From my experience, Quora failed because:
1. Quora decided to automatically mass generate fake questions. Someone genius at Quora saw that the number of questions correlated with engagement/traffic so he/she thought let's just mass generate questions for people to answer. Inevitably, this led to just pure spam. It's like Quora decided to spam itself.
2. Overtime, users figured out cookie cutter, feel-good, often fake news answers received many upvotes and Quora boosted those answers up. This led to an insane amount of garbage from users in India.
3. Quora decided to use every dirty tactic to get people to login/register and download their apps such as hiding content behind prompts, using unkillable popups, etc. Just like Reddit now.