Just like with YouTube, Facebook and Google, I don't like predatory monopolies that gang together to wipe people from the face of the internet. Much respect to Everipedia, listen to the reasons why Wikipedia isn't the route we want to go down when talking about history. Think about it; Google has the power to change history, skew search results, favor different views than others. This is scary shit, and blockchain is here to fix all of that.
I am a believer in if you buidl enough value, the universe will find you and come knocking on your door, even if you live in the middle of nowhere. It is the value effect, if you get one person, that person will tell two friends. Those two friends tell two friends, and thus the snowball grows. This is where I first found Quora. I needed an outlet to express myself, and while doing so as a by-product, I was helping people. It all started when I lost 100 pounds in 4 months. I never was a writer, never read books (I listen to audiobooks) and learned by going with what I innately knew. When writing it is usually a mess, but with products like Grammarly, a nice haircut and clean clothes and my writing is good to go. I found Quora, #GodsPlan, and I saw someone asking: "How to lose weight quickly?" I thought, "Hmm, I know how to lose weight quickly!" I went on to write a very detailed, step by step guide on how I lost the weight. The answer took off, starting getting thousands of views, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. So, I kept writing, kept expressing myself. There were no boundaries; nothing was off limits, my closet and all of my skeletons were on display. I could care less; I was offloading everything in my head, others found my junk useful.
Quora is a compelling place; people go there to find answers to tough questions. I was browsing through reading replies, and I noticed one of my answers was collapsed by a Quora mod, without explanation. I wrote to them, said it was an error and it took them three months to uncollapse my answer. "Hmm... that was weak" I thought to myself. Then I noticed that I was not the only one, many people where getting their answers collapsed, deleted, and then people even started getting temporarily banned from the site. Quora is a newer website and is/was a small website; now it is creeping up to become a real force in this world. This is a place people will look for answers, and if a centralized party behind closed doors can censor those answers without any explanation, that is not a road that leads to freedom. I believe the bigger these websites get, the more vulnerable to government interference they become. Companies like Apple sue the government for trying to leach customer data from Apple devices, of course, the government wins every time. Just look at Facebook, it is a government controlled shit show, and Zuks has about as much control of Facebook as Dr. Victor Frankenstein had over his creation.
It's funny when I first started on Quora in one of my answers I stated a goal of mine was to become a top writer. At the time, I never really thought it would happen. However, once I became a top writer I got to asking the question of who elected me? Moreover, why? The process of selecting top writers is also centralized and controlled by Quora. As we can see, centralized social media sites start off innocent, but it is all a trust game for the content producers because the ball is always in Quora's court and the game is a private one. I just got tired of pouring my heart into content, helping grow a beast that one day will feast on us all. Social media is not a joke or some small thing, human communication is the most critical aspect of life, without it we are back in the stone ages. However, what is worse then no contact, is deceptive communication. When the information becomes skewed, and people can't tell wrong from right, truth from false, propaganda from reality, we set a dangerous precedent moving forward.
I have no issues walking away from a platform that is in threat of becoming apart of the predatorial monopolies of the world. Also, while I don't think Quora is quite yet there, give it a few more years, and we will see people being shadow banned, straight up banned and censored just like we are seeing on all the big centralized social media sites today.
If you BUIDL it they will come. I now have a haven in the form of the Steem Blockchain and now feel at home. Be the change you wish to see in the world... I introduce you to QAS - Question Answer Site - And it will be a free airdrop 1-1 for Steemit Hodlers. I will be creating it as an SMT. Website and whitepaper to be released soon. QAS will be a decentralized Question & Answer website built on a blockchain, and it will live right here on the Steem Blockchain.
EDIT: Thanks to people commenting I have become aware of musing.io, which is a Q&A website on the Steem Blockchain. I will check it out and reach out to the developers to see if I can help in anyway.