The Atlantic

If There Are No Stupid Questions, Then How Do You Explain Quora?

The tragedy of Q&A sites is the story of the internet.
Source: Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Javier Zayas / Getty.

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Every day or two for the past seven months, I’ve received a “personalized” email containing a bunch of recent, user-generated questions from the website Quora. Here are some examples:

“I caught my son playing his Xbox at 12:00 in the morning on a school night. As a result, I broke his console and now he won’t talk to me. How can I tell him that it is his fault?”

“My husband accidentally pushed our 4-year-old daughter off the 40th story window out of anger. How do I prevent my husband from being sentenced to jail? He doesn’t need that hassle.”

“Was Hitler actually a nice guy in person?”

If I ever signed up to get these emails, I don’t remember. In fact, I didn’t even know I had a Quora account to begin with. This is apparently a common experience: In 2018, when users that their personal information may have been compromised in a data breach, a was, Even easier to forget is the fact that Quora, now more than a dozen years old, was once lauded as the future of the internet. Serious people that it would be the biggest thing since Facebook and Twitter, that it would eclipse Wikipedia as an online reference source, that it was the . Today, perusing the site feels more like walking through a landfill.

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