If Quora was to make use of the blockchain technology, what would be the possible use cases?
Quora is a corporation, a hierarchical organization whose purpose is to generate profit for its shareholders. That is its main purpose. Quora could use the Steem blockchain, for example, to provide its users access to a censorship resistant database to store their answers to but I’m not sure why it would want to do that. After all, corporations are hierarchical organizations where top-down control is the name of the game. If Quora censored something, it could still do that by just not showing a question or an answer stored on chain but that act of censorship would forever be discoverable by comparing the content of the blockchain to what’s visible on the website.
One useful thing Quora could do is provide its users an opportunity to earn the STEEM cryptocurrency by giving them an opportunity to automatically post their answer to Steem where it would be accessible by most other Steem front ends and have an opportunity to be upvoted by the stakeholders of Steem. Monetizing great answers is otherwise impossible on Quora because Quora pays nothing to those who write them. Even building a reputation in order to capitalize on it elsewhere it is difficult on Quora because if you are popular and drop too many links to external websites, Quora might fear you driving traffic away from its website and censor you.
In that regard, Quora is a example of corporate-controlled Web 2.0. Billions of little ants toil away without compensation to make a very small group of people fabulously rich. There is nothing left of the freedom that the Internet of the 1990’s had in spades. I believe the Steem blockchain protocol to be part of the infrastructure of Web 3.0 that makes censorship resistance and peer-to-peer transfer the tools making freedom on the Internet possible again.
More information on Steem: https://www.quora.com/q/otycmrjbbhahuqae?sort=top