Ah, Quora. We’ve all encountered it before, seeking answers to the most bizarre questions on the internet, and five years ago some random person from Kentucky asked the exact same question, being a savior for our beleaguered soul. Before the days of AI summaries or quick answers at the tip of your fingers, it was the Quora answers that served the same purpose of oddly specific knowledge. 

Yet now, things have changed. Quora is plagued by AI bots, spouting out nonsense questions and answers generated by bot farms to gain clicks. From that barren landscape, however, a new community has been fashioned. Escaping the confines of traditional social media, communities of lost souls have found their way to Quora as a new host space for the refugees of other platforms. Whether they are escaping from Reddit or are banned from all platforms but the innocent Quora, they have formed the ragtag communities that one would expect to learn of from a YA science fiction novel and not a real-life internet space. 

Even though the platform provides refuge for children banned from social media and blatant fascists alike, it forms a fascinating part of the modern psyche, the place where people come for genuine advice and community (with an underestimated amount of doom scrolling). Such places are a genuine refuge—and you never know who may find their way there. Inexplicably, people leave once their time there has been spent, and the path of life brings them elsewhere for the pursuit of new horizons and adventures. 

Whether such refuges in the corpses of dead platforms will become more commonplace or less so as the large corporations further and further control the digital world is unknown. For now, it provides a rare insight into the unspoken underbelly of the internet.