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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
