34 Facts About Quora

Quora is a social question-and-answer website based in Mountain View, California.

Quora was co-founded by former Facebook employees Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever in June 2009.

Quora first became available to the public on June 21, 2010, 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.

In June 2011, Quora redesigned the navigation and usability of its website.

In January 2013, Quora launched a blogging platform allowing users to post non-answer content.

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Quora launched a full-text search of questions and answers on its website on March 20, 2013, and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013.

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 reported that, although Quora had no immediate plans for monetization, they believed that search ads would likely be their eventual source of revenue.

Quora was evolving into "a more organized Yahoo Answers, a classier Reddit, an opinionated Wikipedia", and became popular in tech circles.

Quora was one of the Summer 2014 Y Combinator companies, although it was described as "the oldest Y-Combinator ever".

In October 2016, Quora launched a Spanish version of its website to the public; in early 2017, a beta version of Quora in French was announced.

On February 9, 2017, Quora announced changes to their anonymity feature, detaching anonymous questions and edits from accounts.

That same month, Quora was reported to have received Series D funding with a valuation of $1.

In September 2018, Quora reported that it was receiving 300million unique visitors every month.

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.

Several investors passed on the opportunity to invest in Quora, citing the company's "poor track record of actually making money.

In December 2019, Quora announced that it would open its first international engineering office in Vancouver, which would deal with machine learning and other engineering functions.

That same month, Quora launched its Arabic, Gujarati, Hebrew, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu versions.

In January 2020, Quora laid off an undisclosed number of employees at its San Francisco Bay Area and New York offices for financial reasons.

Quora allows users to create user profiles with a name and photo, and access to edit count and other site use statistics.

Quora has developed its own proprietary algorithm to rank answers, which works similarly to Google's PageRank.

Quora uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud technology to host the servers that run its website.

Currently, Quora has various ways of recommending questions to users:.

Quora relies on user reporting, and sometimes human moderators, although many complain that most of the more recent moderation actually comes from AI "bots" looking for specific keywords in order to flag content, without human beings doing as much supervision as was done when the site was newer and the membership was smaller and more manageable.

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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.

Quora believed that by cultivating a group of core users who were particularly invested in the site, a positive feedback loop of user engagement would be created.

Quora was hacked in 2018, leading to loss of information of users to hackers.

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.

Quora was highly criticized for removing question details in August 2017.

Moderation system of Quora, which relies largely on automation, has been frequently criticized as ineffective, inconsistent, and opaque from the perspective of users.

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.

Inconsistency of Quora moderation has been blamed for the proliferation of harmful prejudices on the website.

Some Quora users feel there has been an increase of anti-Semitism on the website, pointing to a community for Holocaust denial.