Quora

For the legislature term, see Quorum.

Quora, Inc.

Type	Private
Headquarters	Mountain View, California
Area served	Worldwide
Founder(s)	Adam D'Angelo Charlie Cheever
Key people	Adam D'Angelo (CEO)
Employees	106
Slogan(s)	The best answer to any question.
Website	quora.com
Written in	Python
Alexa rank	157 (December 2015)
Type of site	Question & answer
Registration	Required
Available in	English
Launched	June 2009 (2009-06)
Current status	Active

Quora is a restricted-access question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of registered users. Site visitors are allowed to see one answer before they must register, using either Google or Facebook accounts. There is also an email registration process involving captchas that can take multiple attempts.

The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.

History

Further information: Timeline of Quora

Quora was co-founded by two former Facebook employees, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever. D'Angelo resigned from his position at Facebook in January 2010 to create Quora. He said that he and Cheever were inspired to create Quora because "we thought that Q & A is one of those areas on the internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet." Quora's base of users grew quickly in December 2010.

Quora had an estimated 500,000 registered users, as of January 2011. In June 2011, Quora redesigned its website, in order to make information discovery and navigation easier. Some noted that the redesigned site had definite similarities to Wikipedia. Quora released an official iPhone app on September 29, 2011 and an official Android app on September 5, 2012.

In September 2012, Quora announced that co-founder Charlie Cheever was stepping back from a day-to-day role at the company, while continuing to retain an advisory role. An article in Business Insider quoted an anonymous Quora answer, claimed to be written by an insider, that stated that Cheever left the company because he wanted to focus on the user experience, whereas D'Angelo wanted to focus on growth, and D'Angelo, by financing the Series B investment mostly from his own money, acquired sufficient control over the company to have things his way.

In January 2013, Quora launched a blogging platform.

Quora launched 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. It also announced in May 2013 that all its metrics had tripled relative to the same time in the prior year.

On November 12, 2013, Quora introduced a feature they called Stats that they billed as a dashboard for writers. This would allow all Quora users to see summary and detailed statistics regarding how many people had viewed, upvoted, followed, and shared their questions and answers. TechCrunch reported that, although Quora did not have any immediate plans for monetization, they believed that search ads would likely be their eventual source of monetization.

In April 2014, it was announced that Quora was raising $80 million from Tiger Global at a reported $900 million valuation. Quora was also one of the members of the Summer 2014 Y Combinator batch.

In October 2016, Quora launched a Spanish version of its website to the public. Following this announcement, in early 2017, a beta version of Quora in French was announced. In May 2017, beta versions in German and Italian were introduced. In September 2017 a beta version in Japanese was launched. In April 2018, Beta versions in Hindi, Portuguese, and Indonesian were launched.

In April 2017, Quora reportedly received Series D funding with a valuation of $1.8 billion.

Operation

Quora requires users to register with their real names rather than a screen name, and the site is essentially unusable if a user is not logged in and using cookies. To log in, they must create accounts at the site and at other approved social media sites, as well as email accounts. All these actions have increasingly required high-level and sometimes real-life identity verification procedures. Quora users may log into Quora with their Google or Facebook accounts using the OpenID technology. Quora users can upvote or downvote answers; they can also suggest edits to existing answers provided by other users. The Quora "community" has included some well-known people, such as Marc Andreessen, Dustin Moskovitz, Jimmy Wales, Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Avicii, and Barack Obama. About 40% of Quora users were from India as of January 2016.

Quora uses the Pylons and Comet technologies for its backend and Ubuntu Linux as its operating system with MySQL as its database. It also uses Git and memcached. Quora uses Nginx as a reverse proxy server and HAProxy for load balancing. Quora has developed its own algorithm for ranking answers, which works similarly to PageRank. Quora uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud technology to host the servers that run its website. In August 2011, Quora switched its infrastructure's Python implementation from CPython to PyPy, in order to improve response time.

Quora allows users to create user profiles with visible real names, photos, site use statistics, etc., which users can set to private.

Privacy concerns

In August 2012, blogger Ivan Kirigin pointed out that it was possible for acquaintances and followers to 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, including their real names, to search engines.

Content moderation

Quora has special features to moderate content by users. The majority of content moderation is done by users, though the staff can intervene.

• Upvote/Downvote – Users can rank answers based on how relevant or helpful they found the answers to be. This feature regulates the quality of content posted online. The more upvotes an answer receives, the higher it is ranked, and it shows up on top of the searches related to the question. If an answer is ranked poorly, it is “collapsed” and will not show up in people’s feeds.

• Report Answer – Users can report plagiarism, harassment, spam, factually incorrect articles, etc. This keeps sub-standard content under check.

• Suggest Edits – Users make suggestions to improve an article by proposing changes to it. The proposed changes are also made visible to the original author of the question or answer and can be either approved and published or rejected.

Financials

In March 2010, Quora received funding in the amount of $11 million from Benchmark Capital, valuing the start-up at $86 million.

In May 2012, Quora raised $50 million in Series B funds, valuing the company at over $400 million, bringing their total funding to $61 million. Co-founder D'Angelo, who owns 0.8% of Facebook stock, also invested $20 million of his own money in the B round.

In April 2014, Quora announced an $80 million Series C round of funding, valuing the company at over $900 million. The funding was led by Tiger Global Management. D’Angelo also said the site would likely introduce its first ads in 2015.

Reception

Quora was reviewed extensively by the media in 2010.

According to Robert Scoble, Quora succeeded in combining attributes of Twitter and Facebook. 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 competitors.

In 2010, D'Angelo and Cheever were among five named "Smartest Engineer runner-up" in the "smartest people in the tech" article by CNNMoney. They were also both listed in Inc. magazine's "Top 30 Under-30" entrepreneurs list of 2011.

In 2014 Quora attracted controversy for using robots.txt to ask crawlers such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to not index or archive the site. Their stated reason is that the Wayback APIs as of 2016 does not give users a way to censor answers that they may regret previously posting. Critics have raised concerns about the fate of Quora's data if the site ever goes offline and recommended Stack Overflow as an easily archived alternative.

After question details were removed in August 2017, Quora was highly criticized for doing so. According to some users, the removal of question details limited the ability to submit personal questions and other questions requiring question details. According to an official product update announcement, the removal of question details was made to emphasize canonical questions.

As of February 28, 2018, according to Alexa Internet, the United States makes up the largest user base at 37.1%, followed by India at 19.2%, with an overall global site ranking of 136.

Criticisms

Quora has been heavily criticized for various reasons, including alleged or confirmed racial, religious, and/or political biases held by moderators and registered users of the site, many of whom tend to resort to guilt by association tactics rather than replying to a question with a factual argument. For this very reason, it has often been described as a site that "needs to die a quick, painful death."

Timeline

Year	Month and date	Event type	Details
2009	June	Product	Quora is founded.
2010	March	Funding	Quora raises $11 million in a series A, with Benchmark Capital as an investor.
2010	June	Product	Quora announces that it will open up to the public.
2011	January	Team	Marc Bodnick leaves Elevation Partners to join Quora.
2011	July	Product	Quora introduces video to its Q&A pages.
2011	July	Product	Quora introduces Credits for asking-to-answer questions.
2011	September	Product	Quora introduces threaded comments and comment voting.
2012	May	Funding	Quora raises $50 million in a series B, with Peter Thiel and Adam D'Angelo as investors.
2012	September	Team	Co-founder Charlie Cheever leaves in a mysterious incident.
2012	November	Product	Quora introduces Top Writers program.
2013	January	Product	Quora introduces blogs.
2013	November	Product	Quora introduces "Stats", an analytics tool for writers.
2014	April	Funding	Quora raises $100 million in a series C at $900 million valuation, with Tiger Global Management and Y Combinator as investors.
January 2016	Product	Quora announces bounty system, offering financial bounties for the best answer (selected by the question asker) on select questions.
March 2016	Product	Quora acquires Parlio, an online Q&A site started by Wael Ghonim.
April 2016	Product	Quora announces that it will start out testing advertisements, on a small number of question pages.
May 2016	Team	Marc Bodnick, Quora's public face and leader of its business and moderation team, announces that he is leaving the company.
August 2016	Product	Quora announces support for the Spanish language.
November 2016	Team	Kelly Battles announced as new chief financial officer (CFO).
April 2017	Funding	Quora raises $85 million in a series D at $1.8 billion valuation, with Collaborative Fund and Y Combinator as investors

See also

• List of question-and-answer websites

External links

• Official website