Quora used to have a fantastic crowd-edited question topic ontology/taxonomy for feed shaping, but they enshittified the system away, and now it’s all LLM misunderstandings of what the question topics should be. The bot thinks a question is about apples when the question is a mathematics word puzzle; “How many apples…”. The excuse for AI tagging was “tags can be abused” when in reality the crowd corrected the abuses quickly. With the new AI tagger, my feed turned into viral trash from Quora-celebrities, mostly about recent news.
They never made the obviously needed features of:
- being able to topic tag answers, not just questions (for when the question is general and the answer is specific, like “What do you think everyone needs to know in 2025?”).
- the ability to follow a topic from a user, because most people write about many topics, so a follow brings uninteresting topics to my feed, but not all people write well about that topic I follow, so I’d need to follow a topic from a user.
Hashtags don’t work as well as disambiguated topics used to work on Quora before enshittification. Many real topics have many hashtags associated to them: acronyms, whole names, misspellings. Meanwhile, many hashtags have many real topics associated to them, especially acronyms with many possible collisions: https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/AGI