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 Screenshot of homepage | |
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
Type of site | Question and answer |
| Available in | Arabic,Marathi,Danish,Dutch,English,Finnish,French,German,Gujarati,Hebrew,Hindi,Indonesian,Italian,Japanese,Kannada,Malayalam,Bengali,Norwegian,Polish,Portuguese,Spanish,Swedish,Tamil,Telugu,Punjabi(Shahmukhi, Gurmukhi)[1] |
| Founded | June 25, 2009; 15 years ago (2009-06-25) |
| Headquarters | Mountain View,California, U.S. |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) | Adam D'Angelo Charlie Cheever |
| Key people | Adam D'Angelo (CEO) Kelly Battles (CFO)[2] |
| Revenue | US$20 million (2018)[3] |
| Employees | 200–300 (2019)[3] |
| URL | www |
| Registration | Yes |
| Launched | June 21, 2010; 14 years ago (2010-06-21) |
| Current status | Active |
| Written in | Python,C++[4] |
Quora is an American socialquestion-and-answer website and onlineknowledge market headquartered inMountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009,[5] and made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[6] Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that have been submitted by other users.[7] As of 2020, the website was visited by 300 million users a month.[8]
Quora was co-founded by formerFacebook employeesAdam D'Angelo andCharlie Cheever in June 2009.[3] 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 [the name] Quora had was Quiver.[9]
In March 2010, Quora, Inc. was valued at $86 million.[6] 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.[6] 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.[10] Until 2016, Quora did not show ads because "...ads can often be negative for user experience. Nobody likesbanner ads, ads from shady companies, or ads that are irrelevant to their needs."[3]
In June 2011, Quora redesigned the navigation and usability of its website.[11] Co-founder Adam D'Angelo compared the redesigned Quora toWikipedia, 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.[11] In September 2012, co-founder Charlie Cheever stepped down as co-operator of the company, taking an advisory role.[12] D'Angelo then retained a high degree of control over the company.[3]
In January 2013, Quora launched a blogging platform allowing users to post non-answer content.[13] Quora launched a full-text search of questions and answers on its website in March 2013,[14] and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013.[15] It also announced in May 2013 that usage metrics had tripled relative to the same time in the prior year.[16] In November 2013, Quora introduced a feature calledStats to allow all Quora users to see summary and detailed statistics of how many people had viewed, upvoted, and shared their questions and answers.[17][18]TechCrunch reported that, although Quora had no immediate plans for monetization, they believed that search ads would likely be their eventual source of revenue.[19]
Quora was evolving into "a more organizedYahoo Answers, a classierReddit, an opinionatedWikipedia", and became popular in tech circles.[3] In April 2014, Quora raised $80 million fromTiger Global at a reported $900 million valuation.[20][21] Quora was one of the Summer 2014Y Combinator companies,[22] although it was described as "the oldest Y-Combinator ever".[23]
In March 2016, Quora acquired the online community website Parlio.[24]
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.[25] 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.[26]
In April 2016, Quora began a limited rollout of advertising on the site.[27] The first ad placement that the company accepted was fromUber. Over the next few years the site began gradually to show more ads, which Vox described in 2019 as "...still relatively sparse."[3]
In October 2016, Quora launched aSpanish version of its website to the public;[28] in early 2017, a beta version of Quora inFrench was announced.[29] In May 2017, beta versions inGerman andItalian were introduced.[30] In September 2017 a beta version inJapanese was launched.[31] In April 2018, Beta versions inHindi,Portuguese, andIndonesian were launched.[32] in September 2018, Quora announced that additional versions inBengali,Marathi,Tamil,Telugu,Finnish,Norwegian,Swedish, andDutch were planned.[33]
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.[34]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.[35]
In April 2017, Quora claimed to have 190 million monthly unique visitors, up from 100 million a year earlier. That same month, Quora was reported to have receivedSeries D funding with a valuation of $1.8 billion.[36]
In September 2018, Quora reported that it was receiving 300 million unique visitors every month.[3][36] Despite its large number of registered users, Quora did not possess the same level of mainstream cultural dominance as sites likeTwitter, which, at the time, had roughly 326 million registered users.[3][37] This may 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 other social media sites linked to Quora or created them years previously and forgotten about them.[37][38] Quora usespopups andinterstitials to force users to login or register before they can see more of the content, similar to ametered paywall.[39]
In December 2018, Quora announced that approximately 100 million user accounts were affected by adata breach.[37][40] The hacked information included users' names, email addresses, encrypted passwords, data from social networks likeFacebook andTwitter if people had chosen to link them to their Quora accounts, questions they had asked, and answers they had written.[40] 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.[40]
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, on behalf of named plaintiffs in New Jersey and Colorado.[41][42]
By May 2019, Quora was valued at $2 billion as a company and it was finalizing a $60 million investment round, which was led by Valor Equity Partners, a private equity firm with ties toTesla, Inc. andSpaceX.[3] In spite of this, the site still showed very few ads compared to other sites of its kind and the company was still struggling to turn a profit, having made only $20 million in revenue in 2018.[3] Several investors passed on the opportunity to invest in Quora, citing the company's "poor track record of actually making money."[3] Schleifer characterized the disparity between Quora's valuation as a company and its actual profits as a result of "the high valuation for virtually everything these days in the tech sector."[3]
In December 2019, Quora announced that it would open its first international engineering office inVancouver, which would deal with machine learning and other engineering functions.[43] That same month, Quora launched itsArabic,Gujarati,Hebrew,Kannada,Malayalam, andTelugu versions.[44]
In January 2020, Quora laid off an undisclosed number of employees at itsSan Francisco Bay Area andNew York offices for financial reasons.[45]
In June 2020, during theCOVID-19 pandemic, D'Angelo announced that Quora would permanently allowremote working.[46][47]
On 19 April, Quora eliminated the requirement that users use their real names and allowed users to use pseudonyms.[48]
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.[49][50]
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 not using their real name. The move ties in the no longer needing to use real name for accounts. The intentions of the change was to reduce the amount of policy-violating anonymous answers.[51]
URLs of questions contain only the question title without a numericidentifier as used onStack Exchange sites (in addition to aURL slug), and/unanswered/ before the title, if the question is unanswered.
With the help ofasynchronous JavaScript and XML, some site functionality resemblesinstant messaging, such as updating follow counts and an indicator showing that a user is typing an answer.[52]
Prior to April 19, 2021, Quora required users to register with the complete form of theirreal names rather than apseudonym or other screen name;[53] 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.[54] Users may also log in with theirGoogle orFacebook accounts by using theOpenID protocol. The Real Name Policy was rescinded on April 19, 2021.[48]
As of 2011, the Quora community included answers by some well-known people such asJimmy Wales,Richard A. Muller,Clayton C. Anderson,Barack Obama,Hillary Clinton, andAdrián Lamo,[55][56] 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.[57] In response, Quora stopped showing question views in feeds later that month.[58] By default, Quora exposes its users' profiles tosearch engines. Users can disable this feature.[59]
Quora has developed its own proprietary algorithm to rank answers, which works similarly toGoogle'sPageRank.[60] Quora usesAmazon Elastic Compute Cloud technology to host the servers that run its website.[61][62]
Currently, Quora has various ways of recommending questions to users:[63]
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 positivefeedback loop ofuser engagement would be created.[64]
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.[65]
Poe is a chatbot feature developed by Quora that serves as a web front end for variouslarge language models (LLMs). The product was announced in December 2022[66][67][68][69] and launched to the public on February 3, 2023.[67][70] Poe was made available to desktop browsers on March 4, 2023.[71]
Poe allows users to ask questions and obtain answers from a range of AIchatbots built on top of large language models, including those fromChatGPT developerOpenAI, includingGPT-4,ChatGPT-4o, and other companies likeAnthropic'sClaude series,Google'sGemini,Meta'sLlama and CodeLlama series and other models likeStable diffusion, Playground,Gemma,Mistral, Mixtral,Qwen and many more. It also offers a subscription which allows users unlimited use of lightweight chatbot applications such asGPT-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.
Quora was reviewed extensively by the media in 2010.[72][73][74] Quora was hacked in 2018, leading to loss of information of users to hackers.[75] According toRobert Scoble, Quora succeeded in combining attributes ofTwitter andFacebook.[76] 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.[77]
Quora was highly 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.[78][79] According to an official product update announcement, the removal of question details was made to emphasize "canonical" questions.[80]
The moderation system of Quora, which relies largely on automation, has been frequently criticized as ineffective, inconsistent, and opaque from the perspective of users. The website automatically flags seemingly innocuous actions (such as pasting a web address in order to cite a source)[81] while appearing to ignore answers, posts, and comments that users have reported as false, highly inflammatory, or harassing.[82] 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.[81][83][84][85]
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 subject of a sexually defamatory post containing a photo of her that was taken down by moderation only after the incident was publicized online.[86] There has also been an increase ofanti-Semitism on the website, as exemplified by a community forHolocaust denial, 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.[87]
Reviewing the website in 2024, Jacob Stern, writing inThe Atlantic, 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".[88] These criticisms were echoed by Nitish Pahwa writing inSlate.[89]
In 2018, thePeople's Daily, the official newspaper of theCentral Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), reported on the potential for Chinese citizens to use the platform to promote the image of China abroad.[90] In 2020, Ben Nimmo, a founder of theAtlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, noted Quora's popularity as a place to create fake accounts and plantdisinformation.[91] In 2023,Meta Platforms stated that China'sMinistry of Public Security'sSpamouflageinfluence operation had targeted Quora.[92][93] The same year, a publication by thePublicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party stated that the CCP should expand its use of Quora.[94]
| Date | Event type | Details |
|---|---|---|
| June 2009 | Product | Quora founded |
| June 2010 | Product | Quora announces that it will open up to the public[95] |
| January 2011 | Team | Marc Bodnick leavesElevation Partners to join Quora[96] |
| February 2011 | Technology | Quora choosesC++ overC for its high-performance services[97] |
| July 2011 | Product | Quora introduces video to its Q&A pages[98] |
| July 2011 | Product | Quora introduces Credits for asking-to-answer questions[99] |
| September 2011 | Product | Quora introduces threaded comments and comment voting[100] |
| September 2012 | Team | Co-founderCharlie Cheever leaves[101] |
| November 2012 | Product | Quora introduces Top Writers program[102] |
| January 2013 | Product | Quora introduces blogs[13] |
| March 2013 | Product | Quora introduces a policy eliminating image-only answers.[103] |
| April 2014 | Funding | Quora raises $80 million in a series C at a $900 million valuation, withTiger Global Management andY Combinator as investors[104] |
| January 2016 | Product | Quora announces bounty system, offering financial bounties for the best answer (selected by the question asker) on select questions.[105] |
| March 2016 | Product | Quora acquiresParlio, an online Q&A site started byWael Ghonim.[106] |
| April 2016 | Product | Quora announces that it will start testing advertisements on a small number of question pages.[107] |
| May 2016 | Team | Marc Bodnick, Quora's business and moderation team leader and spokesman announces that he is leaving the company. |
| August 2016 | Product | Quora announces support for theSpanish language.[108] |
| November 2016 | Team | Wikimedia Foundation trusteeKelly Battles announced as newchief financial officer (CFO).[2] |
| February 2017 | Product | Quora integratesWikidata into its topic management.[109] |
| April 2017 | Funding | Quora raises $85 million in a series D funding round at a $1.8 billion valuation, withCollaborative Fund andY Combinator as investors[110] |
| July 2017 | Product | Quora announces support for theGerman andItalian languages.[111] |
| September 2017 | Product | Quora announces support for theJapanese language.[112] |
| April 2018 | Product | Quora launches Video Answers.[113] |
| April 2018 | Product | Quora introduces the Quora Partner Program.[114] |
| June 2018 | Product | Quora announces support for theHindi,Indonesian, andPortuguese languages.[115] |
| February 2018 | Product | Quora announces the launch of the Links feature, which shows links to articles on other websites in the users' feed.[116] Initially, the links were automatically sorted to topics and posted by the software to the users' feeds according to the topics they follow, and also appeared in a "Links" tab on topics pages. The Links tab was later removed from topics pages without announcement. |
| May 2018 | Product | Quora announces the launch of Sharing,[117] a kind ofreblogging. |
| August 2018 | Product | Quora launches the ability for users to share links.[118] |
| September 2018 | User Base | Quora hits 300 million monthly users[119] |
| November 2018 | Product | Quora launches the "Spaces" feature,[120] and subsequently converts existing blogs on the platform to spaces.[121] |
| December 2018 | Security | Quora reported a data breach that affected 100 million of its users' data.[122] |
| January 2019 | Product | Quora announces support for theDutch,Danish,Finnish,Norwegian,Swedish,Marathi,Bengali, andTamil languages.[123] |
| December 2019 | Team | Quora announces that it will open its first international engineering office inVancouver.[43] |
| December 2019 | Product | Quora announces support for theArabic,Gujarati,Hebrew,Kannada,Malayalam, andTelugu languages.[44] |
| January 2020 | Team | An undisclosed number of Quora employees are laid off.[45] |
| April 2021 | Product | Quora rescinds its real names policy, allowing users to use pseudonyms.[48] |
| August 2021 | Product | Quora allows contributors to monetize their content and launches a subscription service called Quora+.[49][50] |
| August 2022 | Product | Quora announced the discontinuation of Quora Partner Program in English language only.[124] |
| February 2023 | Product | Quora launched its AI-powered chatbot called Poe to the public.[67][70][68][66] |
| April 2024 | Product | Now available on quora New on Poe: Creator monetization via price per message[125] |
| April 2024 | Product | user can create Multi-bot chat on Poe[126] |
| October 2024 | Product | Discontinuation of Space Subscriptions and Ads Revenue Sharing Programs [ Big Update ][127] |
Exactly like publishers are doing with porous paywalls that personalize permissions based on referral source or predictive analysis.
