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Comment by kijinbear | Hacker News Reader

Go to StackOverflow.com and you can instantly see what kind of questions are being asked and answered. The UI may feel a little cluttered, but the information is there. Hang out for a few more minutes and you can appreciate the value of this service. You might as well sign up and start using it.

Go to Quora.com and you're asked to log in or create an account. No idea what's behind that login. Not even a search bar. Since there isn't any useful page that I can browse to, I might as well just contribute to their bounce rate. Why would I create yet another online account without even knowing what the benefits are?

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Part of the reason for quora to do that might be to limit their user base to people who already know what it is (people who are referred)

Exposing what it is and making it really easy for anyone to sign up will make it degrade into yahoo answers in no time.

Stack overflow on the other hand embraces new programmers asking and finding answers to questions because they're all going to be related to programming (if not it gets modded down really quickly). Quora doesn't have that niche/topic restriction and is much easier to troll.

It's wasting its buzz time, then. If (that is, When) this hubbub blows over and we think of Quora as "that thing that never caught on" it will already be too late to gain traction.

Maybe you're right, and maybe they want to stay small for now. In which case the linked article is misleading in comparing Quora with StackOverflow.

That doesn't change the fact that I do everything I can to avoid websites that tell me to sign up first. It just feels incredibly disrespectful.

Facebook might be able to get away with "sign up first, and we'll show you what this shit is all about", but not your average startup.

The referral-based strategy may have limited the user base for a while, but after all the press they've gotten lately, it's certainly no longer working for them. (Besides which, if the goal was to keep using that as a strategy long-term, a more explicit invitation-based system, a la forrst, might have been more sustainable.)

Unfortunately for them, what really attracted people to quora originally was more that the initial users were an interesting group of people, than anything particularly unique that the software was doing. Now that everyone and their dog has an account, the really interesting stuff is rather harder to find, for the moment; their challenge is dealing with that before "no one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

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