This struck me also. I initially thought "blimey, does HN provide them so much traffic that they're linkbaiting them now", but taking Quora content and repackaging it is just even lower.

It particularly struck me that HN very recently had an article that kicked off this exact debate.

What a sad state of affairs, although the full advert splash and the junky "similar" articles give that impression too.

Forbes and Quora have an arrangement to republish content from Quora that's interesting to Forbes readers.

The authors are asked individually if they want their answers to appear on Forbes and receive no compensation.

It's not entirely slimy. Its a great way to drive traffic for both Forbes and Quora. How many people would have read this opinion if Forbes hadn't made it slightly more high-profile? Ars has been doing a similar feature-series for awhile, and I think its one of the best parts of their site:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/how-ea...

I will give you that the Ars series is edited much much better than this one-off from Forbes

Forbes' web site has been for a while little more than a collection of badly-curated, badly-written blogs. This seems like a logical next step.

I want to say that BusinessInsider does this with some r/AskReddit and r/IAmA threads as well