Why I Slowly Stopped Using Quora (Even Though I Once Loved It)

You remember Quora, right?

I do. Very clearly.

I still remember the first time I landed on Quora sometime around 2012–2013. I had Googled a question—something dense and half-academic, the kind of thing you expect to skim three articles for and still walk away confused. Instead, I landed on an answer that felt like it had been written for me. It was long, patient, structured, and oddly generous. The author wasn’t trying to impress. They were trying to explain.

That experience repeated itself again and again.

If I asked, “How does quantum entanglement work?” I didn’t get a listicle or a motivational quote wrapped in science. I got a 1,500-word breakdown that started from first principles and slowly built upward. If I asked, “What caused the 2008 financial crisis?” I didn’t get a hot take. I got a former Wall Street professional explaining collateralized debt obligations as if they were tutoring a graduate student who had all day to learn.

Back then, Quora felt like the internet’s brain had finally decided to show up to work.

This is a case study of how that feeling slowly disappeared—not because users became stupid, not because technology got worse, but because incentives changed. I’m writing this in the first person because that’s how I experienced it: as a long-time user who slowly stopped opening a tab that used to live permanently in my bookmarks.

This is not a hit piece. It’s not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. And it’s definitely not marketing. It’s simply an honest account of what changed, what I tried to do as a user, what worked, what didn’t, and what I learned by watching one of the internet’s most promising knowledge platforms pivot itself into something very different.

1. Short Background: Why Quora Mattered to Me

Before Quora, most “answers” on the internet fell into two categories.

The first category was anonymous forums. You could find good information there, but you had to sift through sarcasm, inside jokes, and a lot of misinformation. The second category was polished blogs or news articles, which were often well-written but rarely addressed the exact question you had in mind.

Quora felt different because it merged credibility with accessibility.

Real people used their real names. Many listed their credentials, not as marketing badges but as context. When someone answered a question about aerospace engineering, you could see that they actually worked in aerospace. When someone explained venture capital, you could see they had invested in startups. When someone talked about relationships, they often wrote from lived experience rather than theory.

The upvoting system, at least in the early years, rewarded clarity and depth more than shock value. Long answers didn’t feel like a burden; they felt like a feature. Reading Quora felt like sitting in on a public seminar where anyone could raise their hand, and the person answering actually cared about doing a good job.

For me, Quora became a daily habit. Not a doom-scroll habit, but a deliberate one. I would open it when I wanted to learn, not when I wanted to kill time.

That distinction matters.

2. The Problem I Faced: The Feed Started Feeling Wrong

Around 2017, something subtle but unmistakable changed.

I didn’t wake up one day and think, “Quora is bad now.” It was more like a slow accumulation of friction. The kinds of questions appearing in my feed began to shift. They weren’t wrong, exactly. They were just… shallow.

Instead of “How does X actually work?” I started seeing more questions like:

• Hypotheticals designed to provoke reactions rather than understanding

• Broad generalizations about entire countries or professions

• Image-based questions clearly engineered for easy upvotes

At first, I ignored them. Every platform evolves. Noise creeps in. I assumed the algorithm would recalibrate.

Then I learned about the Partner Program.

Quora started paying users to ask questions. The stated goal was to encourage high-quality content by incentivizing curiosity. On paper, that sounded reasonable. In practice, it changed the nature of questions almost overnight.

If you pay people per view, they will optimize for views.

What gets views is not depth. It’s novelty, controversy, and relatability at scale. Nuanced questions that require expert answers do not travel as far as emotionally charged or absurd hypotheticals. The feed slowly tilted toward what performed best, not what taught best.

As a reader, I felt it immediately. As someone who occasionally wrote answers, I felt it even more sharply.

3. What I Tried: Step-by-Step Attempts to Adapt

I didn’t quit Quora right away. I tried to work with the platform as it evolved. Looking back, this is the part that taught me the most.

Step 1: Curating My Feed Aggressively

My first response was to follow only very specific topics and writers. I unfollowed broad categories and muted questions that felt low-effort. I spent time training the algorithm, telling myself that personalization would fix the issue.

This helped slightly, but not enough.

Even within specialized topics, the incentive structure had changed. Questions were often framed to maximize engagement rather than clarity. As a result, answers—even good ones—started to feel performative. Writers were optimizing for upvotes and reach, not necessarily for precision.

Step 2: Writing Longer, More Careful Answers

When I did answer questions, I doubled down on depth. I wrote the kind of answers I wished I were seeing more of. I cited sources. I explained assumptions. I avoided exaggeration.

The result was mixed.

Occasionally, a thoughtful answer would gain traction and attract intelligent discussion. More often, it would sink beneath shorter, punchier responses that told a better story, even if they were less accurate.

This was discouraging, not because I wanted popularity, but because it signaled that the platform no longer reliably surfaced its best content.

Step 3: Ignoring the Metrics Entirely

Next, I tried pretending the metrics didn’t exist. I wrote as if no one were watching, purely for the satisfaction of explaining something well.

This helped my mindset, but it didn’t fix the underlying problem. Quora was no longer a place where I discovered new ideas organically. It had become a place I visited intentionally, for very specific searches, rather than one I explored freely.

Step 4: Hitting the First Wall — Mandatory Login

Then came the login requirement.

At first, it seemed minor. “Just log in to keep reading.” But psychologically, it mattered. Quora went from being an open knowledge layer on top of the web to being a gated community. Casual readers dropped off. Search-driven discovery weakened.

I noticed it in my own behavior. If I clicked a Quora link from Google and hit a login wall, I often just closed the tab. Not out of anger, but out of friction.

Step 5: The Paywall — Quora+

When some answers moved behind a paywall with Quora+, my relationship with the platform changed permanently.

I understand why subscriptions exist. I pay for many tools. But knowledge platforms operate on trust. When the best answers become inaccessible to casual readers, the ecosystem fractures. Writers lose reach. Readers lose patience. Search engines lose incentive to surface the content.

At that point, Quora stopped being my default learning destination.

4. What Worked and What Didn’t

This is where the comparison becomes unavoidable.

As I spent less time on Quora, I didn’t stop asking questions. I just asked them elsewhere.

Where I Went Instead

• Relationship advice moved to niche communities on Reddit

• Coding questions increasingly landed on Stack Overflow or developer subreddits

• Deep historical or academic questions found homes in tightly moderated communities

Reddit was not cleaner. It was not more polite. It was not more professional.

But it stayed open.

More importantly, it stayed community-driven. Answers were not tied to personal brand-building in the same way. Many people wrote because they cared about the topic, not because they were optimizing a profile.

What Didn’t Work on Quora Anymore

• Relying on the feed for discovery

• Expecting credentials alone to signal quality

• Assuming that long-form answers would be rewarded consistently

The platform hadn’t become useless. It had become unreliable.

Some brilliant answers still existed. But they were buried. And buried content, in practical terms, might as well not exist.

5. Final Results: The Numbers and the Shift

By 2023, the broader impact became visible in traffic data. Public analytics from firms like SimilarWeb and Statista showed a significant decline in organic search traffic, roughly in the range of a 20–25 percent drop year over year.

More telling than the raw numbers was the composition of users.

Casual learners—people like me who showed up with genuine curiosity—were leaving. Power users and monetized contributors remained, but the balance had shifted. Quora had optimized for engagement and revenue, and in doing so, it traded away some of its intellectual gravity.

At the same time, conversational AI tools like ChatGPT entered the mainstream.

For the first time, I could ask a question and receive a clear, structured answer instantly. No login. No ads. No performative tone. Just an explanation.

That didn’t replace communities. It replaced friction.

Interestingly, Reddit did not see the same collapse. In many niche communities, activity held steady or even grew. The reason was simple: lived experience cannot be automated. You can summarize facts with AI, but you cannot replicate a parent explaining how they handled a specific situation, or a developer walking through a bug they fixed at 2 a.m., or a traveler warning others about a scam they personally encountered.

Quora sat awkwardly in the middle. It wasn’t fully open like Reddit. It wasn’t frictionless like AI. It was something else—something that no longer had a clear reason to exist in my daily workflow.

6. Key Lessons for Beginners (and Platform Builders)

This is the part I think about the most, especially when I look at other platforms and brands making similar trade-offs.

Lesson 1: Incentives Shape Behavior Faster Than Ideals

Quora didn’t become shallow because people stopped caring about knowledge. It became shallow because the system rewarded shallow behavior. If you pay for views, you will get content optimized for views. This is not a moral failing. It is economics.

Lesson 2: Trust Is Fragile and Compounds Slowly

Early Quora earned trust over years by being open and rigorous. It lost some of that trust in a few short pivots. Once users feel that a platform is optimizing against them, it is very hard to reverse that perception.

Lesson 3: Friction Is a Tax on Curiosity

Login walls and paywalls are not neutral design choices. They actively discourage exploration. People will not fight to learn unless the value is overwhelming. In most cases, they will simply go somewhere else.

Lesson 4: Depth Beats Dopamine, But Only If You Protect It

Deep content does not compete well in open algorithms unless it is intentionally protected. If you want expertise, you must design for it. Otherwise, the loudest content will always win.

Lesson 5: You Cannot Replace Community With Optimization

Quora tried to scale knowledge the way social networks scale attention. That works up to a point. But knowledge is relational. It depends on context, credibility, and shared norms. Once those erode, no amount of algorithmic tuning can restore them fully.

Closing Thoughts

Quora did not fail. It pivoted.

It chose revenue, scale, and engagement metrics over openness, depth, and trust. That choice makes sense from a business perspective. It just comes with consequences.

I still occasionally read Quora. I still occasionally find excellent answers there. But I no longer rely on it. And that, more than any traffic graph, is the real outcome.

The lesson here is not about one platform. It is about any system—digital or otherwise—that trades its core value for short-term growth.

If you are building something, ask yourself:

What is the one thing people trust you for?
What incentives are you creating, intentionally or not?
And what would your users genuinely miss if you disappeared tomorrow?

Those answers matter more than any metric.

Quora taught me that. Even in its decline, it taught me something valuable.

And that, at least, feels fitting.