A shill asks "a question," followed by all these "answers," recommending a particular site, product or technique (that has a backer).
I have had to leave quite a number of forums, because they became completely taken over by Asian spammers; doing exactly this. They rendered the groups useless.
TBH: I did fall for it the first time I encountered it. It's a fairly effective technique, if done right.
A lot of Quora spammers will play the long game. Some of them will take the time to get moderately familiar with a subject, write some organic answers, gain some karma on the site, then start shilling. It's an interesting incentive structure, but ultimately most answers on the site end up being the mediocre filler by spammers trying to build their accounts.
Somehow or another, Stack Overflow is able to maintain very high quality threads. I'm not sure if that is because of filtering algorithms, or human moderation (which is more or less crowdsourced).
I have not run into this kind of spam on SO.
There are a lot of "Kool Aid" threads, where folks get heavily invested in a technique or pattern, but those are legit, if somewhat tiresome.
And before someone says 'Stack Exhange is just as broad as Quora' -- all the SE sites I've come across disallow 'product recommendation' questions or whatever similar thing fits their niche.
SO has human moderators and a points system to gate functionality, and those points are earned by being useful.
Quora did have a points/credits system in the beginning but they removed it for some reason, and ever since then participation and edits were open to everyone which let the spam take over. They also have a faceless AI-powered moderation system that's often overbearing and wrong.
Though I'll say this -- it's hard to optimize Quora's feed, but once you do that by carefully curating the topics and the people to follow, Quora can be an incredible source of super insightful answers on niche topics. But it does take a lot of work, which is a barrier to many.
Their feed display mechanism needs a lot of work imo.
Strange because I find that it's full of day-0 beginner questions and little of in-depth niche, thought out ones.
Like "Where do I start with machine learning?" often with bad spelling, or "Do you need to be very smart to become a programmer?" etc. By contrast, Reddit, the StackExchange sites and HN are a totally different league.
I used to love browsing Quora, and found a lot of answers fascinating. However, in the past year something seems to have changed. Now I get really spammy suggestions, and there is rarely new content on my feed. I get the same suggestions for days.
I don’t doubt that the good content is there. I think their algorithms just changed and now I don’t see it anymore. Not willing to put in the effort to figure out how to get an interesting feed again.
In my experience it was quite good for a while, then they made a couple of changes and suddenly the feed was rendered absolutely useless. After more than two weeks of the feed showing me the exact same questions and answers every day with only 1-2 new ones inbetween I stopped using it.
And at that point they had changed parts of the site so much I couldn't figure out how to subscribe to new topics because all of them were replaced by user-created topics/groups like on Facebook(at least that's how I understood it).
Unfortunately, it's like that on Reddit too. I just can't find an unbiased, not trying to shill their product response to just about anything. Fake reviews everywhere, fake gurus on YouTube, Fake answers on Q&A sites. Now I can't even get news without paywalls. Also, Medium is smelly garbage. I hate their popups on every article. The WWW is in a sorry state right now.
Quora is full of it, and so is LinkedIn.
A shill asks "a question," followed by all these "answers," recommending a particular site, product or technique (that has a backer).
I have had to leave quite a number of forums, because they became completely taken over by Asian spammers; doing exactly this. They rendered the groups useless.
TBH: I did fall for it the first time I encountered it. It's a fairly effective technique, if done right.