What's with all the negativity around here? It's easy to look at a product, have several quick gut reactions, and then simply write it off. For all the open-minded-ness that the HN community prides itself on, it certainly doesn't seem to be showing through in the comments here so far.<p>In my opinion, Quora deserves more careful consideration and suspension of judgment for a variety of reasons:<p>1. Quality of community - Quora has managed to assemble an incredibly high quality set of founders, VCs, angels, hackers as extremely active members of the community. These are probably some of the busiest and hardest to engage and please people, and yet Quora has been able to elicit extremely candid and detailed responses from them about topics unseen anywhere else. The breadth and depth of information in some of these posts dwarf all the random Mixergy, Founders At Work, etc interviews seen here on HN. For one example, search for answers by Reid Hoffman, cofounder of PayPal and LinkedIn.<p>2. Amazing UI/UX design. There are so many clever small details to the user experience that it is impossible to really understand without actually getting your hands dirty and trying the product.<p>3. Pedigree - Cofounders Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever were former CTO/VP Engineering and Head of Connect/Platform at Facebook, respectively. They've managed to secure a massive investment at a huge valuation from a very highly-regarded VC firm - <i>before launch</i>. Regardless of how much confidence you put in these signals, they are meaningful enough to warrant some suspension of judgment.<p>4. No one cares that you won't connect with Facebook or Twitter. Most people aren't like you. And if you really are interested in "building things people want," you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is the direction the web is moving in. I don't like Facebook's cavalier attitude toward privacy, but I'm willing to connect to Quora to see a great product and community in action. The potential for learning greatly outweighs any philosophical stance for me.<p>Obviously, there are a lot of unstated assumptions underlying these points, so I'll add the caveat that if none of the above appeals to your sense of curiosity, then maybe Quora really isn't for you. But I just wanted to balance all the negative comments so that someone that would enjoy Quora doesn't get turned off by all the "meh".