Perhaps I'm confusing Quora with another site, but isn't this the one that throws up a sort of registration wall when you follow a link there? Doesn't happen now when I try, but I'm sure it has in the recent past.
Millions of dollars are being sunk into this site? Why?
Quora is amazing. I don't know if they'll disrupt Google or Wikipedia but the quality of the content there is light years ahead of any similar site. You post a legal question and get a bunch of lawyers competing to give you the best answer. Post a question about the early days of Facebook and get 12 early employees all competing to give you the best answer. You post a question about the cops and get amazing answers like this from police officers:
Join the site and poke around a bit if you still don't understand. It's like HN. Why is HN so awesome? Because the caliber of people posting here is off-the-charts relative to every similar site. Same with Quora.
It's better than HN. I like HN, but after using it for a few years I noticed something wrong with the comments here that I couldn't quite articulate. Then I saw Quora, which showed me just how good a discussion community could be.
I've only stumbled across Quora a few times and don't really know many people who would even have heard of it, but what you've described sounds like AskScience on Reddit. Though their design isn't as nice.
Millions of dollars are being sunk into this site? Why?