Quora Who?
Well, this is a turn of events.
As I said before, when I hit 50 million views on Quora, it was like a light switch went off. I didn’t have another goal to keep writing on that platform. I’ve not written a thing since January 1, 2026 and I’ve still gained another 2 million views. I stopped writing because it was a lot of work and it just didn’t feel worth it anymore given my existing time constraints. Quora has never treated us writers all that well. We get zero recognition for our work. We get no special treatment if we have five views or fifty million. We’re moderated and abruptly treated just like anyone else. For years they have made it clear that they don’t care about us writers to the point where they reminded us.
I just saw a surprising pie chart on Rick Beato’s YouTube channel that shows Quora as a 14.3% contributor to Google Gemini’s training! I’ve been pushed out on the Quora Digest to 305 million people with just 1,235 of my answers or about a third of what I write, so I’m in that slice somewhere. I’ve written an estimated 2 million words on Quora over the years, so I don’t know how that translates into training data or if I left any meaningful mark, but people still read my stuff.
I recently got an email claiming to be a real person who works at Quora who wanted to know why I stopped writing. I wanted to write, “Well, because you’re a bag of assholes…” but I restrained myself. I’m just talking to an AI. Instead, I carefully wrote just as I would on Quora, all the reasons I wasn’t motivated to do it. It’s not like I quit entirely, I just don’t think of it as the priority I once did. I wanted to focus more of my attention on growing Hudson Cloud and all the interesting things we’re doing and less on a company that uses me with zero appreciation.
I wasn’t angry, I just went point by point with what I thought contributed to my drift and sent it off, knowing it will be aggregated into a group answer that if they decode it correctly will say, “It’s because we’re a bag of assholes.”
I’ve since received two surveys aimed directly at those of us who stopped writing. I checked all the boxes, made many useful comments when prompted, and when they boil it all down the only conclusion will be: “They say we’re a giant bag of assholes!”
Quora will not likely change. It’s led by a Meta founder who only thinks of numbers and is not skilled in building mass relationships. It’s obvious. I’ve never met the guy but I suspect he’s just as dismissive in person and that seems to be the culture at Quora.
The reality is that Quora has little use anymore unless you want a group answer and you want to feel like you’re a part of something, but that’s not enough. While it can still answer questions from real people with real experience better than anything out there today, the bulk of questions, the ones that require black and white facts or complex answers are better answered by an LLM.
What Quora knows is that none of us who left gamed the system with one sentence answers to get our view count high. We didn’t only respond to sensationalism or do anything to get the very high view counts some receive. We were the real thing. People who just loved sharing what we learned in life.
Rick Beato on YouTube gave an excellent example of the weakness of AI relative to the skills of artists. It’s called, “I Fried ChatGPT With ONE Simple Question” and it’s so worth watching. It makes the very point of what us writers brought to the table that no AI can replace. It was our life experience and the subtleties of skills, and all of that meant something. We poured our hearts into our work and we never gamed Quora because we wanted the truth about our work. Yet Quora treated us like none of it mattered. They played politics, gave us crap questions to answer and often gamed with our exposure if we were not somehow in political alignment. We were merely pawns and now they are suddenly worried about us.
Will I write on Quora again? Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I guess I’ll do it when I feel like it, but for now, they need to figure out what was the actual backbone of Quora, and that it was millions of people like me who care about what we write.