There is no way there are 500k active users on Quora.
There are probably <10k people actually contributing meaningfully to the site, and another 50k or so who are upvoting/etc. in a useful way. There are other users who come to Quora via SERP.
They screwed up communicating the impact of opt-in on this feature (by making it reciprocal to seeing the views of others), and didn't do a great job of explaining it after launch. Cautionary tale for other people rolling out features. Maybe rolling it out to a few hundred friendly to Quora users (i.e. not you, apparently) for feedback would have been smart.
Also, it's not like they killed your child or anything; I don't see why you care that much, or maybe you just like being offended about comparatively minor things. I'd be filled with furious anger if my previously-anon answers got un-anoned, but other than that, there's not much Quora could do to make me seriously angry. (un-Anoning users without court orders would bring out justified pitchforks and probably lawsuits, though)
I took my estimate from their non-logged-in frontpage which shows the number of followers per topic. It was <100K per topic, with the average, subjective guess, at around 50K per topic. I figured that not everyone would be a sub to each topic and then gave a generous guesstimate at users...
re: your last paragraph, their actions have shown me that they dont give a shit about any user sentiment (unless major backlash, like this issue) and thus, I simply don't trust them with any information/content I produce/consume.
So, I deleted my account because I am so tired of not only companies like Quora, but where this general direction is taking us.
Hell, the NSA is archiving and data-mining every online transaction of everyone online and I think the acquiesence of the populous, even though seemingly small, through the actions of companies like Quora is simply unnacceptable.
Quora and Facebook are tools against freedom, not for it. If you have no safety in your sharing of information, you have no freedom.
I was trying to distinguish between "people who create content", "people who upvote", and "people who passively read"; probably 1-10k, 10-50k, 50-500k respectively.
There are probably <10k people actually contributing meaningfully to the site, and another 50k or so who are upvoting/etc. in a useful way. There are other users who come to Quora via SERP.
They screwed up communicating the impact of opt-in on this feature (by making it reciprocal to seeing the views of others), and didn't do a great job of explaining it after launch. Cautionary tale for other people rolling out features. Maybe rolling it out to a few hundred friendly to Quora users (i.e. not you, apparently) for feedback would have been smart.
Also, it's not like they killed your child or anything; I don't see why you care that much, or maybe you just like being offended about comparatively minor things. I'd be filled with furious anger if my previously-anon answers got un-anoned, but other than that, there's not much Quora could do to make me seriously angry. (un-Anoning users without court orders would bring out justified pitchforks and probably lawsuits, though)