ChatGPT vs Quora — Who’s David and Who’s Goliath?

Social media is fast becoming a red ocean. Who’ll survive?

ChatGPT — an AI based tool that answers your questions, is on a rampage. Use cases are emerging every day — from investment to marketing to psychotherapy. The last time I remember the people went absolutely this crazy was when iPhone was introduced. That was when social media was still muted. Now, its a marketing frenzy for “all things AI”.

Quora, has long been this reserved and introverted cousin of social media. Started as a question and answer platform, I would say that Quora is one of the very few social media platforms that have stayed true to their essence. Yes, they have had monetisation, content curation and other problems, but then who doesn’t?

After seeing the chaos in Twitter headquarters, people in Quora should have felt happy for their place in the social media world. Not for long.

The “What Next” World

Modern day, post-internet, post-social media world has become a grapevine for “what next”. Disruption is the holy grail here. Things need to change, that’s all. Money needs to shift hands. New rich kids need to be made. The old ones need to become old rich dudes and dudettes. RIP Mark Zuckerberg.

There is this world that want new tech players to replace old, much like our politicians. Every new one of them come with their garden variety of items to be solved for. Only to create new problems and evolve(?!) into the very people they detested in the first place.

Coming back to Quora, ChatGPT must be giving the folks at 650 Castro Street (where Quora is located) a long cold “Helsinki” chill. What if everyone goes to ChatGPT? If they aren’t asking, I am sure their investors and creators are.

THE DAVID and the goliath

We all the know the story. David is the underdog. Goliath is the animal. Blah Blah Blah. With Malcom Gladwell’s twist on it not withstanding, the story has been beaten to death, just like Goliath’s victims. So it shouldn’t matter much that I am beating it one more time. Here it goes!

In an ideal world, ChatGPT will be the David, the new entrant, the one with new ideas. Quora must be the Goliath. Just that here the David has some Goliaths as backers. Microsoft, which majorly lost the plot in Social media, found a backchannel route to get a stake in ChatGPT. And so did others. What more, there are more Davids backed by Goliaths that are entrenching upon Quora’s space. Case in point — Bard.

Quora’s End Game

Quora has being wanting to make money, badly. They pushed this aggressively in the last few years. They came up with Quora plus — their premium content feature. They wanted more users to stay on the platform. They came up with Quora spaces.

Just that none of it worked. Not Yet.

What more, they did unexplainable things like deleting good quality answers, pissing off creators and driving them away. Now, they are in the situation where they have to prioritise on surviving as a credible channel for content creators. It’s Series A, all over again.

Since both platforms are about answering questions, ChatGPT looks like it will kill Quora slowly and quietly in the next few years.

But then, Quora has a few leverages.

Quora’s Trump Cards

#1

As long as people live and die, they will have experiences, and want to share it. As long as people live and die, they want to learn from other people’s experiences.

#2

ChatGPT might not have access to Quora yet, which is Quora’s trump card #2. They can keep it this way or give access for a $ value. This might also solve their monetisation problem.

#3

ChatGPT needs new natural language formulations to learn from. They might be able to get that from outside Quora, especially when it comes to human experiences. But without contributing their content to a specific individual, they will not be able to recreate the experience of learning from one another — a core psychological need in human beings.

Goliath + Goliath

In this context of two tech powerhouses becoming competitors, the only way forward for Quora is to partner with ChatGPT-like platform. It could be Bard as well. Either ways, they don’t have a choice.

Their content curation is struggling as-is and there’s no clarity how they will perform in an AI-based content generation thunderstorm.

Their creators don’t have earning capacity of social media platforms like YouTube.

More creators are going video and shorts based, which doesn’t greatly help Quora.

Their community is shrinking.

Their content is getting commoditised.

Quora can do this the hard way or harder way. Rip off the band aid, find out a way to monetise through AI-tools. Or wait for the eventual explosion of AI-based content and look for buyers. Flight or Flight.

What would your reserved and introverted cousin do in such situations?

Harry Ven is an extended technologist at Konvos.me and freelance marketer at ProductStory