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I'm from Europe and I know SO. I didn't know Quora until I forced myself to click on one of the Quora links on HN.

To me it looked like a SO knockoff and I guess it looks that way to most people.

Look deeper. Quora's magic sauce is that it only shows you questions that either your contacts have interacted with or that correspond to topics you are tracking. As a result, every time you visit you get stuff that you are genuinely interested in.

Or you see no new stuff at all (if you don't have enough contacts/topics) while there are lots of interesting things going on in the other parts of quora that you have almost no way of finding out about without heavy searching.

This pretty much made me stop using quora.

I guess that's why they push you so aggressively to pick up contacts and topics - some of the stuff they do there is really clever, like inviting your friends to suggest topics for you if you don't have any yet.

it is a small bubble, they put a few ppl in a bubble and just blow that particular bubble big.

Use it and have a look at how the community works. You'll find the intricacies in its product design interesting.

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