I don't know how you think this is actually possible. It sounds to me like you just logged in using oauth…
Edit: Hey, downvoters, it's not possible to just use Google's login mechanism without prompting an initial OAuth flow at some point in time. If it is, instead of proving me wrong here, tell Google how and you can make some good money out of it.
I did, once. But after that one entirely new sessions, they automatically "click" the sign in to google button behind the scenes and log me in with the token.
I will say I appreciate Facebook's approach to this - after 60-90 days, you have to affirmatively reconfirm your initial authorization when they send you through the OAuth flow.
The first time you logged in with Google, you were presented with a User Consent screen that said "this website wants access to this information, do you agree?" and you clicked yes.
To break the link, go into Google and see what sites, apps, etc you granted access to. That's a good thing to do regularly anyway with every social provider.
When a service typically uses an external identity provider, they usually still have local accounts that are created and linked to that form of authentication. Of course the user will always need to authenticate using that same external identity provider ,but it can be forced by the application server by initiating oauth without provocation in the backend.
What this seems like is after the user initially logged in and consented with Google, Quora went ahead and decided that they would initiate the oauth flow whenever the user visits the page regardless of whether the user explicitly hits the login button or not.
I agree with the view... But how do you get non HN people to stop using Quora? Ultimately it's that much larger audience that determines if it lives or dies.
All philosophical views aside, there are some really core issues that got me to stop using Quora and unfortunately the case to stop using it is made by the site itself:
* The content quality has deteriorated significantly since the site's inception. The content is far cheaper than before and far less interesting in very obvious ways.
* Moderation systems have not done a good job of growing the site as a community. The site has lost the character that drew many people to it in the first place.
* The machine learning models terribly over-fit to user signals, creating a frustrating experience.
These 3 core issues with the site are what got me to gradually stop using it as someone who was initially an early adopter.
I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchange is a mystery to me; I suspect that most Quora users simply aren't aware that Stack Exchange exists, since SE traditionally catered primarily to a technical audience.
Edit: One of my biggest gripes with the platform is that it's always solicited a large number of promotional answers. Anytime I end up on Quora, I'm usually stuck scrolling through a long list of "Use my product, it's the best!" answers. It appears to make no effort to discourage or remove such content, and, for whatever reason, those answers tend to get heavily upvoted.
SE is much more difficult to start using than Quora, which is also probably why it has higher quality content. Quora has absolutely no quality control.
That's definitely true, though I find that the less technical platforms are laxer. However, that level of quality control is exactly what keeps me coming back. If you ask a stupid question, SO is going point it out rather bluntly. Quora will give you a best-effort answer so someone can plug their latest product.
Ask a vague question on Quora, and you'll get a vague answer.
Ask a vague question on Stack Overflow, and you'll get downvoted along with comments to the order of, "You haven't provided enough information for us to give you an answer."
quora did SEO right. It has huge visibility, and thus, high quality answers get huge votes, even from people who aren't from that field of expertise. So perhaps post quality is lower than SE, but vote quality is magnitudes higher in my experience.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I've looked things up on Google and frequently see Quora answers at the very top.
I'd say at least half the time I click on the link, the top answer, it is either highly biased, anecdotal, just plain wrong, or a combination of those things. Many of the answers are also in broken English. Despite this, the answers get thousands of upvotes and it makes me question whether or not the Quora userbase is competent at identifying good content.
Over time, I've grown to not trust the first answer on Quora as I trust the top answer on SE. At that point, the Quora result becomes a waste of an entry on Google's front page.
As others have said in this thread, Quora seems to be suited towards personal questions and opinion-based questions, in which case, maybe Quora and SE are compliments to each other.
I asked someone who uses Quora. the same thing and they said quora is for reading opinions and experiences and Stack Exchange is for finding the facts.
The only time I ever found the posts on quora valuable was when I was thinking about applying for one of the big tech companies and I wanted to know a bit about what the people who have worked there think about it. That kind of stuff would be off topic on Stack Exchange but thats also the reason why Quora is mostly junk because of a lack of quality control.
SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question which is enforced in all communities except some (Interpersonal SE and "soft questions" come to mind). Even in those contexts, answers must be well cited and be credible in a certain way (e.g. in Interpersonal SE all answers must be grounded by personal experiences). This makes it a fundamentally different website than Quora. Quora is about expertise, opinion and anecdotes. SE is about facts and answers deemed credible enough by the community.
SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question
Probably had. The secret of SE’s success was the rigorous curation as encouraged via the gamification system, explicitly at the design of the site’s founders. Now there are various interpretations of their change in direction, but the quality has noticeably deteriorated for both questions and answers. There’s no sign of a credible rival right now but when one appears it will do to SE what SE did to ExpertsExchange overnight, and for the same reasons.
Personally I think this is a reason to sometimes use quora. The one right answer cult is a huge limitation of se, which frustratingly often closes good questions just for being subjective. This is not site policy but over zealous modding.
>I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchange is a mystery to me; I suspect that most Quora users simply aren't aware that Stack Exchange exists, since SE traditionally catered primarily to a technical audience.
SE has nowhere near the breadth of Quora, and almost no social, personal life, and politics related topics. At least any SE site I've chanced on, and I'm a member of several.
Q is better at "soft" knowledge - psychology, personal history, experience, opinion.
SE is better for "hard" knowledge - clearly-defined problems with specific solutions.
Having said that, I find SE very, very frustrating.
Given any problem, the answers invariably seem to include multiple takes with distracting or irrelevant side points; show-boating comments, often nit-picky, about very minor issues; just plain wrong answers that have been massively upvoted; no account of chronology - later answers always have fewer votes than older answers, even if they're better solutions; moderator show-boating with questions closed for no good reason (e.g. when dupes aren't really dupes.)
SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content.
I enjoy my Quora feed, but I treat it more as entertainment. I wouldn't use it for anything mission critical. I actually agree with Q and not the WB comments - comments about private experiences or opinions are the property of the authors, not communal property, and authors should have the right to withdraw them.
Also - FB isn't archived either. Do the WB people have the same negative attitude to FB groups?
As for SE - sometimes I try to use SE for mission critical problems. Usually I get a few hints from the answers, then end up having to solve the problem independently.
I'm sympathetic to some of your complaints about SE, but I think this is a mistake:
> SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content.
You can see the effect of this approach in many cases where the community has tried to establish a "canonical" Q&A about some recurring topic, and it's frequently not pretty; every tangentially relevant detail that somebody thought to tell the world about gets edited in, and then never gets edited out. Unless somebody is willing to purge lots of users' contributions entirely (which they generally aren't), this one great beast of an answer just continues to grow and grow in scope, gradually losing any sort of coherent narrative or direct relevance to the question.
The failed Stack Overflow Documentation project failed in a similar way. Wikipedia articles about programming topics also seem to me to generally be tedious, confusing and riddled with inaccuracies.
The competition-based model that SE uses certainly has failure modes, but a more collaboration-based model also has failure modes - ones that I think are more serious and crippling.
Agreed I have seen many SO answers in areas where I have expertise where wordy waffly feel good answers - that don't actually answer the question asked get preferred of short and to the point 3 or 4 line answers.
There is also to much vote whoreing going on with people chipping in with non relevant answers. I wish I had a pound for every employment answer that mentions "right to work" when its not an American employment question.
Yes my biggest pet peeve with Stack Overflow specifically is that instead of an answer to the question, you'll often see a lecture about how the poster is doing it wrong. Usually this is because the responder didn't actually read the question and is trying to get their internet points in before someone else answers it.
It's not a bad idea to outline a different approach, but it's almost always better to first answer the question and then add your opinion afterwards. I've even seen questions where they poster will state "I'm not doing it the accepted way because..." and still see useless responses saying "You should do it this conventional way instead" etc.
I think this is just a negative of having a points reward system that encourages answer sniping. However, without a points system you'd see far less content. I've accepted it as a necessary evil, and overall I'm pretty happy with the quality of SO content once you learn to filter out the nonsense.
The vibe on many of the technical branches of SE is one of exclusivity and pretentiousness. Just Friday I was stuck on using some old CLI tool that nobody uses any more, and my problem was two some obscure settings in the myriad options that you can set that had to be configured for this case just because. Somebody at SE came back to an ancient question on the site last year and updated it with the answer last year.
And I can't even thank him. Quora is much easier to assimilate into.
Quora still has some incredible gems and answers from people directly involved with the question. Unfortunately, as all content sites, their growth has led to a rapid decrease in quality, and their efforts to inflate questions has only made it worse.
If I open a question then I basically get nothing but that question (and similar questions) show up in my feed. For someone who has passing interest in random topics (so I click on a random question every so often) suddenly having nothing but repetitive WW2 tank questions in my feed is annoying. All those topics I was told to select, btw, mean nothing apparently and never show up in my feed nowadays.
I took the chance with their data breach and required password change recently to just stop using the site altogether.
The moment you engage with Topic X, you will be inundated with Topic X in the feed, in your email digest, in additional follow ups asking "Are you still interested in X" and so on.
It leaves little room for true exploration and discovery because 1 mis-click on a topic could change your entire content experience for days or weeks.
I’m actually surprised at how bad their ML model is. Funny to see someone else mention how overfit their model is. There’s literally no content discovery, it’s the same extremely specific topic. But you know what? I’ve also noticed this phenomenon on YouTube, maybe there’s something to it from an advertising revenue perspective.
Probably, for the majority of users, it's best to show content which aligns with their opinions and interests to increase engagement. It's similar to the Google "Filter Bubble".
Filter bubble is one thing. It's another thing to filter content so aggressively that over 50% of the site's content stays the same from one day to the next while still showing content you already upvoted.
That's the reason I stopped using it a few weeks ago - it got so bad I had to scroll down multiple pages of collapsed answers in order to find a single question/answer that I hadn't seen yet. Which is exactly the opposite of what should happen.
A coworker of mine was recently sharing an encounter with an engineer at Quora to me. The gist of it was that the Quora engineer was saying that they've built the best engineering team in the entire industry -- that they're the 'smartest guys in the room'.
Both my coworker and I were impressed by the gall of such a suggestion and then began to wonder how much self-deception and double-think must be occurring, culturally, within a company for its employees to be suggesting such a thing to others.
At least they didn't decide to create their own programming language in order to build their website, unlike another company founded by early Facebook employees (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2191800)
If you were an early employee at Facebook it takes significant self-awareness to realize that that success may not be directly linked to your formidable brain power. Especially if you that was your formative professional experience in your 20s.
Despite the fact that I use YouTube only for music videos and technical content and have never watched a Jordan Peterson video, YouTube recommends only Jordan Peterson videos to me.
Yes, they introduced that "feature" this year. Like the new "spaces" which seem to have replaced the interests/topics users can select but actually don't work as a replacement because they seem more like Facebook groups where you can post random stuff and questions related to a topic.
This combined with the horrible feed made me quit recently.
I joined in late 2010, shortly after the site launched because iirc you couldn't read answers without signing up. I think one time I clicked on a question like "what is 1 + 1"? And now my quota is full of nonsense.
I have also seen the content quality decline. Online community management and moderation policies seem like an important research area but I have found little that explores the dynamics of these communities and analysis of which policies work and which don't. Why, for instance, are the comments here on HN generally quite good but not so good on other technical sites? What kind of moderation would enable people with differing political views to discuss them without the usual flaming?
Very well put. I deleted my account about a year ago. I kept seeing a few good answers, old ones, over and over in my feed, juxtaposed with boring answers to questions that would have better gone unasked. And the questions in my areas of expertise had turned from thoughtful inquiries to pure garbage. If Quora think they're sitting on a goldmine by locking up their content, they're sadly mistaken.
I can tell you why the content quality deteriorated. The Partner Program... Encourages weird questions with primary purpose of gaining most viewers. I happen to be selected as one of these people (not too sure why), and I refuse to take part in that nonsense.
Same here. It’s likely a Facebook partnership since for me at least the email was one I used on fb only. Not sure how someone else would guess that email.
I used to be a power user on Quora. It's how I learned about the coding bootcamp that eventually became the catalyst for a huge career change in my life.
I'd spend countless hours answering questions about my experiences and the school I attended, with the intention of just helping give back to the community.
Over the years, Quora became an relentless flood of "ask to answer" questions that were already on the site, ones asking me to compare "X coding bootcamp vs Y coding bootcamp" (like, how would someone know if they only attended one?), or just ridiculous comments from entitled people who expected the world with their questions.
I eventually deleted all of my answers and deactivated my account. It's just no longer worth contributing to a site that's very obviously devolved to "Yahoo Answers, with influencer spam"
I wish you had phrased your answer better, but this is exactly what I thought of the OP's comment (and the vast majority of former power users' complaints, as someone that used to hang out there since the early days).
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Why can't you express your opinion on here anymore?
After all -- it's called "Hacker" News. I'm willing to bet the majority of people downvoting me somehow ended up here or in tech by the dollar signs rather than the "hacking" subculture.
I guarantee you that HN has lost a lot of good conversation due to the constant fear of the downvote brigade (you know -- the "Hive Mind" I mentioned in another one of my comments).
You can downvote me all day. I'll express my opinion when I feel like it.
I was a bootcamp instructor (hello HN -- I'm for hire as one! See my email in my profile). Since I'm in between jobs I can be frank (to potential schools wanting to hire me, I care about the right selection of students).
There are 3 types of people in bootcamps:
1. People who are too good. They should run away from bootcamps.
2. People who are the right fit.
3. People who aren't able to understand what if-based thinking is (if I am cold, then I will put on an extra layer of clothing). These people shouldn't do a bootcamp. All people in this group seem to have less education or less high quality education.
My tip: go to freecodecamp.org and do 2 weeks to 4 weeks of JS. If you notice that you're motivated enough to learn alone then continue and don't do a bootcamp. If you notice that you struggled (motivation-wise) then do a bootcamp.
Personally, I've considered deleting all mine because quite often years old posts will get flagged for spam or inappropriate material or some other rule despite it being the top voted (and often only) answer. I used to reply and send them their own rules back that they claim I violated and get 90%+ lifted, but after a couple old answers got flagged in the same week and it locked my account for x amount of time I stopped dealing with them. And often I'd have to appeal the same post over and over again anyway. It would get blocked, I'd get it reinstated, and then it would get blocked again so it was just frustrating.
I used to be top 7 in a specific niche but it wasn't worth dealing with their moderation appeals constantly. It's not quite as bad now that I am not in the top lists.
Well, in the tech world (especially online), they tend to provide low-quality service and bad codes. Quora is an free Indian-web-service-provider advertising platform. Nothing else. It is frustrating to see all off-shore "developers" coming up with a solution to your problems.
He absolutely 10000% correct, it is not racism. Quora is 98% Indian (or similar region country people) asking fake questions to "market" their crappy service.
It is incredibly obvious if you ever visit once. (Probably will be your first visit because you didn't notice it.)
It is indeed not racism. I was an editor at Quora in its early days as a way to make some easy side money. I'd say something on the order of 90% of the unedited content in the queue originates in India, and it's terrible. Loads and loads of repetitive, already-answered questions (a seemingly never-ending flood) about IIT or body shops and worried queries about which engineering school is the best or the most competitive, all badly written and horribly spelled. And that's before you even get to the scammy stuff!
On one hand I feel the same reaction you have to the parent, phrased this way it sounds like he/she is denigrating a whole nation.
On the other hand, there was something that happened here that we should probably talk about.
A few years ago some of the topics (especially human-relationship subjects) experienced a sudden surge of content from people from India. I know many smart and erudite Indians, and these new users... weren't. I don't know what happened. Maybe Quora suddenly became a fad with the pre-teens in India? Kids online are generally insufferable from all cultures.
The platform didn't digest this well. Quite a few topics that used to be interesting suddenly became filled with garbage. I stopped watching many. Now I seem to just get bombarded with WW2 trivia, which is ok I guess, but I kinda miss "the old Quora".
It's an awkward subject but the parent's comment can't just be discounted as racism.
If you're okay with pointing out that statistically Indians are much more likely to make stupid answers, what's wrong with saying statistically blacks are much more likely to commit crimes.
Maybe we should. Because assholes of all ages tend to be blamed on kids - thirty years old someone being toxic on the internet is assumed to be teenager even when his/her age is known.
The follow up question is: if we truly assume it is all kids being jerks, why do adults dont voice disapproval the way they would in real life, but rather sheepishly enable it? Role modeling and it takes a village and all that.
What happened in India was from mid-2016 usable internet access became super cheap. This suddenly added at least a hundred million new users to the Internet in a short span of time, people who were being exposed to totally new communities beyond their facebook friend circle. This is not about India, this happens whenever there is a clash between new users and old users and the number of new users is overwhelmingly larger than the old ones. This should have happened when China started getting internet, but I guess their government policies coupled with less number of English speakers than India prevented it. But this is not the last time this is happening. After the Indians settle down, I guess next will be Africa and we will start again.
I used to be an avid reader of alt.best-of-internet. When AOL put newsgroups online, alt.best-of-internet was at the top of the alphabetical list and suddenly got a deluge of nonsense. Please to AOL went unheard.
Someone got the brilliant idea to keep a thread bumped to the top whose title was:
OFFICIAL MESSAGE FROM AOL: WE WORSHIP SATAN
I don't know if this was cause/effect, but shortly afterwards alt.best-of-internet was hidden or moved to a less conspicuous location in the UI and the deluge stopped.
This bizarre racism where nobody states what's blatantly apparent because it can be misinterpreted as racist and people claim racism so as to seem not-racist seems quite off-logic.
Exactly. Essays on essays being written on irrelevant, hell even if you decide to skip and scroll past any answers that look like ebook you can't scroll enough to skip to the precise and meaningful answers.
90% of that "advice" could be copy pasted onto any "how do I learn something", and the remaining two sentences related to competitive programming are so vague that he links to the wikipedia page on "Algorithms" and the wikipedia page on "Programming Language"
And that gets you 460 upvotes, far above some of the better answers at the bottom of the thread.
It is relevant because the parent made a disparaging remark about Indians on Quora, while having a username with a borrowed word from India. I dislike the antipathy shown towards Indians online (and off), and I try to combat it where I can.
There are more civil and polite methods of expressing dissatisfaction than the kind of blanket statement that gurumeditations has resorted to above.
Tell me about it. I was probably among the few thousands of Indians using the website during 2012-2013. It helped me so much with learning programming, asking experts, reading about their experiences about working on large scale projects. I thought Quora was the go-to place for useful advices.
A year or so and a Quora popularity boom later, I had hundreds of followers, feeds with all kinds of life stories and experiences, and all stuff I deemed useless. I decided to delete my account.
The shitloads of crap that Indians have spewed on Quora is most probably the only thing I feel shameful about as an Indian.
There's a weird/fascinating subculture of "Indian Quora," a bit like the ruNet. Check out /r/indianpeoplequora, or just this question: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Indian-thug-life-like. It's a deep Indian circlejerk that's invisible to most of Quora.
As an Indian, I have to agree. My feed is filled with questions about salaries and IT jobs, even though I've never held an IT job or want one. The answers are insipid, the burden of proof is entirely anecdotal, and brevity is apparently not a thing.
Plus, the platform is now filled with spammers just promoting their own companies. Ask a question about how to manage a project better and you'll only get some spammer promoting his software instead of actually sharing tactics.
Reminds me about the Quora's "India Problem" in 2013. I am an Indian and I stopped going on Quora within a month of joining the service. Now, from the looks of it, it has actually worsened.
To be honest, most hits on Google with Quora results are spam. I don’t see any value, unless it’s tucked away in some industry specific topics that I’m not interested in.
One part of the article that I really disagree with is the part about the Wayback machine. As much as I believe it's important we retain the information we put on the internet, I fully support that if I put something on the internet and I am the creator of such content, I should be allowed to remove that content I created if I wish.
This is closely aligned with the GDPR's "Right to be forgotten", yes this is in relation to different information but I'm simply describing its intent. But eventually, this level of control should be given to all of us who share content on the internet. That we the curators of such content can ask of the provider to take reasonable steps to remove such content. And that if a provider wishes to restrict how widely dispersed its creators content travels then that's fine. Just because something has been posted online, doesn't mean it needs to travel far and wide.
Now yes, if I post something on the internet and I never touch it again I'm happy for it to hit the Wayback machine. However, I believe it to be important that if I did ever want that information I created to be removed, I'd have the ability to do so. Now if the Wayback machine does not allow this replication, then I understand why Quora do not allow them to use it.
If anything its a battle on both sides, a battle to provide control to the content creators around the content they create. And a battle with trying to archive everything that exists on the internet and making it publicly available regardless of the content creators current wishes.
Don't get me wrong, if you post something online expect it to be on the largest most accessible encyclopedia of information of all time. But times are changing, and we are starting to implement controls to protect our digital identity and the information we create online. My argument, is that if a content provider wishes to restrict how far and wide the information I curate on its service is spread, then there's nothing wrong with that. We should not be shaming content providers who wish to provide as much power to the curator as possible.
I agree. It also aligns with the 'right to one's own image' for example, which is important in jurisdictions like Germany and gains increasing relevance with the prevalence of facial recognition and finding oneself on social media without having given consent.
There is a real danger of the internet becoming a macabre and voyeuristic zoo where people lose control over their own data in the name of ever more transparency or public interest.
It has always been particularly interesting to me that this is an especially big issue in the US, where you would expect the opposite given how it handles these matters of privacy and non-interference in the analog world.
I completely agree. I’m the copyright holder of text I published on my own website years ago; the fact they hold on to my written copyrighted work without my permission, ignoring my explicit request to remove it from their internal database is infuriating.
You don't actually have the right to be forgotten, even within GDPR. That provision was heavily modified before GDPR passed, and the final phrasing doesn't really grant you the ability to erase all of your content from the internet. (If I recall correctly, the term "right to be forgotten" was also largely replaced with "right to erasure" in the actual text of the law, with the intent of indicating that you had the right to erase certain content stored in certain ways by certain services, but you couldn't truly be "forgotten.") Remember, a lot of this information isn't actually personal, so it's mostly not covered by GDPR anyway.
If you post something to the internet, it's permanent. Lawmakers can say all they want, but someone somewhere is storing it regardless of laws, and it can get out again at any time. From a security perspective, it's irresponsible to provide people with the illusion that they can erase their tracks; they'll believe they can truly eliminate all trace of what they said and prevent any future consequences when that's clearly not the case.
Of course, let's not get too wrapped up in the GDPR's actual text. It is "Right to erasure" but is still known and referenced as "Right to be forgotten" as well.
My intent was to put forth what it is describing, which is to allow the user to request the erasure of their information and subsequently that provider should then take reasonable steps to do so.
If that provider, chooses to keep content creators information more central to itself and not allow it to be as widely spread. Then that's more power to the curator and could be something that Quora wants to uphold.
On the same token, just because something has been posted on the internet doesn't mean that the provider of such content is obligated to spread it as far and wide as they want. They are allowed, to take efforts to restrict is movement.
GDPR is almost exclusively for personal content (as in: name, email address), whereas most of the content on Quora isn't personal. GDPR makes no effort to allow you erase that.
You can certainly take efforts to restrict its movement, as Quora has done here. It's mostly futile, though, especially in this case. Archive.org might not be willing to save it, but I guarantee plenty of comparable services are.
>I fully support that if I put something on the internet and I am the creator of such content, I should be allowed to remove that content I created if I wish.
I disagree. Whatever is put on the internet belongs to everyone on it, just because you made it doesn't mean you should have any kind of control over what people do with it. Enforcing redaction is obviously impossible but why would you even want to? You'll never get a guarantee that it's gone but also telling other people they cannot access information you originally created is kind of a jerk move.
The reality is that 99.99% of people will never care about their phony "right" to be forgotten and the 0.01% who do most likely do so because they posted something worth wanting to be forgotten, which will be picked up by interested parties and reposted ad infinum because that's what people do with that sort of thing (dox, embarrassing pictures, etc), while the information of the 99.99% who don't care will be lost when Quora inevitably stops existing and then nobody gets it.
>If anything its a battle on both sides, a battle to provide control to the content creators around the content they create.
They don't have any, and they shouldn't either - everything on the internet should be given freely as virtually everything is received freely as well. People should be allowed to retain or repost or modify anything for any purpose, and they pretty much do. Allowing "content creators" to control their work would mean any modification of it unacceptable to them (which encompasses a lot of territory) would be impossible to distribute, making remix cultures like YTP and others impossible. This is completely unreasonable, they should just learn to deal with other people using their work for things they never intended and move on.
That wording might be a tad harsh, but, essentially, yes, the "right to be forgotten" that most people seem to believe the GDPR provides is just an illusion. It only applies to very specific types of information gathered for specific purposes. It most certainly doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority of content posted to Quora.
That being said, there are other laws that could be at play here, such as intellectual property laws, but I'm assuming Quora either has you turn over ownership of anything you post or has you grant them an exclusive right to distribute it as they please. And if they were to decide to allow archive.org to archive it, you probably wouldn't have any right to request removal.
If you choose to disseminate information on the internet, there's no going back. You're broadcasting whatever you post with the world's largest megaphone. It's foolish to think you can reverse that process. If a government passes a law banning a book, people who've read that book still know what it said--and chances are there are still copies of the book floating around.
If you write something on the internet that you regret, that is your burden to bear for the rest of eternity. You chose to broadcast it with full knowledge of the fact that you would lose any semblance of control over the content the moment you hit Submit. It might not be ideal or fair, but that's the way it is, and laws aren't going to change it. Next time you're about to send a nasty email, think back to this comment, because what you're about to do is irreversible.
I think in the vast majority of cases people don't actually care about deleting their content, they care mostly about disassociating something from their identity. Maybe they asked something dumb or controversial years ago and they don't want it to show up with their name on it.
I think maybe there should be more of a trend of websites not showing usernames next to posts and just an identifier like "Purple" that changes when you post on a different thread/post so you can still follow the flow of a thread but not be able to link it to unrelated posts from that person.
I cant say that knowing the usernames of posters has ever helped me on stack overflow. Mods would still be able to see it but regular users and scrapers can not.
I used to enjoy browsing Quora about 4 years ago. Then It started showing up in Google search results for any obscure thing I would search. Most of the time I view a question, there is some type of product placement in the answers. It's not of high value to me anymore. Stack Exchange is much, much better, and even reddit.
How do these guys honestly have a real business? I know the founder was Zuck's friend.
The Chinese copy of it "Zhihu(Did you know?)" has become a distribution center of misinformation and misconception, a haven for
"folk-science", all driven by financial gains, why would "clever ones" waste time on the internet if they can't make a buck out of it afterall, and if it's not a pragmatism populist hangout, how can they make their most valuable eyeballs keep coming back.
But the sin of it is it makes you think your are "clever" too, and both the website and the answerers are willingly fabricating, promoting and propagating deleterious garbage.
Sad but true, but it will never happen. Quora is traffic hungry and get millions of visits (if not all) from India region. It is literally cancer at this point.
I used to lurk on quora. Once I read an answer to anonymous question, my feed started to full of those anonymous questions. I tried hard to curate my feed, by closing the questions I didn't want to see. But I got the same kinds of things still, albeit with different questions. Agree I saw some of those questions, but it seemed as if I could no longer curate the feed with what I wanted and the algorithm especially popular on quora feed couldn't be avoided. So I started logging out and viewing answers of users I am interested in the answers of by directly going to their profile. But quora started pestering me to login if I viewed more than two questions, so I gave up and stopped using the site. It is a shame as there are some good writers whose content is only available on Quora as far as I know but now I cannot read it without reading all the crap answers in my feed.
Does the root cause of all these problems with quora come down to being vc funded and needing high revenue numbers and growth rates? Imagine quora was a site driven by the community...
It's a conundrum, only a vc funded site can reach such scale, have great growth etc but when the time for monetization comes, everything starts going downhill. A site driven by a foundation for example, rarely ever gets to any sort of scale. How can this problem be solved?
I do get a sense that they put more effort into marketing and growth than actually fostering a solid knowledge base. However, an interesting point was raised in another comment: comparable sites that focus on quality often come across as unwelcoming because they have strict guidelines. I'm not sure it can be entirely blamed on the fact that they're VC-funded--to some extent, it seems they're more interested in being newbie-friendly than producing quality content.
TBH, I'm actually quite impressed that Reddit has lasted as long as it has and is still as vibrant as it is. Yes, of course there are tons of cesspool and misogynistic/racist/tribal areas, but I've found that I still like and frequent my niche smaller subreddits, my city subreddit (tons of trolls there but they are always downvoted and good content bubbles up) and the larger "eye candy" subreddits like r/aww.
My guess is that Reddit explicitly did not try to put VCs number 1 in their priorities, unlike, say, Digg.
Reddit was ruined with the redesign. Its buggy and slow. I get stuck on a loading screen on mobile for about 20 seconds before the page loads and half the time just shows an error. The desktop version also keeps logging me out randomly and forgetting I opted out of the redesign.
I still use i.reddit.com on mobile. Pretty fast, pretty good UX, and functionality wise has most of the non-power user features one needs. No ads either. I’ve tried to switch over the years to various apps as they’ve come up but in the end have always preferred the minimalist text with small thumbnails that runs quick on any browser.
their current success is momentum from before they took VC money and because they're smart enough not to attempt a profit before their IPO. which would entail terrible things like mandated ads in their API or shutting down their API entirely.
its only a matter of time before they have to pay back the hundreds of mil in the hole and shovel ads in every nook and cranny. theyre delaying it so they have enough userbase for the IPO
Recently Reddit began to insert a huge "you want to see this too" block into the comments section (at least for unauthenticated users). What an awful solution. People don't want to see our links in the sidebar so let's put them directly into content.
They think that I am a monkey that came from Google search and is going to click links that they show to me.
> Contrast that with Q&A competitors Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, which offers an API, a wealth of user-made tools and support community for it, a powerful Data Explorer for querying and exporting data, a liberal crawling policy, and doesn’t attempt to hide questions and answers behind authentication. They even proactively upload anonymized data dumps of all user-contributed content to the Internet Archive for posterity under a Creative Commons license.
I was unaware that Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange did this. I'm very happy that I deleted my Quora account a couple months ago and that I've been contributing more to the SE sites lately.
What? Don't use Quora because it's Quora, not because of lack of APIs. Anyone can answer any question about anything. Like Reddit, Imgur, Wikipedia, this crowd sourcing of information leads to constant liquid garbage. People like to teach what they don't know and speak about nothing just to speak.
Anyone can answer, but I’ve found the Quora system to be pretty good at surfacing who knows about a given topic because of credentials attached to names.
Quora used to be good before 2012-13(?), what with its credit system and all. You had a fixed pool of points to ask questions. Potential people who wanted people to ask them questions could arbitrarily set their points, and these points were deducted from questioner's pool, and added to the answerer's pool.
When this was removed, it was the beginning of the end. Clickbait, self-promotion, rabid people-centric cults, unrelated answers (no person X, you should not answer with a sob story for 'what's the weather like in Seattle these days?'), no question details allowed, answers catering to the lowest denominator, crappy feeds, and (imo) the worst - fabricating actual relationships, sob stories, and credentials (IIT/MIT/etc.) to garner more views and become a top writer (w/e that's worth).
And the rabid and toxic community is nauseous, to say the least. No enforcement of community standards means that every non-mainstream opinion (or even an opinion that goes against the Quora mainstream) is lambasted as if you had insulted the commenter's family.
Although HN's moderation policy may seem caged to some, it is the reason for the quality of the community's discussions. Quora is a textbook example of what happens when users are given freedom to do whatever they want to. It is the reason why I deleted my Quora account happily (even though I had 1M+ views on my answers, and I liked answering the most mundane of questions) - the site is not worth the time you devote to it.
I really don't see why not choosing to archive their data for privacy reasons is that big of a deal. I personally find it much better than having everything stay forever. I've always found the notion that everything must be shared with the whole world quite strange.
208 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadAlso makes it extremely hard to log out.
Not to mention they have no respect for users.
Edit: Hey, downvoters, it's not possible to just use Google's login mechanism without prompting an initial OAuth flow at some point in time. If it is, instead of proving me wrong here, tell Google how and you can make some good money out of it.
As was said below, if you want, you can revoke tokens here: https://myaccount.google.com/permissions
Very creepy
To break the link, go into Google and see what sites, apps, etc you granted access to. That's a good thing to do regularly anyway with every social provider.
I wrote about the implications of poorly implemented and abusive social authentication practices last month: https://www.scmagazine.com/home/security-news/using-social-a...
What this seems like is after the user initially logged in and consented with Google, Quora went ahead and decided that they would initiate the oauth flow whenever the user visits the page regardless of whether the user explicitly hits the login button or not.
* The content quality has deteriorated significantly since the site's inception. The content is far cheaper than before and far less interesting in very obvious ways.
* Moderation systems have not done a good job of growing the site as a community. The site has lost the character that drew many people to it in the first place.
* The machine learning models terribly over-fit to user signals, creating a frustrating experience.
These 3 core issues with the site are what got me to gradually stop using it as someone who was initially an early adopter.
Edit: One of my biggest gripes with the platform is that it's always solicited a large number of promotional answers. Anytime I end up on Quora, I'm usually stuck scrolling through a long list of "Use my product, it's the best!" answers. It appears to make no effort to discourage or remove such content, and, for whatever reason, those answers tend to get heavily upvoted.
Ask a vague question on Quora, and you'll get a vague answer.
Ask a vague question on Stack Overflow, and you'll get downvoted along with comments to the order of, "You haven't provided enough information for us to give you an answer."
I'd say at least half the time I click on the link, the top answer, it is either highly biased, anecdotal, just plain wrong, or a combination of those things. Many of the answers are also in broken English. Despite this, the answers get thousands of upvotes and it makes me question whether or not the Quora userbase is competent at identifying good content.
Over time, I've grown to not trust the first answer on Quora as I trust the top answer on SE. At that point, the Quora result becomes a waste of an entry on Google's front page.
As others have said in this thread, Quora seems to be suited towards personal questions and opinion-based questions, in which case, maybe Quora and SE are compliments to each other.
The only time I ever found the posts on quora valuable was when I was thinking about applying for one of the big tech companies and I wanted to know a bit about what the people who have worked there think about it. That kind of stuff would be off topic on Stack Exchange but thats also the reason why Quora is mostly junk because of a lack of quality control.
Probably had. The secret of SE’s success was the rigorous curation as encouraged via the gamification system, explicitly at the design of the site’s founders. Now there are various interpretations of their change in direction, but the quality has noticeably deteriorated for both questions and answers. There’s no sign of a credible rival right now but when one appears it will do to SE what SE did to ExpertsExchange overnight, and for the same reasons.
"We never claimed that subjective questions were horrible abominations that should never be asked." https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-su...
SE has nowhere near the breadth of Quora, and almost no social, personal life, and politics related topics. At least any SE site I've chanced on, and I'm a member of several.
Q is better at "soft" knowledge - psychology, personal history, experience, opinion.
SE is better for "hard" knowledge - clearly-defined problems with specific solutions.
Having said that, I find SE very, very frustrating.
Given any problem, the answers invariably seem to include multiple takes with distracting or irrelevant side points; show-boating comments, often nit-picky, about very minor issues; just plain wrong answers that have been massively upvoted; no account of chronology - later answers always have fewer votes than older answers, even if they're better solutions; moderator show-boating with questions closed for no good reason (e.g. when dupes aren't really dupes.)
SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content.
I enjoy my Quora feed, but I treat it more as entertainment. I wouldn't use it for anything mission critical. I actually agree with Q and not the WB comments - comments about private experiences or opinions are the property of the authors, not communal property, and authors should have the right to withdraw them.
Also - FB isn't archived either. Do the WB people have the same negative attitude to FB groups?
As for SE - sometimes I try to use SE for mission critical problems. Usually I get a few hints from the answers, then end up having to solve the problem independently.
> SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content.
You can see the effect of this approach in many cases where the community has tried to establish a "canonical" Q&A about some recurring topic, and it's frequently not pretty; every tangentially relevant detail that somebody thought to tell the world about gets edited in, and then never gets edited out. Unless somebody is willing to purge lots of users' contributions entirely (which they generally aren't), this one great beast of an answer just continues to grow and grow in scope, gradually losing any sort of coherent narrative or direct relevance to the question.
The failed Stack Overflow Documentation project failed in a similar way. Wikipedia articles about programming topics also seem to me to generally be tedious, confusing and riddled with inaccuracies.
The competition-based model that SE uses certainly has failure modes, but a more collaboration-based model also has failure modes - ones that I think are more serious and crippling.
There is also to much vote whoreing going on with people chipping in with non relevant answers. I wish I had a pound for every employment answer that mentions "right to work" when its not an American employment question.
It's not a bad idea to outline a different approach, but it's almost always better to first answer the question and then add your opinion afterwards. I've even seen questions where they poster will state "I'm not doing it the accepted way because..." and still see useless responses saying "You should do it this conventional way instead" etc.
I think this is just a negative of having a points reward system that encourages answer sniping. However, without a points system you'd see far less content. I've accepted it as a necessary evil, and overall I'm pretty happy with the quality of SO content once you learn to filter out the nonsense.
And I can't even thank him. Quora is much easier to assimilate into.
I just find it funny that you can say this about literally any site with any content whatsoever.
Heck, even Mad made this joke about itself... in its second issue.
I took the chance with their data breach and required password change recently to just stop using the site altogether.
It leaves little room for true exploration and discovery because 1 mis-click on a topic could change your entire content experience for days or weeks.
That's the reason I stopped using it a few weeks ago - it got so bad I had to scroll down multiple pages of collapsed answers in order to find a single question/answer that I hadn't seen yet. Which is exactly the opposite of what should happen.
Both my coworker and I were impressed by the gall of such a suggestion and then began to wonder how much self-deception and double-think must be occurring, culturally, within a company for its employees to be suggesting such a thing to others.
This combined with the horrible feed made me quit recently.
I'd spend countless hours answering questions about my experiences and the school I attended, with the intention of just helping give back to the community.
Over the years, Quora became an relentless flood of "ask to answer" questions that were already on the site, ones asking me to compare "X coding bootcamp vs Y coding bootcamp" (like, how would someone know if they only attended one?), or just ridiculous comments from entitled people who expected the world with their questions.
I eventually deleted all of my answers and deactivated my account. It's just no longer worth contributing to a site that's very obviously devolved to "Yahoo Answers, with influencer spam"
EDIT: (as you can tell by the amount of downvotes both of my comments have already received). Hive-mind in effect.
HINT: I've been here for 10 years.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
After all -- it's called "Hacker" News. I'm willing to bet the majority of people downvoting me somehow ended up here or in tech by the dollar signs rather than the "hacking" subculture.
I guarantee you that HN has lost a lot of good conversation due to the constant fear of the downvote brigade (you know -- the "Hive Mind" I mentioned in another one of my comments).
You can downvote me all day. I'll express my opinion when I feel like it.
You're welcome to do that in a way that is constructive. What you are not welcome to do is be rude when doing so, like you are here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are 3 types of people in bootcamps:
1. People who are too good. They should run away from bootcamps.
2. People who are the right fit.
3. People who aren't able to understand what if-based thinking is (if I am cold, then I will put on an extra layer of clothing). These people shouldn't do a bootcamp. All people in this group seem to have less education or less high quality education.
My tip: go to freecodecamp.org and do 2 weeks to 4 weeks of JS. If you notice that you're motivated enough to learn alone then continue and don't do a bootcamp. If you notice that you struggled (motivation-wise) then do a bootcamp.
I used to be top 7 in a specific niche but it wasn't worth dealing with their moderation appeals constantly. It's not quite as bad now that I am not in the top lists.
It is incredibly obvious if you ever visit once. (Probably will be your first visit because you didn't notice it.)
People post questions about themselves and then proceed to answer those questions to build an online presence.
I think you missed the memo, racism is now just the act of identifying race as existing.
On the other hand, there was something that happened here that we should probably talk about.
A few years ago some of the topics (especially human-relationship subjects) experienced a sudden surge of content from people from India. I know many smart and erudite Indians, and these new users... weren't. I don't know what happened. Maybe Quora suddenly became a fad with the pre-teens in India? Kids online are generally insufferable from all cultures.
The platform didn't digest this well. Quite a few topics that used to be interesting suddenly became filled with garbage. I stopped watching many. Now I seem to just get bombarded with WW2 trivia, which is ok I guess, but I kinda miss "the old Quora".
It's an awkward subject but the parent's comment can't just be discounted as racism.
Choose both or none.
You're right though in that from a law enforcement POV the two look roughly the same.
Are Indians not voting Democrat?
Hey man thats ageist! I know X kids that are probably smarter than the average adult!
Maybe we should have a conversation on ageism now.
The follow up question is: if we truly assume it is all kids being jerks, why do adults dont voice disapproval the way they would in real life, but rather sheepishly enable it? Role modeling and it takes a village and all that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
What happened in India was from mid-2016 usable internet access became super cheap. This suddenly added at least a hundred million new users to the Internet in a short span of time, people who were being exposed to totally new communities beyond their facebook friend circle. This is not about India, this happens whenever there is a clash between new users and old users and the number of new users is overwhelmingly larger than the old ones. This should have happened when China started getting internet, but I guess their government policies coupled with less number of English speakers than India prevented it. But this is not the last time this is happening. After the Indians settle down, I guess next will be Africa and we will start again.
I used to be an avid reader of alt.best-of-internet. When AOL put newsgroups online, alt.best-of-internet was at the top of the alphabetical list and suddenly got a deluge of nonsense. Please to AOL went unheard.
Someone got the brilliant idea to keep a thread bumped to the top whose title was:
OFFICIAL MESSAGE FROM AOL: WE WORSHIP SATAN
I don't know if this was cause/effect, but shortly afterwards alt.best-of-internet was hidden or moved to a less conspicuous location in the UI and the deluge stopped.
90% of that "advice" could be copy pasted onto any "how do I learn something", and the remaining two sentences related to competitive programming are so vague that he links to the wikipedia page on "Algorithms" and the wikipedia page on "Programming Language"
And that gets you 460 upvotes, far above some of the better answers at the bottom of the thread.
There are more civil and polite methods of expressing dissatisfaction than the kind of blanket statement that gurumeditations has resorted to above.
Plus, the platform is now filled with spammers just promoting their own companies. Ask a question about how to manage a project better and you'll only get some spammer promoting his software instead of actually sharing tactics.
This is closely aligned with the GDPR's "Right to be forgotten", yes this is in relation to different information but I'm simply describing its intent. But eventually, this level of control should be given to all of us who share content on the internet. That we the curators of such content can ask of the provider to take reasonable steps to remove such content. And that if a provider wishes to restrict how widely dispersed its creators content travels then that's fine. Just because something has been posted online, doesn't mean it needs to travel far and wide.
Now yes, if I post something on the internet and I never touch it again I'm happy for it to hit the Wayback machine. However, I believe it to be important that if I did ever want that information I created to be removed, I'd have the ability to do so. Now if the Wayback machine does not allow this replication, then I understand why Quora do not allow them to use it.
If anything its a battle on both sides, a battle to provide control to the content creators around the content they create. And a battle with trying to archive everything that exists on the internet and making it publicly available regardless of the content creators current wishes.
Don't get me wrong, if you post something online expect it to be on the largest most accessible encyclopedia of information of all time. But times are changing, and we are starting to implement controls to protect our digital identity and the information we create online. My argument, is that if a content provider wishes to restrict how far and wide the information I curate on its service is spread, then there's nothing wrong with that. We should not be shaming content providers who wish to provide as much power to the curator as possible.
There is a real danger of the internet becoming a macabre and voyeuristic zoo where people lose control over their own data in the name of ever more transparency or public interest.
It has always been particularly interesting to me that this is an especially big issue in the US, where you would expect the opposite given how it handles these matters of privacy and non-interference in the analog world.
If you post something to the internet, it's permanent. Lawmakers can say all they want, but someone somewhere is storing it regardless of laws, and it can get out again at any time. From a security perspective, it's irresponsible to provide people with the illusion that they can erase their tracks; they'll believe they can truly eliminate all trace of what they said and prevent any future consequences when that's clearly not the case.
My intent was to put forth what it is describing, which is to allow the user to request the erasure of their information and subsequently that provider should then take reasonable steps to do so.
If that provider, chooses to keep content creators information more central to itself and not allow it to be as widely spread. Then that's more power to the curator and could be something that Quora wants to uphold.
On the same token, just because something has been posted on the internet doesn't mean that the provider of such content is obligated to spread it as far and wide as they want. They are allowed, to take efforts to restrict is movement.
You can certainly take efforts to restrict its movement, as Quora has done here. It's mostly futile, though, especially in this case. Archive.org might not be willing to save it, but I guarantee plenty of comparable services are.
I'm simply taking one of the GDPR principles and applying to them a wider variety of information outside of just PII.
I disagree. Whatever is put on the internet belongs to everyone on it, just because you made it doesn't mean you should have any kind of control over what people do with it. Enforcing redaction is obviously impossible but why would you even want to? You'll never get a guarantee that it's gone but also telling other people they cannot access information you originally created is kind of a jerk move.
The reality is that 99.99% of people will never care about their phony "right" to be forgotten and the 0.01% who do most likely do so because they posted something worth wanting to be forgotten, which will be picked up by interested parties and reposted ad infinum because that's what people do with that sort of thing (dox, embarrassing pictures, etc), while the information of the 99.99% who don't care will be lost when Quora inevitably stops existing and then nobody gets it.
>If anything its a battle on both sides, a battle to provide control to the content creators around the content they create.
They don't have any, and they shouldn't either - everything on the internet should be given freely as virtually everything is received freely as well. People should be allowed to retain or repost or modify anything for any purpose, and they pretty much do. Allowing "content creators" to control their work would mean any modification of it unacceptable to them (which encompasses a lot of territory) would be impossible to distribute, making remix cultures like YTP and others impossible. This is completely unreasonable, they should just learn to deal with other people using their work for things they never intended and move on.
That wording might be a tad harsh, but, essentially, yes, the "right to be forgotten" that most people seem to believe the GDPR provides is just an illusion. It only applies to very specific types of information gathered for specific purposes. It most certainly doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority of content posted to Quora.
That being said, there are other laws that could be at play here, such as intellectual property laws, but I'm assuming Quora either has you turn over ownership of anything you post or has you grant them an exclusive right to distribute it as they please. And if they were to decide to allow archive.org to archive it, you probably wouldn't have any right to request removal.
If you choose to disseminate information on the internet, there's no going back. You're broadcasting whatever you post with the world's largest megaphone. It's foolish to think you can reverse that process. If a government passes a law banning a book, people who've read that book still know what it said--and chances are there are still copies of the book floating around.
If you write something on the internet that you regret, that is your burden to bear for the rest of eternity. You chose to broadcast it with full knowledge of the fact that you would lose any semblance of control over the content the moment you hit Submit. It might not be ideal or fair, but that's the way it is, and laws aren't going to change it. Next time you're about to send a nasty email, think back to this comment, because what you're about to do is irreversible.
Edit: Grammar
I think maybe there should be more of a trend of websites not showing usernames next to posts and just an identifier like "Purple" that changes when you post on a different thread/post so you can still follow the flow of a thread but not be able to link it to unrelated posts from that person.
I cant say that knowing the usernames of posters has ever helped me on stack overflow. Mods would still be able to see it but regular users and scrapers can not.
It's basically turned into yahoo answers but instead of the top answer being vapid, it's vapid and an ad for some service.
How do these guys honestly have a real business? I know the founder was Zuck's friend.
But the sin of it is it makes you think your are "clever" too, and both the website and the answerers are willingly fabricating, promoting and propagating deleterious garbage.
It's a conundrum, only a vc funded site can reach such scale, have great growth etc but when the time for monetization comes, everything starts going downhill. A site driven by a foundation for example, rarely ever gets to any sort of scale. How can this problem be solved?
My guess is that Reddit explicitly did not try to put VCs number 1 in their priorities, unlike, say, Digg.
its only a matter of time before they have to pay back the hundreds of mil in the hole and shovel ads in every nook and cranny. theyre delaying it so they have enough userbase for the IPO
They think that I am a monkey that came from Google search and is going to click links that they show to me.
You'd get 40 answers spamming their website, 20 life stories of completely uneventful event, and then answer 9 repeatedly posted like 11 times.
https://www.quora.com/If-14x-14-14-what-is-x
Data goes in - it doesn't come out. Can't explain it!
They're walled gardens.
What's frustrating is that users don't care. They simply do not care.
Their data leaks, it's sold to the Russians, and they keep coming back.
Export data? Yes, it's very easy to import data!
I was unaware that Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange did this. I'm very happy that I deleted my Quora account a couple months ago and that I've been contributing more to the SE sites lately.
When this was removed, it was the beginning of the end. Clickbait, self-promotion, rabid people-centric cults, unrelated answers (no person X, you should not answer with a sob story for 'what's the weather like in Seattle these days?'), no question details allowed, answers catering to the lowest denominator, crappy feeds, and (imo) the worst - fabricating actual relationships, sob stories, and credentials (IIT/MIT/etc.) to garner more views and become a top writer (w/e that's worth).
And the rabid and toxic community is nauseous, to say the least. No enforcement of community standards means that every non-mainstream opinion (or even an opinion that goes against the Quora mainstream) is lambasted as if you had insulted the commenter's family.
Although HN's moderation policy may seem caged to some, it is the reason for the quality of the community's discussions. Quora is a textbook example of what happens when users are given freedom to do whatever they want to. It is the reason why I deleted my Quora account happily (even though I had 1M+ views on my answers, and I liked answering the most mundane of questions) - the site is not worth the time you devote to it.