Was there a time when Quora was good? I've been thinking of it as "Stack Exchange for arrogant, tedious bores" for as long as I've been aware of it.

I think 5-6 years ago, it was good. I enjoyed using it and experts wrote some amazing, no filter, content you can't get anywhere else.

From my experience, Quora failed because:

1. Quora decided to automatically mass generate fake questions. Someone genius at Quora saw that the number of questions correlated with engagement/traffic so he/she thought let's just mass generate questions for people to answer. Inevitably, this led to just pure spam. It's like Quora decided to spam itself.

2. Overtime, users figured out cookie cutter, feel-good, often fake news answers received many upvotes and Quora boosted those answers up. This led to an insane amount of garbage from users in India.

3. Quora decided to use every dirty tactic to get people to login/register and download their apps such as hiding content behind prompts, using unkillable popups, etc. Just like Reddit now.

I remember receiving an invitation to some Quora program to post questions for the website, in exchange for monetary compensation. Never took them up on it.

But this seems like the kind of thing, that will lead to low quality content on any platform.