But that's also true of almost every other place on the internet; if you'll pardon the pun, StackOverflow is the Exception.
Quora's utility is a tiny subset of, for example, Reddit's /r/AskReddit. Except it does away with the community vibe and what is at least somewhat a meritocracy on Reddit and replaces it with being an already-well-known figure or someone who can sell their reputation well enough. Half the questions are directed at specific people anyway, which is quite bizarre: 'What was Elon Musk's GPA at UPenn?'. If you want to have a Q&A session with a famous person, /r/AMA is much better. In general, there's nothing stopping you from asking and collecting questions and answers anywhere else on the internet, so why do we need a specialist? Quora's Q&A implementation has nothing to set it apart from SO, or even Twitter threads.
More importantly, in terms of user base, most conceivable questions have a better place to be asked than Quora. For some of them, that place is Reddit or StackExchange, or even your favourite Elon Musk fan-fiction club. For the rest, there is probably a community out there that isn't limited to the open Q&A format that users on Quora try to shoehorn everything into.
The one topic that seems to do inordinately well on Quora is questions about startups, because respondents can tout how successful they are when they give you an answer and be upvoted according to how well they do that. This is the rare case that people are actually looking for reputation rather than content. If you're looking for people with life experience, AskReddit does a great job of promoting answers where people take the time to tell a story. Subreddits (like /r/malefashionadvice, for example) do a great job of organising communities around common interest with lots of Q&As and beginner guides thrown in. If you want what Quora purports to provide, just find any old community online with the people you want to hear from and ask it there instead.
Quora's utility is a tiny subset of, for example, Reddit's /r/AskReddit. Except it does away with the community vibe and what is at least somewhat a meritocracy on Reddit and replaces it with being an already-well-known figure or someone who can sell their reputation well enough. Half the questions are directed at specific people anyway, which is quite bizarre: 'What was Elon Musk's GPA at UPenn?'. If you want to have a Q&A session with a famous person, /r/AMA is much better. In general, there's nothing stopping you from asking and collecting questions and answers anywhere else on the internet, so why do we need a specialist? Quora's Q&A implementation has nothing to set it apart from SO, or even Twitter threads.
More importantly, in terms of user base, most conceivable questions have a better place to be asked than Quora. For some of them, that place is Reddit or StackExchange, or even your favourite Elon Musk fan-fiction club. For the rest, there is probably a community out there that isn't limited to the open Q&A format that users on Quora try to shoehorn everything into.
The one topic that seems to do inordinately well on Quora is questions about startups, because respondents can tout how successful they are when they give you an answer and be upvoted according to how well they do that. This is the rare case that people are actually looking for reputation rather than content. If you're looking for people with life experience, AskReddit does a great job of promoting answers where people take the time to tell a story. Subreddits (like /r/malefashionadvice, for example) do a great job of organising communities around common interest with lots of Q&As and beginner guides thrown in. If you want what Quora purports to provide, just find any old community online with the people you want to hear from and ask it there instead.