The ‘Insane People Quora’ subreddit has been active since June 2018, recently having celebrated its 3rd birthday. During that time, the community has grown to become over 291k members strong. Most redditors visit the group for their daily dose of fringe weirdness that reminds them (and us!) that fact can often be stranger than fiction.

The founder of r/InsanePeopleQuora told Bored Panda that the online group was founded once there was a rise in the number of Quora posts shared on r/insanepeoplefacebook, a "catch-all for social media insanity." There was a demand for a separate subreddit dedicated exclusively to Quora posts.

"I saw a comment suggesting there should be a specific one for Quora as it's quite different to standard social media (having Q&As only) and decided to make it from there. Getting the first few thousand members took a while with crossposting Quora posts I found to r/insanepeoplefacebook. Some reached the front page of Reddit which is when the sub started seeing a large increase in numbers and became self-sustaining, meaning I didn't need to post as much to keep the sub going," the founder shared how the community started to grow.

According to r/InsanePeopleQuora's mod team, moderating the community is "fairly easy" for the most part. "The main issues we've faced is when we became the trending subreddit of the day we got a large number of unique views (~200k which is way more than the hundreds we would've been getting at the time) and new members within a few days (I think doubling or tripling our size at the time)," they explained.

Politics is almost always a touchy subject. And political discussions on the subreddit are no exception. "The other posts which are difficult are those that bring up political issues. Most of the time this will result in people flinging personal attacks at each other, a large number of bans, and often a locked post. Otherwise, since the number of insane posts on Quora each day is fairly small we tend to only get a few posts a day on most days."

I was interested to get the subreddit founder's opinion about why Quora is such a popular platform. In their opinion, it has to do with the site's ability to adapt. "I think Quora is so popular due to its age and keeping up with the times. Age obviously helps as it takes time to build up a user base, but then you have to do something to maintain that base. For Quora, they've added several common social media features such as the ability to upvote questions, comment on questions (as opposed to answering them), and following people for their questions or answers," they pointed out exactly how the platform has changed with the times.

"I don't think there's anything specific that attracts weird questions, I think it's just because of the popularity of the site, with enough people on there you're always going to get some strange questions as well as trolls."

Quora itself was founded in 2009 by former Facebook employees Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever and became public a year later, on June 21, 2010. Fast-forwarding to 2020, a whopping 300 million users visited it each month. With that kind of popularity, it’s no wonder that some Quora posts end up being weirder than weird.

There have been some large changes made to how Quora operates this year. On April 19, 2021, the site eliminated the requirement for users to use their real names. That means that users can use pseudonyms of their choice as of that date.

What’s more, in August, Quora announced that contributors can now monetize their content. A new subscription service called Quora+ was also launched, where subscribers can access all the content that anyone puts behind a paywall. For a small fee, of course.

The r/InsanePeopleQuora subreddit has a few rules for any up-and-coming members of the community. For instance, obviously, all the posts have to be screenshots from Quora, though other question-based sites also allowed. That includes certain subreddits dedicated mainly to questions.

What’s more, the subreddit’s moderators ask their members not to post any personal information. That means no links to the source material! The mods also frown upon reposts and posts that are obvious satire presented as serious questions (satire needs to be marked as such).

And there you have it. The next time you’re browsing Quora for some educational content, you should keep an eye out for any bizarre posts. We’re sure that the r/InsanePeopleQuora community would be more than happy if you share your finds with them.