Quora used to have a system which rewarded good answers. Now, they pay people to ask popular questions. In the private Top Writers group (I left shortly after t

Quora used to have a system which rewarded good answers. Now, they pay people to ask popular questions. In the private Top Writers group (I left shortly after this change) it was predicted that this is result in a dearth of garbage questions: template "what is X times Y?", nonsense "what if" questions, etc. And sure enough, it came to pass. Quora made a conscious choice to trade quality answers for more questions (of any quality). They surely saw in advance what the site would become and did it anyway. It used to be a place where you could read thoughtful replies from intelligent people, and it's become a spiritual successor to Yahoo Answers.