Were Mahalo, Aardvark and Yahoo! Answers better quality services in their earlier days?

it's impossible to say that the brilliant and now dying on the vine aardvark service was bereft of great answers as many exchanges took place in small silos...yahoo answers was awesome for mass market use...mahalo was all over the place, and their compensation model didn't work at all for pro researcher types, all of whom balked at the original google answers project...quora has yet to implement any meaningful features that will let me control the increasing flood of craptastic topics that draw high nonsense response rates, but if they can filter out the cruft and improve concise answers (brevity wins in expert exchanges), then perhaps it could morph into a great lifestyle business for the founders and the current team. there's tremendous open knowledge on the intertubes, and better search - namely semantic search - will obviate the need for quora within a matter of years. for now, the site is consistently more entertaining than mahalo, more fluid and open than aardvark and littered with great gossip, company history, arcane knowledge and other "premium blog" quality content...just don't make the mistake of thinking that any q&a site can really scale as credible without verification of expert input, a manual process that in and of itself constrains growth. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this site should be focused on questions around things people use or buy, from education to products and services, and that content should serve as a discussion platform for other sites, otherwise I'm typing this on the next mahalo or yahoo (because if the site goes very mainstream with a large user base, it will feel just like any other marginal quality ad-driven site, too much junk to read through in a society where people don't seem to read much).. footnote: the pay/charge points idea on this site is absolutely illogical and discourages quality participation while at the same time encouraging users to improperly value their own expertise. you can not turn expert knowledge into a game, by doing so you crack the foundation with scattered objectives - and this is the point at which "people who also know stuff" seep through those cracks and work their way up to the first floor lobby, where guests are increasingly turned off by their nature

I was at Aardvark in the early stages.  I can say that we made a very strong effort make sure every single new user had a great answer and we  valued great conversations.