Yes, this is how I have a huge number of people blocked and muted for asking stupid questions by the thousands. They used to offer something to top writers, but no longer; the last one was a subscription to NY Times.

But not many really make a living by asking questions, I don't think the pay is good enough.

Quora is not user friendly. Asking me to login every time to read some answers to marginally interesting questions is not a value proposition to me.

for me it goes even beyond. expects me to download app or doesnt allow me to read. Its crazy. I stopped going there. Reddit has better answers anyway

“Growth hacking” / getting investor money

Is that bad?

Yeah, it's pretty bad. Questions that they pay for are generally of poor quality. When you pay for something, people rush in to produce as much quantity as they can. Even if they are also attracting good ones, they can be hard to find in the onslaught.

My intuitive understanding of Quora, formed about five years ago, is that it’s a WikiHow with VC mojo.

It's most accurately described as a yahoo answers with generally higher quality answers and SEO.

“Higher quality than Yahoo answers” is an extremely low bar.

There is a lot of genuinely good content on Quora. They went out of their way early to attract some high-level Silicon Valley talent, and that brought in a fair number of good writers. It was really cool, for example, to have physics professors explaining the Higgs Boson at the time of the CERN announcement.

It degrades over time, partly from simple reversion to the mean, partly because a number of topics have simply been talked to death. That's why they started paying people to ask questions. There's still good new content in a lot of areas, such as history and language, that are very broad and deep. But topics like physics and mathematics are largely moribund, because there's only so much that can be talked about at the roughly high-school level that most people can follow.

So it does look increasingly like Yahoo Answers, but there's still good content if you know where to look. It earned a very good reputation early and that high rep still has some carryover.

What's the word for that? Astroturfing?

When a company needs to generate fake content pretending to be real questions from real users.

Would you spend an hour writing a really thorough answer to a question if the person who asked the question got paid to ask it, and never reads any of the responses?

It's fake.