Very ominous title, I know. But I promise, this isn’t anything bad, it’s just really embarrassing on my part, but this blog is due and I might as well put this out into the world. 

 

Back in middle school, around the end of 6th grade and the start of 7th grade, all of my classmates were obsessed with this one website, Quora. I had never heard of this website before, but I was curious to find out, and so after a quick google search in the middle of class, I was logged into Quora.

 

For those of you who don’t know, Quora is basically just an online question and answer site, only really used by the vast majority of people when looking something very obscure up. However, a bored, kind of sheltered asian child in 7th grade does not belong in the same cohort as the vast majority of people, and so I went in deep. 

 

7th grade me had never used social media before, and so the dopamine hit that I got seeing numbers like upvote and follower count go up (even though it was just my friends giving me support) was unmatched. So, me being the muppet that I was, decided to keep chasing that high. I kept answering questions, trying to rack up social media points only to be disappointed when I would get 1 upvote (from myself) on an answer after an entire week. So I decided to go study the Quora meta. 

 

All the popular answers I saw on the for you page were long, they told interesting stories, they had pictures and humor and creativity. Again, I was a sheltered 12 year old so I didn’t exactly have a lot of stories to tell, much less the writing capability to make my meager stories interesting. What made this even more frustrating was that my classmates, who were also all over Quora, did have the rhetoric and wealth of stories to tell that garnered lots of attention. A friend of mine had an absurdly viral post (I’m talking like a hundred thousand upvotes), another classmate got followed by huge personalities on Quora at the time, others would only use Quora once or twice a month but gain huge numbers regardless. 

 

I was jealous.

 

I wanted the same clout as my classmates. I wanted to prove that I could write just as good as them. I didn’t want to feel inferior, and so I decided to change up my approach. 

The issue with what I was writing was that I was writing two or three sentence answers with awful grammar and zero pictures(I wrote an answer about this, you don’t need to read it). If you look at any popular Quora answer, all of those things that I mentioned are nonexistent traits unless the person writing the answer already has a big following. So once I implemented those changes, 1 or 2 upvotes turned to 10 or 12, but 10 or 12 wasn’t the hundred or even thousand that I was looking for. So I made an even more fundamental change: what I was writing about.

 

Instead of trying to come up with a story or attempt to make a funny response, I decided to instead focus in on what I knew a lot about at the time: anime, specifically Naruto. Essentially, I dedicated myself and my account into answering as many Naruto questions as I could in hope of monopolizing the Naruto question and answer market.

I would write at least one or two answers a day, some being easily 1000+ words filled with pictures and hyperlinks and everything else that I could think of. The opportunity cost of this time was a pretty significant slide in my grades, which my parents were very unhappy about but I didn’t care. I needed that clout.

 

Thankfully, my time wasn’t completely wasted. My numbers would slowly go up, a dozen followers turned into a hundred. A thousand views turned into a hundred thousand, which turned into millions. My average upvote count went from 10 to twenty to thirty and so on. I even had a couple of answers break out of the usual anime sphere and go on to gain a couple thousand upvotes. I was on the leaderboards for most viewed anime writers. The cherry on top of it all was when I received a random DM on Quora, only for me to open it up and find out that I had been designated a top writer for Quora in 2018.

I had achieved everything I had set out to do and more. The only issue was that it came at the cost of a lot of time. As I said before my grades slipped, but there was also more than that. I was forsaking going out and doing other (probably more important) activities. Extracurriculars, hanging out with my friends, studying, etc. So by the end of 7th grade, I decided that in the best interests of myself, I would stop writing on Quora. I deactivated my account, and moved on with my life. But looking back (past my very cringy answers), I had a lot of fun. I experimented with my writing styles and learned a lot about how to actually write something decently coherent. I haven’t gone back to write anything on Quora at all, but I have used it to do some research on colleges, so I guess that’s useful.

 

Also, I’m realizing right now that these blog posts are awfully similar to Quora answers, so there’s food for thought.