Quora has hired freelancers to write questions in the past couple of months; see screenshot at the end.

We are looking for talented individuals who are highly motivated, have excellent written communication skills, and work efficiently and independently.

Quora is a platform where users can ask any question and get answers from real people with first-hand experience. You will write incisive and insightful questions to be answered by real-world experts on our platform. This role requires 5-10 hours per week, all remote.

Responsibilities:

• Write interesting and thoughtful questions in an assigned field, intended to be answered by real-world experts on Quora

Things we look for include:

• Bachelors degree, or working toward one
• Background in journalism is helpful but not required
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong editorial judgement and attention to detail
• Interest in technology, higher education, and/or finance, as those are the areas you will be asking questions in
• Organization and efficiency
• Ability to work independently with minimal direction—

There are pros and cons to such a move.

Quora’s interest is in becoming a go-to resource for Internet research. In topics that it prioritises but it feels have not been well covered by questions to date, paying for questions is a strategy to seed good answers from its expert users. By addressing such gaps in their topic coverage, and paying for well-researched questions that are relevant to those topics, they ensure that when questioners begin at Google, they have the opportunity to end up at Quora.

On the other hand, many Quora users see themselves as a community (note that the Quora ad does not use that terminology). From a community perspective, the notion that people are paid to contribute questions may be disturbing to them. It’s a particularly delicate matter, as Quora is already awarding Top Question Writer awards to community members, who contribute questions for free. Many users have said that they want Quora to have better communication about their goals and policies. If there is a negative gut-reaction to the idea of Quora paying for questions, some of it will certainly stem from the lack of communication about it.

I think Quora should have considered how it would come across when a user accidentally stumbled on the job ad (as I have done), and I think Quora should have preempted any reaction by explaining that they were doing this—and that they still appreciate the freely contributed questions that come from the community.

You could argue there’s a slippery slope between pay-to-ask and pay-to-answer. As perusal of freelancing sites shows, people are already doing pay-to-answer on Quora, to boost their social media profile, but Quora has not been doing anything of the sort.

I would argue there is a difference between questions and answers, though. Questions are the stimulus to the content, but the answers are the content people come to see; that’s why answers are left as the user’s intellectual property, while questions belong to the community and not the user. As Yishan Wong pointed out so long ago (Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora?),

Quora is a great place to write answers and to read answers, but it is not a good place to get your own questions answered.

Quora hiring people to ask good questions does not detract from the independence and quality of the answers to those questions.

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What languages does Quora support?

You don’t need an invite any more for Spanish. You do need an invite for French, since it is still in Beta. https://fr.quora.com/join?code=0

People Rank

I’m 45.

I would not like to go forward. It’s already started being downhill physically, and I’m happy to take the leisurely route towards senectitude.

Not back to 16. I wasn’t really socialised back then, even if I was at my most physically rigorous.

Not back to 20. Still not properly socialised, and pretty adrift in what I was going to do with myself and who I was.

(I’m still adrift about what I’m going to do when I grow up. Life really is this thing that just happens to you.)

I’d like to go back to 25. When I was starting my PhD, was forming friends for the first time. Before I realised that it was not going to get me a job; before I realised that life just happens to you; before I was compromised and jaded. Back when everything seemed to be opening up for me.

The most successful one has been Blissymbols; it was conceived of as an auxlang, but has it seen usage helping disabled children acquire language.

The sample phrase on Wikipedia is:

Person-1st Verb-feeling-fire Verb-legs house camera-move
“I want to go to the cinema”

Outside of the currently supported languages (English, Spanish, French in Beta):

If you ask D’Angelo, German and Italian: they’re next up in the plan. Launching a beta for Quora en français by Adam D’Angelo on The Quora Blog.

If you ask Clarissa Lohr: https://www.quora.com/What-are-t…

I think I would have chosen Hindi, Tamil and Russian next. Maybe Arabic.

If you ask me, LATIN! Praeclarum enim esset!!!¡!!!11!! Ond Englisc! Maciaþ Mierce grēat āġēan!

So. Let’s approach this a little more coldly.

Quora is not Wikimedia, and Quora is not a non-for-profit, and Quora is not out there to save the world. Would that it were so, but it’s not. Quora is a business. Or rather, Quora is trying to become a business. Which means Quora’s got to be all about the benjamins: the Venture Capitalists’ benjamins in the short term, the advertisers’ benjamins in the long term.

So its choices of languages have to be strategic.

What language choices are strategic?

• Languages that don’t already have a strong competitor website in place, and that aren’t likely to firewall Quora. As User has pointed out to me, that rules out China, which has Zhihu (Q&A website); and Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora aren’t enough to sustain a zh.quora.com on their own. It does not rule out French and German, where the localised equivalents have not done well: Séverine Godet’s answer to Why is Gozil (French version of Quora) not as popular as Quora?; What is the German equivalent of Quora?
• Languages spoken by lucrative demographics. That presumably rules out Hausa, for example.
• Languages whose lucrative demographics aren’t already comfortable using English Quora: the point is to grow market share, and to grow it in benjamins. That may (may) rule out Indian languages. But I’d have thought it also rules out German, if not Italian and French. I’ve seen a lot of French and German users here lukewarm about the prospect of Quora in their language.
• Languages that Silicon Valley VCs are likely to be wowed by. Here we get into identity politics, and Sam Morningstar, please don’t hit me. But permit me the idle speculation:
• A bunch of Silicon Valley VCs are likely to be wowed by Spanish, because it’s the default foreign language in California.
• A bunch of Silicon Valley VCs are likely to be wowed by French, German, and Italian, because those are the default prestige foreign languages in the Anglosphere (Britain, and those under British influence). I paused about including Italian; but music and art and the Renaissance have likely bought it a place at the table, rather than advertiser benjamins.
• A bunch of Silicon Valley VCs are likely not to be wowed by languages they have a cultural cringe against. This is irresponsible speculation, but: I have seen Indians on Quora beg for Indian language support, and I have seen Indians on Quora pooh-pooh Indian language support. Indians who have ended up as VCs in Cali, I suspect, are going to be among the latter: they loved English so much, they moved to the States. They may be biased against sending VC money back home, when being Indian on Quora in English is what they are all about. Same would go for any Chinese VCs in Cali.
• A bunch of Silicon Valley VCs are likely not to be wowed by languages seen to have been a bust for internationalisation in the past. Orkut did not fail because it was Big In Brazil and Immense In India; Orkut failed because of structural mismanagement. But “Big In Brazil” became a joke in Silicon Valley, so I can see Portuguese being demoted in the wow-factor list, among Valley VCs. Same goes for Indian languages.

My own more considered opinion: definitely Russian, as the monopoly of VK (social network) in Russia shows, and probably Arabic. There’s Benjamins to be had there. Unless…

• Languages that Silicon Valley VCs are likely to have politically-motivated distaste for, which outweighs the benjamins to be had.

I have no idea whether VCs in the Valley are so impractical as to let their cultural and political predilections outweigh their nose for money. But you gotta admit. If they are, that would explain French, German and Italian. Which I, as a cultural European, am fricking STOKED to see announced; but which I don’t think are where the benjamins are at.

As of this writing, Quora supports English, Spanish, a beta for French has been announced, and there are plans for German and Italian.

This was answered by Laura Hale with the data available to her in 2015:

Laura Hale’s answer to Does Quora have any black employees? I read that tech firms in Silicon Valley face challenges in recruiting and retaining minority employees.

From what I can tell, the answer appears to be zero African American employees, while Asian employees represent 55% of Quora’s employees. This is an ethnically diverse group though, and includes people of Chinese, Iranian and Indian descent among others.

The reaction of Quorans to the question even being posed is… enlightening:

Adam Nyhan’s answer to Does Quora have any black employees? I read that tech firms in Silicon Valley face challenges in recruiting and retaining minority employees.

The fact that you are Australian is significant here.

Foreign languages are taught in school because foreign languages have been decided to be useful to a country’s citizens. They can be useful practically, or they can be useful culturally.

Classical languages were initially taught because they are useful practically as well as culturally. Latin was the language the European elite communicated in internationally, and classical Greek is where Latin got its culture from. When the practical utility fell away, classical languages became more of a niche, but they were still felt essential to the cultural grounding of the elite. When the culture shifted away from that, classical languages became even more niche.

There are only a few countries in which a majority of citizens don’t need to learn a foreign language for very practical reasons. And many of those countries are English speaking. In such countries, you learn a foreign language in school either because a minority still will finds it useful, or to contribute to the cultural grounding of the citizenry.

In the US, teaching Spanish makes sense for practical reasons, because a minority of non-Latinos clearly will still find it useful, whether south or north of the border. The same applies in Australia, with teaching Japanese or Indonesian or Mandarin.

The same kind of applies to Britain with the teaching of French and German. There is a bit of cultural grounding going on there, as well, given the importance of French and German culture. But those really are the two languages an educated Briton was most likely to run into.

French and German were taught in Australia, because French and German were taught in Britain. I am grateful that I was taught French and German, but I concede that the priority given to French and German until 20 years ago in Australian education was an anachronism.

Originally Answered:

Why did Quora stop working on Feb 28, 2017?

Amazon Just Broke the Internet

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