I was given the following information a month or so ago by someone who was formerly on both Spanish Quora and English Quora. My source is a native speaker of Spanish. I am not in a position to verify it myself, and am passing it along as one person’s perspective.
1. Quora Spanish effectively has zero moderation, with an employee operating in the wrong time zone [for Spain], little familiarity with the local language or cultures, and B2 level language skills.
There is no enforcement of Real Name, due to lack of cultural knowledge: no one from a Spanish speaking country has one name unless they are a football player. They appeared to think that all Spaniards had 1 first name and 1 last name.
2. Quora outsources their translation of community rules, with the translated materials being provided by people unfamiliar with the state of the local language product and its features. This leads to weirdness where key policies being described are for features that do not exist. The translations are also often problematic.
For example: they posted a recent answer on Spanish Quora about rules. The whole post? About blogs. Guess which site lacks blogs? Spanish Quora.
3. Quora does not have any lawyers investigating local regulatory issues, and appears to be setting itself up for problems both employment and content wise.
Quora can’t even enforce policy to make content legal in Spain. They have said nothing about the right to be forgotten.
People in Spain can go to jail for things they write on the Internet. So say you say something like, “Oh? 43 whores were killed by their husbands? 43 dead whores isn’t enough. More whores should die.” Write that publicly enough and you can get reported to the cops, and enough of that and you can get them on your doorstep arresting you. Condenado a dos años de prisión por denigrar a las mujeres en Twitter.
4. Quora has no one on the ground in Spain or France.
They kept having meetups in Madrid on like days when half the people left town.
Then they’d pick times like Wednesday night at 7PM with a week’s notice. You don’t do 7PM if you want people to show here. You do 9:00 PM, more realistically 9:30 PM. They also picked a place where the reviews for one place were, “Staff stole my stuff” and “My laptop was stolen by staff.”5. Quora Spanish has a huge gender gap issue, which makes English Quora look great. Quora has not dedicated resources to this and alienated users best placed to assist in fixing this back when it was fixable.
The gender gap problem Quora has on English Quora is about 10 times worse on Spanish Quora. It is no more than 10%. I went 2 months without a single woman appearing in the digest. It also enables questions like these:
¿En qué errores cae el feminismo contemporáneo?
¿Por qué el feminismo moderno es tan irracional?
¿Por qué hay mujeres que no les puedes contar todo lo que sucede sin que lo tomen mal?
And they have an awful tendency to refer to women as men. Spanish is a gendered language. “Top Writers” is gender neutral in English. It is NOT in Spanish.
Quora does gender neutral, and hires American Spanish speakers who are not formally trained as translators. Or they hire shitty translators. In either case, same result in that they often have embarassing translation issues.
In at least one case, they pretty much decided that fuck it, masculine it is.
Picture writing to maletopwriters@quora.com if you had any questions about top writers. This might appear like little stuff with the gender thing, but it is highly noticable to native speakers, and especially female native speakers.