[6] Quora first became available to the public on August 11 2009, and was praised for its interface and for the quality of the answers written by its users, many of whom were recognized as experts in their fields.

[13] Quora launched a full-text search of questions and answers on its website in March 2013,[14] and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013.

[17][18] TechCrunch reported that, although Quora had no immediate plans for monetization, they believed that search ads would likely be their eventual source of revenue.

[19] Quora was evolving into "a more organized Yahoo Answers, a classier Reddit, an opinionated Wikipedia", and became popular in tech circles.

[32] in September 2018, Quora announced that additional versions in Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Dutch were planned.

[37][40] The hacked information included users' names, email addresses, encrypted passwords, data from social networks like Facebook and Twitter if people had chosen to link them to their Quora accounts, questions they had asked, and answers they had written.

[40] Adam D'Angelo stated:The overwhelming majority of the content accessed was already public on Quora, but the compromise of account and other private information is serious.

[40] Compromised information could also allow hackers to log into a Quora user's connected social media accounts, via access tokens.

A class action lawsuit, case number 5:18-cv-07597-BLF, was filed in the Northern District of California, on behalf of named plaintiffs in New Jersey and Colorado.

[3] Several investors passed on the opportunity to invest in Quora, citing the company's "poor track record of actually making money.

[44] In January 2020, Quora laid off an undisclosed number of employees at its San Francisco Bay Area and New York offices for financial reasons.

With the help of asynchronous JavaScript and XML, some site functionality resembles instant messaging, such as updating follow counts and an indicator showing that a user is typing an answer.

[48] As of 2011, the Quora community included answers by some well-known people such as Jimmy Wales, Richard A. Muller, Clayton C. Anderson, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Adrián Lamo,[55][56] as well as some current and former professional athletic personalities, scientists, and other experts in their fields.

[65] Poe is a chatbot feature developed by Quora that serves as a web front end for various large language models (LLMs).

[71] Poe allows users to ask questions and obtain answers from a range of AI chatbots built on top of large language models, including those from ChatGPT developer OpenAI, including GPT-4, ChatGPT-4o, and other companies like Anthropic's Claude series, Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama and CodeLlama series and other models like Stable diffusion, Playground, Gemma, Mistral, Mixtral, Qwen and many more.

It also offers a subscription which allows users unlimited use of lightweight chatbot applications such as GPT-3.5 and provides access, with certain limitations, to more advanced artificial intelligence models such as GPT-4, Gemini 1.5 and Claude 3.

[76] Later, in 2011, Scoble criticized Quora for being a "horrid service for blogging" and, although a decent question and answer website, not substantially better than alternatives.

[80] The moderation system of Quora, which relies largely on automation, has been frequently criticized as ineffective, inconsistent, and opaque from the perspective of users.

The website automatically flags seemingly innocuous actions (such as pasting a web address in order to cite a source)[81] while appearing to ignore answers, posts, and comments that users have reported as false, highly inflammatory, or harassing.

[86] There has also been an increase of anti-Semitism on the website, as exemplified by a community for Holocaust denial, and the presence of countless troll questions containing the numbers 14 and 88 in various contexts, which are almost never removed by the ineffective moderators.

[87] Reviewing the website in 2024, Jacob Stern, writing in The Atlantic, was negative, stating that "A large number of the questions are junk.

Whatever scant kernels of quality exist on the site are tough to sift from the mountains of inanity—at least in part because Quora tends to place the inane front and center".

[90] In 2020, Ben Nimmo, a founder of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, noted Quora's popularity as a place to create fake accounts and plant disinformation.

[91] In 2023, Meta Platforms stated that China's Ministry of Public Security's Spamouflage influence operation had targeted Quora.