That plus it seems >90% of answers are guerilla advertising

And those two facts are related. Quora actively drives casual users away with the forced-login behavior. So the only people on Quora are the people with strong incentives to do so... that is, people who are being paid. Marketeers.

That's interesting. I only "follow" (or whatever they call it) a few people on Quora, and Quora sends me an email of what some of them have said over the last two or three days, and I pop over to see what the opinion is about. And, then, there's already some sort of conversation or fight underway - but usually pretty light.

Generally, I find Quora to be a pretty "ok" place to have a conversation. Better than most of Reddit, for sure. (Reddit does have some fantabulous subs to be sure, but not very many! :-) )

EDIT: HN is good for conversations in threads, although they can veer off track pretty wildly. Reddit can get pretty vitriolic. You could have a conversation, but the participants destroy it. Twitter? Fuggedaboutit. Are there sites I ought to look at where I can have a polite discussion with people that I may or may not agree with on various topics? [FWIW - Before 2008, Reddit itself was pretty close to this, except for maybe /r/politics]

There was also a significant uptick in biased/loaded questions on Quora recently (think election influencing/agenda pushing ones)

OTOH a lot of legitimate questions were answered by specialists or people very familiar with the subjects

The thing about Quora is that I would never use it to get an answer to a question.

I only go there to read a few people's opinions on things. If you restrict yourself to those people then Quora seems ok. If a Quora link shows up in my search results -- I know it's going to be useless.

The only problem is Quora seems to aggressively promote clickbait scammers / self-promoting twits. I find myself actively logging on to Quora very rarely these days as it becomes harder and harder to repel useless content from my feed.

I'm pretty sure every time I've Googled something and got a Quora link and clicked it, it's just been an ad.

I just don't click Quora links anymore.

I've never understood the point of quora, it is a worse version of yahoo answers. And that is about the lowest bar.

I honestly don’t remember the last time I saw a useful answer. It’s just always reads like a generic advice spam.

Pretty impressive though sometimes. I wonder if those people used their heads into something actually productive

I think it is just irrelevant to the web today. I don't think Quora has a future to be an independent business.

To me Quora is just a more entitled/self-righteous version of Reddit, and much less fun.

I think that sounds fine though. You could consider HN to be "like reddit" too, but there's still value in HN.

HN is not valuing itself at 2B dollars, that is the problem.

It is Quora itself that needs to justify against that valuation, not anyone else. Where that is fine or not, I think the news itself is self-explanatory.

It's interesting how the value the owners get from HN is more kudos and relevant discourse.

I'm finding it hard to think of other domains with succesful quasi-public institutions run by for-profits without monetization. Are there other examples?

I have skipped quora links for so long that I don't remember why I started doing so. It's just a synonym for not worth clicking.

Exactly ! I'm never quite sure where to see the "click-bait" answer and when does a new question or answer stop or starts. Quora has good content.. But its HARD to read it...

Add ?share=1 at the end of the URL.

I discovered this recently: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

It works really well for blocking quora from google results.

yeah I also think their machine learning is terrible. Their recommendation engine was so bad that I unsubscribed, it was completely overfit.

It used be alright but their noise factor has increased a lot since half a decade ago.

Before that, Quora felt like a small community similar to HN. They had founders and executives answering questions. They were still spamming email afair but not as aggressively as today and it didn't have what is x + 3 = 10?

I deleted it after I reached a million answer views from a sudden growth. The users that moved in completely destroyed the whole thing.

That day, I learnt acquiring users via heavy marketing or SEO may not be a good decision for a community. They are better as spectators or consumers.

I think they panicked a bit and went with high growth strategies that ruined the integrity of the platform

It would be nice if there was a way to block certain domains from Google (or any other search engine) results. There are also a lot of sites that seem like they scrape posts from StackOverflow that I would like to block too.

There’s extensions for that. One such is (as mentioned by @bubblethink): https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

I skip Quora as well. It's automatic.