The Enshittification of Quora
The Enshittification of QuoraQuora launched in 2010 as a question-and-answer site built around expert contributors, then introduced advertising in 2016 and expanded it into a self-serve platform the following year. A 2018 breach exposed data from about 100 million accounts, and the Partner Program, which paid users for asking questions, was criticized for flooding the site with low-effort templated questions before its English version shut down in 2022. From 2023 the company shifted resources toward Poe, a standalone AI chatbot aggregator with paid subscriptions, while observers documented a rise in AI-generated answers and a decline in the human-written expertise the site was known for.
Alternatives
A network of topic-specific Q&A communities with voting, editing, and no login wall for reading answers.
Topic-based communities where questions are answered by humans and threads remain readable without an account.
The Paper Trail
| Date | Category | Symptom · rating · source |
|---|---|---|
| 2016-04 | ads | Quora introduces advertisingQuora began showing ads for the first time, starting with a small group of advertisers whose promoted listings appeared beneath questions. It was the company's first monetization effort after six years without revenue.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2017-05 | ads | Self-serve ad platform opens to all advertisersQuora opened a self-serve advertising platform to the public, letting any advertiser buy text-based and app-install ads targeted by topic, geography, and platform. The launch came shortly after the company raised $85 million at a roughly $1.8 billion valuation.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2018-12 | privacy | Data breach affects about 100 million usersQuora disclosed that a malicious third party gained unauthorized access to systems containing data for approximately 100 million users, including names, email addresses, encrypted passwords, and direct messages. The company logged out affected users and notified law enforcement.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2022-08 | quality | English-language Partner Program shut downQuora announced it was ending the English version of its Partner Program, which had paid users for posting questions based on the ad revenue and engagement those questions generated. The invite-only program had drawn criticism for incentivizing high volumes of templated, low-quality questions.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2023-02 | features | Poe AI chatbot app opens to the publicQuora opened its standalone AI chatbot app Poe to the general public, providing access to chatbots from OpenAI and Anthropic rather than human-written answers. The company launched Poe as a separate product and increasingly positioned it as central to its future.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2023-03 | pricing | Poe adds paid subscriptionsQuora launched subscriptions in Poe, charging users for access to bots powered by GPT-4 and Claude models. The subscription tier marked Quora's expansion from ad-supported Q&A into paid AI chatbot access.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2024-02 | quality | Slate documents Quora's decline amid AI-generated answersSlate reported that Quora had become flooded with nonsensical and AI-generated answers after budget cuts eliminated full-time moderators and support staff. The report noted that new terms allowing user answers to be used for training large language models prompted prominent contributors to remove their work.↳ Slate |
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