Overly negative and/or grumpy. Wont all traffic come from google anyway?

I agree, was not in the right mood when I wrote that reply. Should have formulated much more positive.

The points are still valid though so I'll leave it as is. Hoping the authors can still find information in it.

Traffic that comes from Google is not the traffic that builds a community, which they highlight as their strong point. For that you need people who put your site in their routine visits. In addition, right now being small google is not in your favor. It will forward me to SO, not TrueQ. They might want to change their urls as quickly as possible, replacing the question id in the url with the full title to improve indexing.

What I also noticed is that I cannot up vote without having an account. E.g. This question: https://trueq.io/q/18 has a better answer that is not the top answer. I see no way of upvoting it though without an account (did not try to login). Not sure if that is intended. I also see no clear indication of votes on an answer. Even if 0, you should show it. It is the second most valuable piece of information in a Q&A site for me.

> Rule number one for a Q&A site should be to not land you on a marketing landing page as main page

So quora.com is doing it wrong?

Quora is doing a lot of things 'wrong.' Wrong as in, choices that produce a low quality service (eg dark patterns, maximizing for volume of content which has led to vast amounts of marketing spam posing as real content), not wrong as in they have no traffic. They get to play by different rules for the same reason Pinterest does, inside-SV favoritism: Google protects Quora from being punished for all the things they do that directly violate Google's search engine rules that would get anybody else penalized heavily [1]. It has been talked about on HN for many years, it's clearly a different set of rules.

Further, Quora - as with Stack Overflow and Wikipedia - had the benefit of arriving on the scene before Google closed the door to easy SEO, easy search engine traffic. Quora is already inside, entrenched Web bloatware, they can get away with more in part because of that.

[1] I'll provide a prominent example of this Google / Quora SEO fraud in action.

If you check out this Quora Q&A page:

"What makes Napoleon Bonaparte such a famous icon?"

https://www.quora.com/What-makes-Napoleon-Bonaparte-such-a-f...

And then if you, as a human, click on a right side bar of links ("Related Questions"; on mobile it's just below the top answer) - when you perform that action, they blur out your experience and present you with a content blocking prompt that hides all the content from you, attempting to force a sign-up. One of Google's fundamental content rules is that you must present page content to them, to their bot, the same as you do a normal human user of your site. If you violate that, much less do so egregiously, they'll penalize your content heavily. Do you suppose Quora is giving the Google bot that same experience, blocking Google bot's every attempt to crawl from page to page and trying to force Google bot to sign-up using a dark pattern? Of course not, and thus it's fraud in action. Google doesn't give a shit because they have zero integrity as an organization. It's one of the more blatant examples of Google hypocrisy as a search engine and it has been on-going for many years now, and pointed out constantly in tech circles and yet it persists, so we know Google is doing it with full knowledge and intent (thus it's an inside-SV favoritism action, Quora gets to play by different rules than everybody else).

Do you have a concrete source on the Google Quora thing?

I couldn't use quora today on mobile without signing up. Not sure if it was based on my user agent but it was pretty annoying.