I think Quora is a totally different product, content wise. You don't go to Quora for programming help unless it's hello world in php. You go there for /r/iama type of questions.
Or it's just my usage, largely influenced by the weekly email.
If Quora plan to pivot, they should change their robots.txt [1] so that Archive.org can crawl their website or post their data dumps like StackOverflow [2]. Others came to the same conclusion today [3].
if you don't, they'll flag you and until you update your name, your account will be frozen (you can read and follow but can't answer) and all your previous answers hidden
The problem with reddit is that it's hard to ask random, potentially "dumb" questions. You have to find the right subreddit, and if you're wrong you'll just be downvoted and receive joke responses. Even in the right subreddit many questions will get instantly downvoted by people browsing /new/. Quota has none of these problems.
Reddit is only "devouring" it because it has no decent competitors. Quora could potentially be one if it at least let you read without registering. I can understand wanting to restrict it to "real name"-type contributions, but it's a major mistake to make it unreadable imo. This also prevents indexing by search engines.
I even have a Quora account, but rarely log into it. Most of the time when I come across an interesting question on Quora and it asks me to log in to read more than the first answer, I say, "Well, I guess it's not that interesting anyway."
I don't use Quora very much, but I have noticed that it seems to be very focused on the identity of the person replying, and even the identity of upvoters. It feels like a great place for senior management in organisations to answer questions about topics related to their roles.
Eh, I dunno. I think it creates an egotistic atmosphere that creates problems for both participants and moderators. Someone is much less likely to admit they were wrong or let something go when their professional headshot, real name, and high-powered corporate position is next to it. They reply because they think they get it, find out they were wrong, but feel they risk embarrassment for themselves and their employer if they admit their mistake or don't vigorously self-defend. Under these conditions, you almost need a PR team to manage your Quora account.
I'm not sure there are right and wrong answers to the vast majority of Quora questions. They tend to be about topics where two different people might give extremely different answers.
I agree that that Quora questions are largely subjective, but many are subjective topics that demand accurate conception of prerequisites to answer effectively. I've personally cringe-worthy threads on Quora where a pseudo-technical executive gives a misconceived response to such a question (that is, not providing an unpopular answer, but providing an answer that is not actually relevant to the question) and proceeds to attempt to defend it, sometimes even falling back on "Well, if I was wrong, I wouldn't be the CXO at BigCorp".
Actually I have started using Quora for the stuff that gets pedantically closed on Stack Overflow, for exactly that reason.
It is useful to get an opinion on which library / language / framework is better for a particular task, or what the pros and cons are. Stack Overflow has a real attitude problem, closing these questions as "not constructive" despite the fact the question has hundreds of upvotes.
Quora is not tech focused, and still feels a bit more like facebook (questions feel more like they are based on how recently they were asked as opposed to outright relevance - though that may the way I view the site, and the way it markets itself to me). But there is a huge opportunity to pick up where Stack Overflow is failing its users.
Or it's just my usage, largely influenced by the weekly email.