People have been wondering for a long while: What could Quora’s long-term business plan be?
The watercooler assumption I’ve seen most recently is, either they are building a commercialisable knowledge bank (which I doubt, the data is way too messy), or the real value is in licensing the machine learning that they are training up through the questions and answers. See How does Quora use machine learning in 2015?
Yes, the bots. Yes, I know the bots are stupid. That doesn’t mean they are useless, or that they are stupider than the equivalent bots 20 years ago were.