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