Atheists, imagine you're going skydiving with a Christian baby. Suddenly, the baby tells you he won't open his parachute until you renounce atheism and accept Jesus as your lord and savior. What would you do?
If your response to that question was anything other than "what the hell?", you might be part of Quora's target audience.
As has been well-documented by others before me, Quora has been struggling to actually turn a profit since its inception, largely because there's no real way to monetize Internet strangers asking other Internet strangers questions. Combine that with its well-publicized data breaches and you have a recipe for desperation — aside from its notoriously aggressive email marketing, how exactly do you get users to spend time on the website, looking at ads and responding to monetized questions? The answer Quora has settled on, unsurprisingly, is rage bait.
And thus we arrive at the caper of the Christian baby. That skydiving one was the earliest example I could find, but Christian baby questions — and others of that ilk, precision-engineered to be so bizarre and rage-inducing that they simply demand an answer — seem to be the shovel with which Quora has decided to dig itself out of its grave. You'll find literally hundreds of these posted ad nauseum by Quora power users, each more outlandish than the last and crafted that way for the sole purpose of getting angry clicks and driving up traffic.
Take, for instance, another example:
Atheists, imagine a Christian baby breaks into your house and walks into your refrigerator and refuses to leave until you renounce atheism and accept Jesus as your lord and savior. What would you do?
Thousands were delivered this question, whether through those aforementioned newsletters the site foists on you or simply seeing it in their feed — and hundreds answered, in many cases taking the bait hook, line and sinker. The amount of people smugly reminding the original poster that babies can't talk or, you know, be Christian, is staggering — and, indeed, exactly the intended result.
Quora hasn't collapsed just yet, so one can only assume this unorthodox strategy is bearing at least some fruit. For the sake of babies everywhere, though, I can only hope they settle on a new grift soon — this would be funny if it wasn't such a searing indictment of the modern Internet and its pathological need to always be right.
