Quora degrades because you're trying to fit a business model into a square hole where it won't fit.

Maybe not every project should be a commercial enterprise.

Quora also degrades because as soon as you have a popular site that individuals can push unfiltered content to, the scammers, spammers, or just people with positions/products to push show up. It's pretty clear that moderation (both community and admins) are a pretty important part of a popular crowdsourced site. (Not that I disagree with your point as well.)

Is quora so bad? I usually use it for little questions before I ask something on stackexchange and it seems to work fine enough...

There's a lot of dross on there. Every now and then a search will lead me to a useful answer but it was a much more interesting site when it started out. More active interesting people and fewer worthless or scammy questions and answers.

And for some reason they seem to actively merge only tangentially-related questions and answers. I often see answers that have nothing to do with the question.

They email me a daily digest of maybe a dozen questions and answers they think I might find interesting.

Typically, at least half of them each day are interesting enough that I'll click to read the full question and the full answer that they picked to highlight. Most of the rest are usually decent questions, but I'm just not interested enough to click.

Of those I do click, maybe half of those turn out to be sufficiently interesting that after reading the featured answer I'll click to see the other answers too.

Like many sites based on user provided content, Quora tries to show you what they think you will be interested in, but "interested in" really means what you'll click on.

I see enough stupid stuff (especially stupid political stuff) elsewhere, so don't click on it on Quora. I seem to be consistent enough with this that their algorithms have figured out there is better stuff to show me to get my click.

I also do not use "sign in with Facebook" or "sign in with Google" there, and am not really active on any social media that exposes user email addresses or that exposes contact lists (or even has contact lists). I don't know if I have any friends who also read Quora, but if I do there is a decent chance that Quora does not know that I do, and so won't be using their interests to try to guess mine.

I don't know why do many others have bad Quora experiences, but for whatever reason it works great for me.

It’s a pretty notorious hideout for cranks, both benign and weird nationalist ones.

You essentially can't get that big, survive that long, or be so relevant without deserving criticism. Until people are angels, large complex efforts that survive necessarily need to be kind of shitty in one way or another. Linux (and Linus) are in the same boat. The ways that they are shitty have maintained (and are necessary for) the ways that they are great.

People argue the opposite, that things could be better, that the criticisms could be addressed and everything else would continue on, but I'm not so sure. Where is the large, successful organization -- based on money or not -- which has survived into greatness without these kinds of criticisms?

It reminds me of Marxism/Communisms/various utopian ideas. People have big ideas about how things can be "perfect" and all problems can be abolished. Except for a very few, very small exception, when those ideas have been tried, the outcome has been far worse than the problems that were trying to be avoided.

It's one of the huge challenges to mankind, and an underappreciated field of research. If we better understand how to organize ourselves, we can slowly make less shitty systems over time.

That, and before you can make a system work, however shitty it is, you really need to make sure everyone knows how to use it. (hence it's important to educate or on-board people. One of the things en.wikipedia is bad at. )

"There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles."

Ok maybe a bit off topic, but what I'm getting at is... well I think that a bit of unpleasantness is simply necessary and unavoidable. How, where, and the correct amount are important, but people seem to be overly outraged over every bit of negativity these days.

Human misery has a tendency to adjust itself to whatever circumstances a person finds themselves in which is why you find people in profound poverty imagining if they just had this they would be happy forever and then you go and look at people who actually have it and find that they are just as likely to be completely miserable.

I think shittiness is necessary in places because without it you'll have some people making really bad choices just to make folks happy and others who no matter what will find something to be miserable about.

So it's not about eliminating all the rough spots, but instead intentionally shaping them to be in the right places at the right intensities.

Indeed, it's no Yahoo Answers (RIP)