Well, the revenue sharing probably didn't help much for sure. I've seen dozens of sites and platforms add that as a feature, and as unfortunate as it is, this almost always backfires. People see 'make money contributing to this platform' as 'free cash for spamming!' and the quality often falls off a cliff. You need really strict rules and a good moderation team to keep a platform under control in this situation, and that's rarely the case for services like Quora.
You can see the same issues cropping up on Medium with its partner program, on Twitter thanks to Twitter Blue and revenue sharing, and even to some degree on the likes of YouTube and Twitch (though they're so massive that the scammers don't really stand out/do as well). Put money on the table, and the scammers will come out of the woodwork to try and get as much of it as they can, quality content be damned.
Edit: I also suspect part of the issue with revenue sharing programs is that they don't offer enough to incentive genuine experts, but offer enough that if you're utterly desperate and local costs of living are low, you're incentivised to spam for it.
Yeah, the comments to any viral post on Xitter now is just blue checkmarks spamming memes in order to get likes and eyeballs on their junk content, and thus make money.
Any large film/music/video games twitter account post gets spammed by AI bots and I mean literal AI bots that occasionally give the game away with "you have run out of credits" or "I don't understand this prompt" messages. Also a bunch of them just retweeting their own posts that have nothing to do with the original in an attempt to farm engagement for their older stuff
You can see the same issues cropping up on Medium with its partner program, on Twitter thanks to Twitter Blue and revenue sharing, and even to some degree on the likes of YouTube and Twitch (though they're so massive that the scammers don't really stand out/do as well). Put money on the table, and the scammers will come out of the woodwork to try and get as much of it as they can, quality content be damned.
Edit: I also suspect part of the issue with revenue sharing programs is that they don't offer enough to incentive genuine experts, but offer enough that if you're utterly desperate and local costs of living are low, you're incentivised to spam for it.