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Comment by facethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Reminder to those who aren’t aware: Quora is a rich man’s hobby business. You aren’t going to get practical knowledge from their decisions.

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Why has it become such an SEO driven BS filled website if the owner doesn't care about the financials? Why can't he pay people to curate the answers and generally drive up the quality?

They have to at least pretend it is a real business.

It was kind of interesting at first when the answers were good and there were some "celeb" participants.

But seems pretty stale now with lots of lead gen answers.

They claim huge traffic numbers which could be possible given the pretty good Google placements.

I don't really get it.

Can we go ahead and coin this the as 'The Yahoo Answers Effect' because it seems they are following in the exact same fashion. High quality question and answers, that slowly (and rapidly) devolves into SEO spam and useless commentary.

You can't throw out a comment like that and give no follow up. In what way is it a hobby business?

I’m guessing they’re referring to the fact that the CEO is very wealthy [1] and has self-funded the company, and suggesting that he’s not as concerned with the financials.

1: https://www.forbes.com/profile/adam-dangelo/#657861427cb4

It's not self-funded by D'Angelo. Quora has raised several hundred million dollars, the overwhelming share of that from traditional venture capital firms.

They also don't have the luxury of treating it like a hobby business, which is why they've been focused on quantity over quality for years now. They have to scale up the concept massively or find another business.

In contrast WikiHow is an example of a successful knowledge service that is operated with more of a focus on quality and less on quantity. They're not owned by venture capital firms and don't have to seek an exit or try to force growth at any cost. It's a route Quora could have taken if it weren't for the VC firms, now they have no choice. Their former competitor, eHow, took the paid spam content route and got destroyed for it.

Wikihow is garbage though. How can you seriously claim it's focused on quality? What is this shit: https://www.wikihow.com/images/thumb/f/f5/Laugh-Step-6-Versi... ?

Why link to the image out of context? https://www.wikihow.com/Laugh

The context doesn't help.

> Quora Raises $50M At $400M From Peter Thiel, D’Angelo Puts In $20M Of His Own Money [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/05/14/quora-raises-50-at-400m-fr...

How is it any different from Stack Overflow or Yahoo Answers, except generalized and civilized?

About half the answers devolve into a sales pitch after a lengthy and confusing intro that seems to be written for SEO purposes only. The answers tend to be of substantially lower quality than what you'd see on SO too.

Yahoo Answers might be similar, sure, but that's not a positive comparison.

Inevitable when you try to turn something small and good into a “venture scale business”.

There are two criticisms here: one is that Quora is a bad business, and only operates because its CEO funds it, and second is that it is a bad source of information. The first is definitely an unanswered question at this point: revenue is low but the site has a vast amount of evergreen content which ranks highly on Google -- they have a ton of traffic but it's not clear to what extent they can monetize it.

The second is a matter of opinion, and whether you're looking at the average content or the best content. There is great content on Quora but the average question/answer is of course absolute dogshit.

so, like every VC startup

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