>I'll . . . ask if they have any other option.
The other option would have been to choose not to take VC money -- or to have chosen a "business model" not heavily dependent on high-quality uncompensated contributions from users.
The other option would have been to choose not to take VC money -- or to have chosen a "business model" not heavily dependent on high-quality uncompensated contributions from users.
There's nothing wrong with being a small successful company, there are tens and thousands of that out there. But building a big successful company at scale is rarely done without taking on external investment.
Uncompensated users are a different issue altogether. I'm sure people have various reasons to keep contributing content there even after knowing that fact.
>building a big successful company at scale is rarely done without taking on external investment.
Wikipedia is a counterexample. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the sixth most visited web site in the world. But more to the point, no VC-funded or stock-market-funded company I know of is foolish enough to try to compete with Wikipedia. I think that fifteen years from now, we will see a similar situation among Q-and-A sites -- at least those where the answers are contributed by unpaid users. In other words, I predict that Quora -- as well as Stack Exchange, which has also taken VC funding -- will be eclipsed within 15 years by sites not funded by VC or other profit-motivated investment.
Any competition for Google Search is likely to come from companies like Apple or Microsoft that already have plenty of money to pay engineers or from investor-funded for-profit companies. That is because the "non-profit sector" is unlikely to be able to summon up enough skilled labor or funding to compete with Google Search.
In contrast, setting up a competitor to Quora or Stack Exchange is relatively easy (especially since these new entrants can learn from Experts Exchange, Stack Exchange and Quora), and going the non-profit route (or the for-profit "lifestyle business" route without external funding) does not alienate a large fraction of potential unpaid contributors.
Atwood had an idea that SE would be "like Wikipedia" for QA, and Stack Overflow has certainly had success in that regard. I think that contributors to the site get very much the same value proposition as that of Wikipedia, if not slightly more in the user profile/karma regard.
Of course, none of this negates your point about the influence of funding!