch of gig-economy penny-a-day wage-slaves ping-ponging off each other, inventing fake questions to dodge the 'uniqueness' requirement, and answering with padded off-topic essays probably because they've found out that the algorithm can't tell if the question actually got answered, only whether a certain quantity and type of words were used.

I knew it was some kind of hell.

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0x2ba22e11
@0x2ba22e11

The funniest part about Quora that I know of is that: for every number and unit of volume, they have a question titled "is it okay if I drink {number} × {unit of volume}s of alcoholic beverages per (day|week|month)" and every single one of them has a large number of screaming "IT'S NOT OKAY YOU ARE AN ALCOHOLIC YOUR LIVER WILL EXPLODE".

This pattern of answers happens regardless of whether the question is "is it over to drink 3 handles of vodka per day" (okay fair, your liver actually might be exploding already) or if it's "is it okay to drink 5 teaspoons of 0.5% beer substitute per month" (not what I'd call cause for alarm).

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neckspike
@neckspike

The answer to the asker's question is yeah it'll be fine in most conditions. 5W30 is a bit thicker at operating temp which will be a bit less efficient than the 5W20 that's called for, but in the average car engine* it's not going to do any damage and you can just put the correct grade in at the next oil change.

*May not apply to certain very high compression engines. I didn't work with any of those.

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

tati
@tati

people say they've had many super popular questions that barely earned them a dime and then other times they make significant money off one question, and no one knows why.

randomly awarded incentives have been empirically shown to be magnitudes more motivating than predictable incentive structures. basically it's just gambling with extra steps.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

i always forget this. like it's simple to go "the payout is random and opaque so they can just stochastically not pay their workers" and yeah that's true but also they definitely know that making it unclear what (if anything) gets you reliably paid will whip everyone into a feeding frenzy, probably not actually increasing their average payouts, but massively increasing quora's SEO as everyone desperately tries to figure out which lever will make the money come out.

i doubt there are any mechanical turk operations in existence at this point that actually reward a quantified amount of work with a quantified amount of money. like why would any company do that when they learned years ago that they just don't need to

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Veni-Vidi-ASCII
@Veni-Vidi-ASCII

It's a scam that's going to destroy instelf with AI as quickly as it can. Here's a question and answer I accidentally found recently:

Question: What if the Joker gained the power of the Mask? (No credit to an asker)

AI Answer: Combining the Joker with the power of the Mask, as seen in the comics and movies, would likely result in a truly chaotic and dangerous character. The Joker is already known for his insanity, unpredictability, and penchant for chaos. When you add the reality-warping abilities of the Mask to this mix, the result could be catastrophic.

Also, now "humans" are increasingly copying answers from chat gpt, or even using scripts automate the process.

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