The interesting thing to me is I didn't really notice the monetization thing. I think it probably happened later than when I stopped using the site, because I n

The interesting thing to me is I didn't really notice the monetization thing. I think it probably happened later than when I stopped using the site, because I notice now hitting it from web search you can't view anything without logging in, but that wasn't the case when I was still using it. What you say here was definitely the draw, but that was true as an answerer, too. I don't exactly consider myself an "expert" on anything, but I was a fairly senior budget officer in the 1st CAV division headquarters before getting into software and both details of military operations and the federal budgeting process are things I had an insider view that I also see being discussed both in web forums and news media with a lot of naivete and wrong information. I was happy to answer questions about these topics, and it was nice to have the setup with your real name, official qualifications, and specific people vouching for you. It worked for a while and high-quality answers drifted to the top. But that all changed in 2016. The US presidential election between Trump and Hillary ruined the Internet. For over a year, every top answer and most of the top-ranked members giving answers were purely partisan. The only way to get noticed and rewarded was to say something flattering to one political party and insulting to another. Nobody cared about the quality of information any more. This just didn't hit Quora. It hit the entire Internet. It probably helped ruin Twitter and Facebook as well, though I didn't care as much because I didn't really use them anyway. Really, it ruined the entire global information ecosystem. As much as news media had been going downhill ever since CNN kicked off the 24 hours permanent news cycle in the early 90s, I feel like a threshold was crossed in 2016 that made it no longer tolerable and no longer worth even bothering to consume news. Maybe some of Quora was insulated from this and wasn't ruined until a later monetization push, to the extent they somewhat cordoned you by interest, if you managed to only follow questions on purely tech or business topics and ignore civics and world affairs. Certainly, I think this is largely what has saved Hacker News. Being the only place on the Internet I still read anything, it's interesting to observe that apparently Israel is at war and I didn't even know about it until watching football last night.