Quora has taken on too much funding to do "OK". But if it hadn't, it could end up thriving as a successful business. IMO, too many startups go down the road of taking on a ton of funding and expanding very fast. It's very easy to decide that you have the next Google on your hands, but you probably don't. There's nothing wrong with that.

The problem with Quora is that, more than any other social network in existence, their product is their customers. Quora doesn't have a product without high quality discussion on their site. The problem is that the steps required in maintaining that high level of discussion(active moderation, good community policing, etc.) often directly opposes actively getting more users because of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. While I'm sure that Quora can grow their userbase more, I'm pretty sure that they're seeing a dropoff in total hits. At a certain point, they need to start improving their conversion rate in order to make more money.

Quora is not a money-making product, it wants to be one. In their present incarnations, if they just inserted ads (just for argument sake), it is not clear that Quora would make more money than HN.

You can be a profitable company by just focusing on user engagement, and not on user growth. Quora's problem is that they raised too much money and now have to give their investors a return on their investment.

For those who missed this reference: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

Total revenue = revenue per user * no. of users

There's an upper bound on how much each user generates in revenue (either through ads, subscriptions), e.g. imagine paying > $200/yr to use Quora, unlikely that more than 100,000 people are willing to do that. So the fastest way to grow is through having more users. On top of pure revenue/user number, there's the network effects of having more users, as well as becoming a key part of cultural fabric e.g. most celebrities have Twitter accounts now.

It's unlikely that more than ten persons are willing to pay $200 per year to use Quora in its current condition, and it's even less likely that those ten would stick around once everyone else left.

In other words, your example has even more force than you suggested.

AFTER EDIT: By the way, user droithomme nails it with his user's-eye-view description of Quora elsewhere in this thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603653

AFTER FURTHER EDIT: I just did some specific searches on Google, site-restricted to Quora, which breaks through Quora's wall of obscurity and allows me to see current highly voted answers to questions on topics of known controversy in online discussion. The answers are crap. They don't even cite good sources, but are mostly anecdotes of lower quality than the typical anecdotes found on HN, and in some cases the anecdotal answers directly contradict what careful scientific research has found to be the general correct answer for the same question. But on many issues, Quora is just the opinionated leading the opinionated, and no one makes the effort to LOOK UP better, more reliable sources. I like the user culture here on Hacker News much better. I read whole books, for fun, after learning about those books on factual topics here on HN. I see no reason to put up with Quora's annoying user interface to get into a community with such poor quality control on the answers to the submitted questions.

As they get bigger, the quality of the membership becomes severely diluted. Eventually, the crud fills the pages, the 'good' members leave, and all that remains is the crud.

This is happening on Quora too. Look at up-voted answers on non-tech questions. All it takes is a bunch of nicely formatted paragraphs, lists, bolded text, and a bunch of nice pictures. Tons of posters are commenting on places they have never visited and things they know nothing about.

Quora is a business. They are not making any money. Like Twitter, they can only hope to make money if they grow big enough. If the only way to grow requires pissing off existing users (or developers, in Twitter's case), the choice is clear.

I'm struggling to see how growth is going to make them more profitable. While there's a bit of constant overhead, at that kind of scale I'd expect most expenditures to scale linearly or faster with number of users, and I don't see how more users will make income scale faster than linear.

That just doesn't make any sense. Have you ever built any internet infrastructure? Costs grow much less than linearly as you scale.

Imagine a factory that makes widgets. At first there's loads of space, and half the factory is a basketball court for the first employees to relax after a long day of widget manufacturing. but if the widgets are good and demand increases, more and more of the factory is filled with widget-making machines. Finally the factory gets full and efficiency starts to go down because people are literally getting in each others' way as they work and move the widgets around; its costs more an more to squeeze out each additional unit. In technical terms, your Marginal Costs go up and bring Average Total Costs above the minimum where normal profits are maximized.

The solution to this is not to declare that no sane widget manufacturer should try to sell more than 10,000 widgets a year, but to set up an additional or replacement factory. Your Average Total Costs go up even higher because a new factory costs money (like a new DB infrastructure or server farm), but - and this is crucial - that cost of the new business infrastructure is a Fixed Cost, and the more product you ship the lower a proportion of each transaction it represents. The upside is that your Marginal Costs are now lower because you can again enjoy economies of scale. So you expand production as quickly as possible to meet demand, so as to minimize ATC (= FC + MC). Most firms go through this cycle many times as they grow.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370291

Edit: do you have an idea of the size of your 3rd-degree network at Facebook? Do you care? :)

Obviously if you're profitable per-user then scaling is a nice problem to have. But I struggle to see how scaling from their current users to say 10x could move twitter or quora from unprofitable to profitable; I think the engineering costs of making these tradeoffs and solving the scaling problems would largely outweigh any economies of scale, and I don't see how more users would increase their per-user revenue.

True, but HN strikes me as a pretty small expense, and its existence certainly helps the growth of YC.

Probably one of the reason they don't invest in upgrading the software/hardware to improve the speed. Keep friction in the experience so only the most hardy put up with the delays.

Having snappier response would encourage more comments with the resulting comments being of lesser quality.