Quora is an American social
question-and-answer website and online
knowledge market
A knowledge market is a mechanism for distributing knowledge resources. There are two views on knowledge and how knowledge markets can function. One view uses a legal construct of intellectual property to make knowledge a typical scarce resource, ...
headquartered in
Mountain View, California
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census.
Mountain V ...
. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010.
Users can post questions, answer questions, and comment on answers that have been submitted by other users. As of 2020, the website was visited by 300million users a month.
History
Founding and naming
Quora was co-founded by former
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
employees
Adam D'Angelo
Adam D'Angelo (born August 14, 1984) is an American internet entrepreneur. He is best known for his role as the co-founder and CEO of Quora, based in Mountain View, California, and as the first Chief Technology Officer of Facebook (now Meta).
...
and
Charlie Cheever
Charlie Cheever (born August 2, 1981 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is the co-founder of Quora (website), Quora, an online knowledge market. Cheever also founded Expo (formerly known as Exposition), a framework which creates app that works on Andr ...
in June 2009.
In an answer to the question, "How did Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever come up with the name Quora?" Cheever wrote:
We spent a few hours brainstorming and writing down all the ideas that we could think of. After consulting with friends and eliminating ones we didn't love, we narrowed it down to 5 or 6 finalists, and eventually settled on Quora. The closest competition that he nameQuora had was Quiver.
2010–2013: Early growth
In March 2010, Quora, Inc. was valued at $86million.
Quora first became available to the public on August 11 2009, and was praised for its interface and for the quality of the answers written by its users, many of whom were recognized as experts in their fields.
Quora's user base increased quickly, and by late December 2010, the site was seeing spikes of visitors five to ten times its usual load—so much that the website initially had difficulties handling the increased traffic. Until 2016, Quora did not show ads because "...ads can often be negative for user experience. Nobody likes
banner ad
A web banner or banner ad is a Online Advertising, form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract web traffic, tra ...
s, ads from shady companies, or ads that are irrelevant to their needs."
In June 2011, Quora redesigned the navigation and usability of its website.
Co-founder Adam D'Angelo compared the redesigned Quora to
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
, and stated that the changes to the website were made on the basis of what had worked and what had not when the website had experienced unprecedented growth six months earlier.
In September 2012, co-founder Charlie Cheever stepped down as co-operator of the company, taking an advisory role. D'Angelo then retained a high degree of control over the company.
In January 2013, Quora launched a blogging platform allowing users to post non-answer content.
In March of that same year Quora also established a full-text search of questions and answers on its website, and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013. It also announced in May 2013 that usage metrics had tripled relative to the same time in the prior year. In November 2013, Quora introduced a feature called ''Stats'' to allow all Quora users to see summary and detailed statistics of how many people had viewed, upvoted, and shared their questions and answers.
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high tech, high-tech and Startup company, startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
I ...
reported that, although Quora had no immediate plans for monetization, they believed that search ads would likely be their eventual source of revenue.
2014–2017: Continued growth and new features
2014 organization
Quora was evolving into "a more organized
Yahoo Answers, a classier
Reddit
Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...
, an opinionated
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
", and became popular in tech circles.
In April 2014, Quora raised $80million from
Tiger Global
Tiger Global Management, LLC (often referred to as Tiger Global and formerly known as Tiger Technology) is an American investment firm founded by Chase Coleman III, a former Tiger Management employee under Julian Robertson, in March 2001. It ma ...
at a reported $900million valuation.
Quora was one of the Summer 2014
Y Combinator
Y Combinator, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 5,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, Californi ...
companies, although it was described as "the oldest Y-Combinator ever".
Parlio acquisition
In March 2016, Quora acquired the online community website Parlio.
Question details
Users were able to add descriptions to questions. In early December 2015, these were limited to 800 characters, and questions themselves to 150, not affecting existing questions. In August 2017, question details were discontinued entirely and replaced with an optional source URL input field to provide context, reportedly to encourage users to phrase questions more descriptively. Existing question details were stored in comments under respective questions.
Advertisement rollouts
In April 2016, Quora began a limited rollout of advertising on the site. The first ad placement that the company accepted was from
Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...
. Over the next few years the site began gradually to show more ads, which Vox described in 2019 as "...still relatively sparse."
Multilingual expansion
In October 2016, Quora launched a
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas
**Spanish cuisine
**Spanish history
**Spanish culture
...
version of its website to the public; in early 2017, a beta version of Quora in
French was announced. In May 2017, beta versions in
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany, the country of the Germans and German things
**Germania (Roman era)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
and
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
were introduced. In September 2017 a beta version in
Japanese was launched. In April 2018, Beta versions in
Hindi
Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...
,
Portuguese, and
Indonesian were launched. in September 2018, Quora announced that additional versions in
Bengali,
Marathi
Marathi may refer to:
*Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India
**Marathi people (Uttar Pradesh), the Marathi people in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh
*Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Mar ...
,
Tamil
Tamil may refer to:
People, culture and language
* Tamils, an ethno-linguistic group native to India, Sri Lanka, and some other parts of Asia
**Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka
** Myanmar or Burmese Tamils, Tamil people of Ind ...
,
Telugu,
Finnish,
Norwegian,
Swedish, and
Dutch were planned.
2017 anonymity changes
On 9 February 2017, Quora announced changes to its anonymity feature, detaching anonymous questions and edits from accounts. When asking or answering anonymously, an anonymous edit link is generated, which is then the only channel to edit the question or answer.
[Quora product updates: Upcoming changes to anonymity on Quora]
by Riley Patterson on February 9, 2017
Since then, commenting anonymously and toggling one's answer between anonymous and public is no longer possible. These changes went into effect on 20 March 2017. Users were able to request a list of anonymous edit links to their existing anonymous questions and answers until then.
2017 Series D funding
In April 2017, Quora claimed to have 190million monthly unique visitors, up from 100million a year earlier. That same month, Quora was reported to have received
Series D
A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup company, startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture fundi ...
funding with a valuation of $1.8billion.
2018–2019: Further growth and data breach
In September 2018, Quora reported that it was receiving 300million unique visitors every month.
Despite the number of registered users, Quora did not possess the level of mainstream cultural dominance as sites like
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
, which, at the time, had roughly 326million registered users.
This could have been because a large number of registered users on the site did not use it regularly and many did not even know they had accounts since they had either created them unknowingly through social media sites linked to Quora or created them years earlier and forgotten them.
Quora uses
popups and
interstitials to force users to login or register before they can see more of the content, similar to a
metered paywall.
In December 2018, Quora announced that approximately 100million user accounts were affected by a
data breach
A data breach, also known as data leakage, is "the unauthorized exposure, disclosure, or loss of personal information".
Attackers have a variety of motives, from financial gain to political activism, political repression, and espionage. There ...
.
The hacked information included users' names, email addresses, encrypted passwords, data from social networks like
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
and
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
if people had chosen to link them to their Quora accounts, questions they had asked, and answers they had written.
Adam D'Angelo stated:
The overwhelming majority of the content accessed was already public on Quora, but the compromise of account and other private information is serious.
Compromised information could also allow hackers to log into a Quora user's connected social media accounts, via access tokens. A class action lawsuit, case number 5:18-cv-07597-BLF, was filed in the Northern District of California in 2021, on behalf of named plaintiffs in New Jersey and Colorado.
By May 2019, Quora was valued at $2billion as a company and it was finalizing a $60million investment round, which was led by Valor Equity Partners, a private equity firm with ties to
Tesla, Inc.
Tesla, Inc. ( or ) is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, it designs, manufactures and sells battery electric vehicles (BEVs), stationary battery energy storage devices from h ...
and
SpaceX
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an America, American space technology company headquartered at the SpaceX Starbase, Starbase development site in Starbase, Texas. Since its founding in 2002, the compa ...
.
In spite of this, the site still showed very few ads compared to other similar sites and the company was struggling to turn a profit, having made only $20million in revenue in 2018.
Several investors passed on the opportunity to invest in Quora, citing the company's "poor track record of actually making money."
Schleifer characterized the disparity between Quora's valuation and its actual profits as a result of "the high valuation for virtually everything these days in the tech sector."
In December 2019, Quora announced that it would open its first international engineering office in
Vancouver
Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...
, which would deal with
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
and other engineering functions.
That same month, Quora launched its
Arabic
Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
,
Gujarati,
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
,
Kannada
Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...
,
Malayalam
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...
, and
Telugu versions.
2020
In January 2020, Quora laid off an undisclosed number of employees at its
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...
and
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
New York may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
* ...
offices for financial reasons.
In June 2020, during the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...
, D'Angelo announced that Quora would permanently allow
remote working.
2021
On 19 April, Quora eliminated the requirement that users use their real names and allowed them to use pseudonyms.
On 5 August, Quora began allowing contributors to monetize their content. In addition, the platform launched a subscription service called Quora+ which requires subscribers to pay a $5 monthly fee or a $50 annual subscription to access content that any creator chooses to put behind a paywall.
On 22 November, Quora removed the ability to answer questions anonymously. Instead, they encouraged people who do not want to reveal their identity for legitimate reasons, to create alternative accounts under pseudonyms. The change follows no longer requiring a real name for accounts and was made to reduce the number of policy-violating anonymous answers.
Operation
Website
;URL format
URL
A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...
s of questions contain only the question title without a numeric
identifier
An identifier is a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object or a unique ''class'' of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, person, physical countable object (or class thereof), or physical mass ...
as used on
Stack Exchange
Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer (Q&A) websites on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. The reputation system allows t ...
sites (in addition to a
URL slug
Clean URLs (also known as user-friendly URLs, pretty URLs, search-engine–friendly URLs or RESTful URLs) are web addresses or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) intended to improve the usability and accessibility of a website, web application, or we ...
), and
/unanswered/
before the title, if the question is unanswered.
;
User interface
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...
With the help of
asynchronous JavaScript and XML, some site functionality resembles
instant messaging
Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...
, such as updating follow counts and an indicator showing that a user is typing an answer.
Real name policy
Prior to April 19, 2021, Quora required users to register with the complete form of their
real names rather than a
pseudonym
A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true meaning ( orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individual's o ...
or other screen name; although verification of names was not required, false names could be reported by the community. This was done with the ostensible intent of adding credibility to answers. Users have the option to write their answers anonymously. Visitors unwilling to log in or use cookies used workarounds to access the site. Users may also log in with their
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
or
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
accounts by using the
OpenID
OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provi ...
protocol. The Real Name Policy was rescinded on April 19, 2021.
As of 2011, the Quora community included answers by some well-known people such as
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...
,
Richard A. Muller,
Clayton C. Anderson,
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...
,
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, lawyer and diplomat. She was the 67th United States secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, a U.S. senator represent ...
, and
Adrián Lamo, as well as some current and former professional athletic personalities, scientists, and other experts in their fields.
Quora allows users to create user profiles with a name and photo, and access to edit count and other site use statistics. In August 2012, blogger Ivan Kirigin pointed out that acquaintances and followers could see his activity, including which questions he had looked at. In response, Quora stopped showing question views in feeds later that month. By default, Quora exposes its users' profiles to
search engines
Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases.
By content/topic
Gene ...
. Users can disable this feature.
Answer recommendations
Quora has developed its own proprietary algorithm to rank answers, which works similarly to
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
's
PageRank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. Accordin ...
. Quora uses
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ap ...
technology to host the servers that run its website.
Currently, Quora has various ways of recommending questions to users:
;Home feed question recommendations
:In this method, users have a timeline that is personalized to their preferences. Quora also provides "interesting" questions that are relevant to those preferences.
;Daily digest
:In this method, Quora sends a daily email containing a set of questions with one answer that is deemed the best answer, given certain ranking criteria.
;Related questions
:In this method, a set of questions that relates to the current question is displayed on the side. This display is not tailored to the specific user.
;Requested answers
:This feature lets a user direct a question to other users whom they consider better suited to answer it.
Top Writers Program
In November 2012, Quora introduced the Top Writers Program as a way to recognize individuals who had made especially valuable content contributions to the site and encourage them to continue. About 150 writers were chosen each year. Top writers were invited to occasional exclusive events and received gifts such as branded clothing items and books. The company believed that by cultivating a group of core users who were particularly invested in the site, a positive
feedback loop
Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause and effect that forms a circuit or loop. The system can then be said to ''feed back'' into itself. The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handle ...
of
user engagement
Ancient Egyptian roles
* User (ancient Egyptian official), an ancient Egyptian nomarch (governor) of the Eighth Dynasty
* Useramen, an ancient Egyptian vizier also called "User"
Other uses
* User (computing), a person (or software) using an ...
would be created.
After not selecting any 2019 or 2020 English-language Top Writers, the program was officially retired in April 2021 but will continue in other languages.
Poe
Poe is a chatbot feature developed by Quora that serves as a web front end for various
large language model
A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation.
The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...
s (LLMs). The product was announced in December 2022
and launched to the public on February 3, 2023.
Poe was made available to desktop browsers on March 4, 2023.
Poe allows users to ask questions and obtain answers from a range of AI
chatbot
A chatbot (originally chatterbot) is a software application or web interface designed to have textual or spoken conversations. Modern chatbots are typically online and use generative artificial intelligence systems that are capable of main ...
s built on top of large language models, including those from
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released on November 30, 2022. It uses large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o as well as other Multimodal learning, multimodal models to create human-like re ...
developer
OpenAI
OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...
, including
GPT-4
Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model trained and created by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. It was launched on March 14, 2023, and made publicly available via the p ...
,
ChatGPT-4o, and other companies like
Anthropic's Claude series,
Google's Gemini,
Meta's Llama
The llama (; or ) (''Lama glama'') is a domesticated South American camelid, widely used as a List of meat animals, meat and pack animal by Inca empire, Andean cultures since the pre-Columbian era.
Llamas are social animals and live with ...
and CodeLlama series and other models like
Stable diffusion
Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on Diffusion model, diffusion techniques. The generative artificial intelligence technology is the premier product of Stability AI and is considered to be a part of ...
, Playground,
Gemma,
Mistral, Mixtral,
Qwen and many more. It also offers a subscription which allows users unlimited use of lightweight chatbot applications such as
GPT-3.5 and provides access, with certain limitations, to more advanced artificial intelligence models such as GPT-4, Gemini 1.5 and Claude 3. It also allows users to create and use custom chatbots.
Reception
Reviews
Quora was reviewed extensively by the media in 2010.
According to
Robert Scoble
Robert Scoble (born January 18, 1965) is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, ''Scobleizer'', which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He later work ...
, Quora succeeded in combining attributes of
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
and
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
. Later, in 2011, Scoble criticized Quora for being a "horrid service for blogging" and, although a decent question and answer website, not substantially better than alternatives.
Reviewing the website in 2024, Jacob Stern, writing in ''
The Atlantic
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher based in Washington, D.C. It features articles on politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.
It was founded in 185 ...
'', was negative, stating that "A large number of the questions are junk. Many are not really questions at all; they’re provocations. On those occasions when users do seem to be in search of useful answers, the ones they receive are, to put it mildly, uneven. Whatever scant kernels of quality exist on the site are tough to sift from the mountains of inanity—at least in part because Quora tends to place the inane front and center". Stern said that in order to become profitable Quora had bloated the site with advertising and had encouraged the posting of provocative and clickbait questions, which while likely boosting engagement, drove away the participation of high-quality contributors, leaving the website in what Stern called a "state of thriving failure". These criticisms were echoed by Nitish Pahwa writing in ''
Slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...
''.
User complaints: Question details, moderation
Quora was criticized for removing question details in August 2017. According to some users, the removal of question details limited the ability to submit personal questions and questions requiring code excerpts, multimedia, or complexity of any sort that could not fit into the length limit for a URL. According to an official product update announcement, the removal of question details was made to emphasize "canonical" questions.
The moderation system of Quora, which relies largely on automation, has been frequently criticized as ineffective, inconsistent, and opaque from the users' perspective. The website automatically flags seemingly innocuous actions (such as pasting a web address in order to cite a source)
while appearing to ignore answers, posts, and comments that users have reported as false, inflammatory, or harassing. Moderation decisions can be appealed by users, but Quora's handling of appeals is criticized as automated and impersonal, leaving many to wonder how little of the website's moderation is performed by human staff.
The inconsistency of Quora moderation has been blamed for the proliferation of harmful prejudices on the website. In 2014, in addition to being privately harassed, female users noted a ubiquity of pointed, sexist questions about women with more clearly sexist question details, whereas the same kinds of questions rephrased to be about men were quickly taken down. One user was the subject of a sexually defamatory post containing a photo of her that was taken down by moderation only after the incident was publicized online. There has also been an increase of
antisemitism
Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemi ...
on the website, as exemplified by a community for
Holocaust denial
Historical negationism, Denial of the Holocaust is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that asserts that the genocide of Jews by the Nazi Party, Nazis is a fabrication or exaggeration. It includes making one or more of the following false claims:
...
and the presence of countless troll questions containing the numbers
14 and
88 in various contexts, which are almost never removed by the ineffective moderators.
Use in influence operations
In 2018, the ''
People's Daily
The ''People's Daily'' ( zh, s=人民日报, p=Rénmín Rìbào) is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It provides direct information on the policies and viewpoints of the CCP in multiple lan ...
'', the official newspaper of the
Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party
The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, officially the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is the Central committee, highest organ when the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, national congress is not ...
(CCP), reported on the potential for Chinese citizens to use the platform to promote the image of China abroad. In 2020, Ben Nimmo, a founder of the
Atlantic Council
The Atlantic Council is an American think tank in the field of international affairs, favoring Atlanticism, founded in 1961. It manages sixteen regional centers and functional programs related to international security and global economic prosp ...
's Digital Forensic Research Lab, noted Quora's popularity as a place to create fake accounts and plant
disinformation
Disinformation is misleading content deliberately spread to deceive people, or to secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic dece ...
. In 2023,
Meta Platforms
Meta Platforms, Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms and communication services, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads ...
stated that China's
Ministry of Public Security
Ministry of Public Security can refer to:
* Ministry of Justice and Public Security (Brazil)
* Ministry of Public Security of Burundi
* Ministry of Public Security (Chile)
* Ministry of Public Security (China)
* Ministry of Public Security of Co ...
's
Spamouflage influence operation had targeted Quora. The same year, a publication by the
Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party
The Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, also known as the Propaganda Department or Central Propaganda Department, is an internal division of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ...
stated that the CCP should expand its use of Quora.
Timeline
See also
*
Comparison of Q&A sites
*
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. Questions were orga ...
References
External links
*
{{Use mdy dates, date=January 2018
Companies based in Mountain View, California
Internet properties established in 2009
Privately held companies based in California
Question-and-answer websites
Y Combinator companies
Multilingual websites
American websites
2009 establishments in California