Why else would the same question get asked over and over and over again? I don't know how many times I've seen some apparent novice asking what programming language he should start with. A real person would just read one of the many existing answers.
There's a couple of questions on Hackernews that repeat a lot. I'd say human nature, not bots. Some questions have a slight twist or personal background, sometimes a year is added in hope to get recent answers. Same on AskReddit. It's up to the platform (or moderators) to enforce anything.
"Ask HN: How to find mentors?" "Ask HN: How to find a mentor/advisor?" "Ask HN: Where to find a mentor in my city (or any)?" "Ask HN: How to find a mentor?" "Ask HN: How Can I Find a Mentor?" "Ask HN: Where do you find mentors online?" "Ask HN: Where can one find a mentor?" "Ask HN: How do you find a mentor at a new job or a new place?" "Ask HN: Best way to find a mentor" "Ask HN: How did you find your mentor?"...
or which books people can recommend, how to people writes notes, how does your company do knowledge management, how do I learn web development, how does a backend developer switch to frontend...
The other day I was about to answer a question about the city of Krakow (where I live). Then I opened the list of hidden answers and saw a guy warning others not to waste their time, since the OP has asked the same question about every other Polish city. Sure enough, a search revealed exactly that. The question actually employed the name "Kraków", which is the Polish spelling.
I'd say no based on the fact that you see most user-driven forums experience this problem. I can't remember how many times I've seen a pinned post or set of rules to exclaiming "use the search function before posting". Even StackOverflow has many duplicate questions despite possibly having some of the best built-in workflow to prevent that from occurring.
It's different at SO. Generally a poster would follow up on their question. At Quora, posters would ask questions and not say a peek after. Lots of copy-and-pasted answers as well.
The chances are high... Quora raise $226 million dollars for what would theoretically be a pretty normal CRUD app in most people's minds. So what is that investment being used on? I'm guessing the bots concept has some merit... but its probably larger than that.
"Ask HN: How to find mentors?" "Ask HN: How to find a mentor/advisor?" "Ask HN: Where to find a mentor in my city (or any)?" "Ask HN: How to find a mentor?" "Ask HN: How Can I Find a Mentor?" "Ask HN: Where do you find mentors online?" "Ask HN: Where can one find a mentor?" "Ask HN: How do you find a mentor at a new job or a new place?" "Ask HN: Best way to find a mentor" "Ask HN: How did you find your mentor?"...
or which books people can recommend, how to people writes notes, how does your company do knowledge management, how do I learn web development, how does a backend developer switch to frontend...