"1. If you are loved first by techies and then by normals you get free marketing and also scale. Google, Skype and YouTube all followed this chronology. It is startup nirvana.
2. The next best scenario is to be loved by normals but not by the techies. The vast majority of successful consumer businesses fall into this category..."
This is a case of #2. I know many "normals" who really don't care and just sign up or download the app. It is probable that Quora alienates some percentage of its content writers by doing this but probably not enough to account for the absolutely massive increase in lift it is seeing as a result (I would guess 3x minimum conversion improvement to account creation from just this one change.) If they don't break out of the tech minority the company is not going to be valuable anyway so it does not seem to make sense to optimize for that audience.
All comparisons to Experts Exchange (where you had to pay to sign up) are totally overblown, signing up for Quora takes less than one minute and its free. It's just not that difficult to even be worth complaining about. You are not entitled to the Internet your way as the user of a free product. As the saying goes "if you are not the customer, you are the product".
That's an oversimplification of the situation. A Q&A based site like Quora can be compared to it's predecessors like Experts Exchange or Stack Overflow because the content is simply enhanced by greater participation of experts. The early adopters could be techies or otherwise, but they will notice the increase in friction for sharing and using content.
Also the problem is not really "signing up". As the article points out, downloading another app just to read content on the web feels like a overkill to most people (even non techies). Especially when the most common means of searching for answers remains Google which is usually found in the browser.
Frankly speaking I don't see the problem at all. If you are a rare user/reader at Quora not installing the App won't hurt you or Quora. If you are a regular user you will install anyway!
Besides these days who worries about login's when there is unlimited supply of free email accounts.
Most frequent users start off as infrequent users. By discouraging infrequent users, you prevent formation of frequent users. That's the business argument.
Personally, I just hate it when I click a google link and land on a blurred page. It's deceptive to promise an answer and then make me jump through the hoops before telling me what it is, all of which happens before I even know if the answer was good.
That is secondary to my point which is that people like you, a founder & developer who cares about cryptography (just guessing from your profile), are not like most people ("normals").
I love Quora as a Q&A vertical focussed on startups.
As a content creator though, I'm increasingly tempted to put it in the similar StackExchange site http://answers.onstartups.com/, where at least my content is CC licensed and easy to link to.
Quora doesn't live in a vacuum, it has competition.
"1. If you are loved first by techies and then by normals you get free marketing and also scale. Google, Skype and YouTube all followed this chronology. It is startup nirvana.
2. The next best scenario is to be loved by normals but not by the techies. The vast majority of successful consumer businesses fall into this category..."
This is a case of #2. I know many "normals" who really don't care and just sign up or download the app. It is probable that Quora alienates some percentage of its content writers by doing this but probably not enough to account for the absolutely massive increase in lift it is seeing as a result (I would guess 3x minimum conversion improvement to account creation from just this one change.) If they don't break out of the tech minority the company is not going to be valuable anyway so it does not seem to make sense to optimize for that audience.
All comparisons to Experts Exchange (where you had to pay to sign up) are totally overblown, signing up for Quora takes less than one minute and its free. It's just not that difficult to even be worth complaining about. You are not entitled to the Internet your way as the user of a free product. As the saying goes "if you are not the customer, you are the product".