I am very skeptical of the very notion of community manager. Whenever I hear people talking about it, it almost always sounds like a non-job description made up by self-styled social-media "experts" to give themselves something to do.

For the more commodity-platform communities that often get set up by corporations and other organizations for various purposes, these "experts" will often say things like "you MUST have a community manager." What they mean is, "you MUST give me a job."

The concept of managing a community as a process, divorced from a sense of what a community is actually about, is basically bureaucracy. It is staff middle management as opposed to line management. Most of us who do stuff on the Web are here to get away from that kind of useless middle management overhead in other, more annoying parts of our lives.

An "admin" is a much more natural and uncontroversial concept, like an IT sysadmin, so I like that Quora has that. There ARE specialized processes that require attention in this kind of technically complex platform, so roles to deal with those are justifiable. And this role can (and should) be dictatorial to an extent.