Despite all the really negative comments (and yes, I agree that Quora shouldn't hide its great content from guests), Quora is fairly valuable for me. I spend more time on Quora than I do on Facebook or Twitter; the only site I spend more time on is HN.<p>The reason is that Quora has a lot of really reputable, valuable, and domain-specific contributors, and it's easy to identify answers from people who have credibility on a subject. On HN there's a lot of noise, and there's a really common phenomenon of people bullshitting about subjects where they really have no credibility (usually the most controversial topics on HN like politics, economics, venture capital). The same is true for Quora, but on Quora you can identify people's domain-expertise better (it's posted next to each answer), and the best contributions percolate to the top much better than on HN. It's interesting to note that one thing people have always wanted on HN is the ability to follow certain users and certain topics, which is something Quora does.<p>For just the startup/tech world, there are tons of contributions from experienced VCs, angel investors, experienced entrepreneurs, etc. Outside of tech, you get pleasant surprises like former police officers answering questions about policing, movie directors answering questions about movies they've directed, etc.<p>Quora is still young, so there are a lot of quality early adopters. Going forward, it remains to be seen whether the quality will degrade as Quora gets more popular.<p>The biggest problem with the onboarding is that most of my value is through following "famous" (credible) people, I get very little value from following topics or questions, because when you start doing that you get lot's of noise (random or semi-credible people answering). This doesn't seem to be something emphasized in the current flow.<p>EDIT (reply to below): There's a lot of noise. There are a lot of gems, too, but it's easier to identify the gems. I don't think of things in terms of inside vs. outside the so-called SV bubble, so I don't really share that sentiment. An experienced entrepreneur is still credible to me, even if they are in SV.