> 1. Quora has a slick realtime UI. But I doubt it will work at large scale - think about Facebook Chat scale.

I don't see why you've came to the conclusion about #1. Can you elaborate? It isn't like Quora bombards you with stuff that requires action right now, like Chat does.

> 2. Quora rely heavily on moderators. This will not work at large scale. I can understand Google's algorithmic-only approach, but Quora's human-based approach is just too chaotic.

Quora doesn't rely heavily on moderators, it relies heavily on the community. There are admins, but most of the "moderation" is done via users - eg: assigning topics, editing titles, policing users.

> 3. Their topic approach to question categorization is just too simplistic. In essence they are just tags, i.e. folksonomy. No fancy Semantic Web techniques here.

It has a taxonomy. Quora knows that Starcraft 2 is a video game, and a child of the Starcraft computer game series, which is made by Blizzard, and so on: http://www.quora.com/StarCraft-II/ontology

> 4. Quora has no concept of NPOV - Neutral Point of View. It has a MPOV - Moderator Point of View. They should learn a lot from Wikipedia.

I agree that there could be issues with stuff like answers written to sound authoritative when they're wrong.

> 5. Quora has a lot of privacy issues. They also have inconsistent rules about anonymity. You required to register with your real name. You have a choice of answering with you real name or as anon, but you must comment with your real name. You also can't see the name of the person, asking the question, who apparently can add anon comments ...

I'm not sure of your point. Quora used to allow anonymous comments whenever, and it was a nightmare for the community. You can ask and answer questions anonymously. If you asked the question you can comment anonymously, and if you answer a question you can anonymously comment on your answer. This is useful as you can clarify your answer via comments without revealing who you are.

I think Quora actually takes privacy really seriously. You can delete your comments, but you cannot delete questions/answers permanently, I agree this is lame.

> 6. Most of the questions on Quora are just UGC junk, like: "Why Asian girls don't date Black guys?", "Why White girls don't date Asian guys?", etc.

Like most UGC, its one of the situations where 5% of the content is insanely valuable/brilliant and the rest grey area nonsense. That 5% of content on Quora that is valuable is life changing content from some of the smartest domain experts that'll teach you invaluable stuff.

Also that 95% of junk is what creates a community - Quora already has its own memes and in jokes.

> The only quality answers are on topics related to startups, entrepreneurs, angels and VCs.

Quora has fascinating content regarding Fashion, Cooking, Dating and Video Games. What you're seeing (all the great startup content) is simply their initial early adopter market. It's changing - it isn't like Quora is a ghost town outside of the Startup topics. I think this just takes time and passion for other topics.

I use Quora quite a bit, I think it's fun, I think it's interesting. I think their design is brilliant. I think their goal is ambitious but I haven't seen the customer acquisition models I expected to really see them nail other topics - yet. If you're working on a startup you should just read this: http://www.quora.com/Startups/best_questions

and learn. then win. then contribute back to Quora.