I haven't been back to Quora for a couple of years, but there seemed to be a lot of astro-turfing by people who self-appointed themselves as "credible people". I also found that it was difficult to discover interesting content by genuine experts who exist outside of the "valley" VC/entrepreneurial bubble.
The whole community on Quora also seems uncomfortably obsessed with wealth and being/getting rich. I can't browse through it for too long before I tire of that atmosphere.
After signing up, I realised that its much more than just a QnA website.
Quora is a great place to find interesting discussions about a wide variety of topics.
The QnA part is mostly an excuse for domain experts to blow you away with interesting content.
its a community where experts can discuss interesting topics in their field, and I believe the "google spam" thing is helping keep the community this way for 2 reasons:
1. People coming from Google are expecting a "yahoo answers" type of website (public opinion, not expert advice). They want their answer and they are out.
If they could see all the results, the trolls (of which there are many) they would probably be tempted to signup with a fake account, just to add their throll-y whimsical answer or comment and never return.
2. If you go through the pain of being on-boarded, you probably care about the topic enough to become an engaged member of the community. Which will help maintain the quality of the website.
The reason is that Quora has a lot of really reputable, valuable, and domain-specific contributors, and it's easy to identify answers from people who have credibility on a subject. On HN there's a lot of noise, and there's a really common phenomenon of people bullshitting about subjects where they really have no credibility (usually the most controversial topics on HN like politics, economics, venture capital). The same is true for Quora, but on Quora you can identify people's domain-expertise better (it's posted next to each answer), and the best contributions percolate to the top much better than on HN. It's interesting to note that one thing people have always wanted on HN is the ability to follow certain users and certain topics, which is something Quora does.
For just the startup/tech world, there are tons of contributions from experienced VCs, angel investors, experienced entrepreneurs, etc. Outside of tech, you get pleasant surprises like former police officers answering questions about policing, movie directors answering questions about movies they've directed, etc.
Quora is still young, so there are a lot of quality early adopters. Going forward, it remains to be seen whether the quality will degrade as Quora gets more popular.
The biggest problem with the onboarding is that most of my value is through following "famous" (credible) people, I get very little value from following topics or questions, because when you start doing that you get lot's of noise (random or semi-credible people answering). This doesn't seem to be something emphasized in the current flow.
EDIT (reply to below): There's a lot of noise. There are a lot of gems, too, but it's easier to identify the gems. I don't think of things in terms of inside vs. outside the so-called SV bubble, so I don't really share that sentiment. An experienced entrepreneur is still credible to me, even if they are in SV.