Tehdastehdas

Not the light bulbs. They improved light quality and reduced energy consumption per unit of light by increasing filament temperature, which reduced bulb life. Net win for the consumer.

You can still make an incandescent bulb last long by undervolting it orange, but it’ll be bad at illuminating, and it’ll consume almost as much electricity as when glowing yellowish white (standard).

Quora had heckloads of users before the well-working topic system was destroyed with the excuse of tag spamming (real reason: cost-cutting), which us tedium-loving “Topic Gnomes” had always corrected quickly. So it’s not impossible. Now the tagging is done badly by “AI” and my feed content went to shit, even worse than on PieFed with a leaky keyword mute list.

Missing features were a trust system for topic editors (new user = 0 trust, etc.) and answer topic tagging - only the questions were tagged, which didn’t work when the question was general, like “What should you know in 2025?” and the specific answers were all over the place.

Keywords would never have worked for the infinite questions about perpetual motion machines, because the askers never knew the correct term. Similarly, I have failed to craft a keyword block list to filter out all U.S. politics.

I’m hoping for EU-run social media that requires secure ID like a bank. I liked Quora before enshittification when it had real name policy and strict moderation.

I’m hoping for EU-run social media that requires secure ID like a bank. I liked Quora before enshittification when it had real name policy and strict moderation.

Manipulation by unnoticeable omission. Europeans getting a personalised censored feed, not getting recommended and advertised what they need. Social media giant AI detects an illness you have, and silences all content that could lead you to health. Dating sites not showing you the most compatible people. Job sites not showing you the jobs that could strengthen Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

We’re making the same mistake with AI as we did with cars; not planning human future.

Cars were designed to atrophy muscles, and polluted urban planning and the air.
AI is being designed to atrophy brains, and pollutes the air, the internet, public discourse, and more to come.

We should change course towards AI that makes people smarter, not dumber: AI-aided collaborative thinking.
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-better-to-work-on-intelligence-augmentation-rather-than-artificial-intelligence/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen

https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen

Not Fediverse, but an example of what works:

Quora used to have a fantastic crowd-edited question topic ontology/taxonomy for precise feed shaping with thousands of disambiguated topics interlinked in a graph/tree structure, but they enshittified the system away 2023, and now it’s all LLM misunderstandings of what the question topics should be. The bot thinks a question is about apples when the question is a mathematics word puzzle; “How many apples…”. The excuse for AI tagging was “tags can be abused” when in reality the crowd corrected the abuses quickly and reported the offenders. With the new AI tagger, my feed turned into viral trash from Quora-celebrities, mostly about current news.

They never made the obviously needed features of:

• being able to topic tag answers, not just questions (for when the question is general and the answer is specific, like “What do you think everyone needs to know in 2025?”).
• the ability to follow a topic from a user, because most people write about many topics, so a follow-a-user brings uninteresting topics to my feed, but not all people write well about that topic I want to follow, so I’d need to follow that topic from good writers only.

Commanding a bad/incompetent/overworked parent to become a good parent doesn’t make it so.