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From Quora's perspective, that puts them on the path to being the next Friendfeed -- not a good outcome for the investors who valued them at $86M last spring.

Isn't that a problem for Quora to solve? I'd hate to think keeping anyone out is the answer, especially with a challenging UX.

HN is pretty easy to figure out and thanks to Techcrunch et al has had ample opportunity to be overrun with junk. So it can be done. In fact it should be easier because here we all share a front page, but Quora can use the social graph to massage results.

HN doesn't have to exit at a multiple of $86 million to generate returns for investors and so can afford to be a niche site carefully curated to be uninteresting to the mass market.

The curation is mostly done by users voting on others' contributions, not by a user interface that is too hard for dumb people to understand.

Yahoo Answers.