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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'm less inclined to put up a fight about that than I once was. I argued pretty passionately that it was terrible and etc, but I've since spent some time on Quora. It has fascinating content. We should probably accept that their growth strategy is either brilliant and succeeding even without our Expert Input, or their growth strategy is dumb yet Quora is successful in spite of it. Either way, bringing it up every time Quora pops up is probably more harmful than helpful at this point.

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Quora is successful? Their userbase is still below 5 million and most of their traffic comes from a third world country(India), and they still have exactly zero ads 5 years on after raising 161 million in capital.

Quora is an unmitigated failure at this point.

>>and most of their traffic comes from a third world country(India)

I'm not sure what you mean by this. But what has the traffic coming from India(third world country, seriously?) got anything to do with their success/failure?

India is an unique, magical and increasingly important country and I love its culture and people. However if half of its citizens don't have a toilet in their homes, yeah, its a third world country.[0]

As usual, that's not the problem with the people of India per se, but with the long term path-dependent development of country that has been a British colony for too long.

[0]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-17362837

It contributes to their failure because third world advertising rates are quite low.

You might want to let their investors (who include Y Combinator) know - because they keep pouring money into Quora at ever higher valuations.

Pouring money into a company more or less requires ever higher valuations otherwise it would be much harder to find future investors.

The question then becomes what kind of assumptions underly their businessplan that they use to justify these higher valuations. These can make for very interesting reading, usually they translate into a loose form of: for every 'x' dollars of investment we can generate 'y' dollars (usually a multiple of 'x' ;) ) of turnover keeping the ship afloat long enough to pull in the next round of funding. As long as the funding keeps coming it will look really good to the untrained eye. The real issue of course is what the expected lifetime value is of the customers when taking into account the amount of overhead. If the balance here is close to zero it can become quite hard to distinguish the ultimate losers from the winners. 'At scale' then becomes the key, if you can't make it fly at a small size the theory is that the company will do just fine if you just scale it up drastically while keeping the overhead steady. This is a hard problem.

Since Quora's investors presumably did financial due diligence before they invested it is safe to assume that the story is a complex one and any variation on the theme mentioned above will be hard to dig up. The degree of desperation with which they try to monetize their traffic is a good indicator about what's going on behind the scenes.

Barometer: slowly dropping.

Oh, well, the investors said so. They're always right!

The greater fool theory of investing

Perhaps. All I'm saying is that they have good content. Give it a try, you may be surprised to find you like it. Even if they're on an implosion trajectory, Internet Archive will make sure most or all of it stays online. So it won't be a failure if you measure success as "generating positive contributions to the world" instead of dollars.

Nope.

"Worth noting: Quora has no public API, no backup/export tools, blocks anonymous display of answers, and banned the Wayback Machine entirely."

https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/453958676529696769

"You agree that this license includes the right for... Quora to make your Content available to others for the publication, distribution, syndication, or broadcast of such Content on other media and services..."

"If you operate a search engine or robot... Quora gives you a... revocable... license... You must follow robots.txt at all times"

"We use these automated technologies to collect and analyze certain types of information... Quora itself does not respond to do not track signals"

"Quora agrees, in the performance of this agreement, to keep non-public information furnished by [government users] in the strictest confidence"

Having cake and eating it too

They banned Wayback Machine?

Quora, you're making it so difficult to like you.

Especially since they are eternally at risk of disappearing, I'm not too optimistic about Quora in the long run. Their competition is doing a lot better.

Wikipedia has good content and doesn't force you to register with some bullshit "growth hacker" tactic. Quora can die.

Wikipedia doesn’t have original content (i.e. the content needs to be based on other sources).

It doesn't have original content but it can link to such content.

Can the Internet Archive/ArchiveTeam scrape Quora with their regwall?

Question really is will. And IA respects robots.txt. Which is very reasonable given that they operate within a quasi-legal domain in which it's best that they don't archive anything that the archive owner doesn't at least implicitly want to be archived.

Which is why you scrape while the site is in business, and then only display once they've gone out of business.

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