Can Money Save Quora?

Can money save Quora? Yes, I believe the goodness of the results strongly correlates with the goodness of the funders. Good money can be used to drive out the bad, but as a default, the bad drives out the good because selfish money grows fast on everyone else’s expense. Over the centuries, this has made a significant difference, and we are here today with the majority of money being selfish.

Quora's Dilemma with Selfish Investors

As we can see from Quora cofounder-CEO Adam D’Angelo’s posts, he has been forced to defend the question-spamming partner program, which greedy venture capitalist investors have manipulated to benefit themselves. This move has effectively aligned Quora’s success metrics, such as the number of answer views and upvotes, with its mission to share and grow the world’s knowledge. However, these metrics are completely disconnected from the actual mission, where user activity is often equated with knowledge, even when it’s just trolling and backlash. New questions are paid for even when they are just non-canonical litter, burying good fundamental questions ever deeper.

Quora’s Success Metrics vs. Its Mission

Quora works better as a crowd noise amplifier than a collaborative knowledge-building tool. It is telling that Quora is useless to others with the same mission. Universities, research teams, and inventors trying to make actual progress growing the world’s knowledge prefer traditional peer-reviewed publications and other archaic collaboration methods over Quora. This exposes Quora’s mission statement as a lie and the welcome page as a scam front.

Corruption of Quora's Goals

Quora has turned into a scam that tricks people who want to grow the world’s knowledge to work for Quora’s investors. Quora says one thing and does the other, focusing primarily on ad revenue. This deviation from the mission became evident around 2012 when all technological development necessary to fulfill the mission ended about the same time as the other co-founder was fired. This was no coincidence.

Incentives and Company Design

Quora as a company was designed poorly, with perverse incentives against its mission built in. By company rules, the mission is not the master; instead, the investors are. Quora has no incentive to improve anything except ad views and clicks. By business model, the users are not the customers; they are Quora’s livestock to produce ad revenue. User experience does not matter unless the users leave. Since there is no good successor to Quora yet, disappointed users stick around, funneling clickbait-fed users to the adhouse.

Proposed Solutions

The solution to this issue lies in driving out the bad money and making Quora a for-profit benefit company, where values, mission, and vision rule over everything else. For example, Quora’s userbase could buy the company, with not a big investment per user. The buyer would have the stronger negotiating position because the amount of Quora’s user activity is the main determinant of its market value. Asking the price to be unfair, we could go on strike.

Ownership Realignment Risks

The change in ownership might introduce a new risk of the user-owners prioritizing their own short-term comfort and entertainment over the company’s important mission. They might oppose painful but needed developments such as splitting all existing double questions into canonical ones, thereby having to edit all existing combination answers and correcting all existing biased questions into neutral ones, and editing all existing reactionary answers into neutral ones. However, such an ownership realignment could allow us to complete the broken wheel. We could restart Quora’s technological development, open-source it, and crowdsource all work.

Conclusion

Shortsighted companies don’t dare try great leaps. They want to make billions of dollars in a few years, not trillions of dollars worth of value to everyone in a few decades. They lead humanity to technological dead ends to make money now. Quora’s success could be its downfall, as we have seen. Can money and good intentions save Quora? It is possible, but it requires a significant shift in ownership and a commitment to its true mission.