Open Letter to Quora
Dear Quora,
I think you ought to know that the best feature of Quora isn't its interface, or its search engine, or its moderation. All of those are pretty dreadful. What keeps me coming back are the unique voices and personalities of your writers.
I've met a trans homeless woman who struggles with mental illness, a science fiction writer who is knowledgeable about space and astronomy, a sex positive man who has expanded my knowledge of relationships, the capable mother of an autistic child, a UK police investigator who is an expert on rock music, a speech pathologist, a gay man who is a better spokesperson for feminism than I am… And those are only a few.
So many interesting people and yet you treat them as a disposable resource, with your eyes only on your advertisers.
You have inadvertently created an extraordinary community and yet whenever you can you change your website to make it more impersonal and less accessible; less like social media and more like Wikipedia.
I can’t help wanting to hang around with my friends over there but I’m tempted to do all my writing here. I’m hoping there will be less drama and I won’t live in fear of being banned for something I didn't do and that I can’t rectify because you won’t tell me what you think I did wrong.
I can see the time coming when either you dump me or I dump you. Medium is now my bolt hole for when it’s time to say “So long, and thanks for all the fish”.
Given the recent debacle over removing question details, that time may come sooner than I thought.
