Quora's format is questions and answers rather than a pure feed, which changes where the pull actually comes from. It's less about an endless scroll and more about a specific, personal trigger: someone answered a question you asked, upvoted an answer you wrote, or followed a topic you're active in. Each of those is addressed to you specifically, which makes it harder to treat as background noise than an anonymous algorithmic update.
What actually makes Quora hard to close
Notifications tied to your own activity — a new answer to your question, an upvote on something you wrote, a comment replying directly to you — carry a personal weight that a generic content notification doesn't, since ignoring them can feel like ignoring a person rather than a feed. Checking how your own answers are performing, in upvotes and views, adds a small reputation-tracking loop similar to checking a post's engagement on a social app, except framed as intellectual contribution rather than social display. A "Related Questions" sidebar on almost every page turns a single specific query into a branching rabbit hole of adjacent questions, each one plausible enough to be worth a click, with no natural point at which the branching stops.
The built-in iPhone route, and where it gives way
An iOS Screen Time App Limit on Quora behaves like it does on any app: a warning, a lock screen, one "Ignore Limit for Today" button that clears it in a tap, needing only a Screen Time passcode you set and know yourself. "Someone answered my question" is a specific, personal reason to override that most other apps on this list can't manufacture nearly as convincingly — it isn't manufactured urgency, it's an actual small social event, which makes the override harder to argue yourself out of.
The built-in Android route, and where it gives way
Digital Wellbeing's App Timer greys out Quora's icon at your limit and offers more time the moment you tap it, adjustable or removable from Settings whenever you like. Same gap as iPhone: the timer has nothing to say about a notification that's personally addressed to you, versus one that's just trying to look that way.
What changes when the toll is three questions
Mr. Grummel's toll costs the same few minutes of real thought whether the notification pulling you in is a genuine personal reply or just an algorithmic nudge dressed up to look like one — it doesn't try to tell the two apart, because in the moment, you usually can't either. What it changes is the gap between noticing the notification and acting on it: a few minutes of actual thinking before the app opens is enough to separate a reply worth a real response from a related-questions rabbit hole that was never really about the original notification at all.
A realistic day
Right now: a notification that someone answered your question pulls you in for what should be thirty seconds, and the related-questions sidebar turns it into twenty minutes across five topics you weren't thinking about when the notification arrived. With the toll in place: opening Quora runs into three questions first. A genuine reply to something you wrote still gets read and answered. What's interrupted is the sidebar-driven branching that turns one real notification into an unplanned wander, which now costs a few minutes of real thinking before the first tap, not after the fifth related question.