I registered with Quora using my legal name as documented on credit cards, my library card, my utilities bills and my drivers license. My account was blocked, and I was asked to register with my "proper" name. So far my replies have been ignored.
I registered with a completely fake name, though it sounds like a real name rather than a handle.
I have to wonder about a mother who names her kid "Quora" anyway, and I would like to point out that Quora isn't giving us her last name, yet she demands that we give her ours?
I learned my lesson with facebook, which promised privacy and then years later made the data public. That is the last site that got my real name. I've changed my name on facebook several times to completely obviously fake names, and while they claim that you have to use your real name and they claim to review them, no repercussions. I'm only keeping the account while I go back, and delete old status updates a few months at a time anyway.
And really, no website actually needs it. Trying to fight it is silly, as there is no mechanism whereby you can authenticate identity online. Faxing a passport doesn't even work, unless the business is tied into the government network, and if it is, then other businesses are as well and fake passports become easier.
> I registered with a completely fake name, though it sounds like a real name rather than a handle.
This is why their real name policy is flawed. A real name that sounds fake gets flagged as fake. A fake name that sounds real does not get flagged. The process is completely subjective as to what sounds real. Requiring ID is one way to prove/disprove it, but checking scanned IDs does not scale well.
> Trying to fight it is silly, as there is no mechanism whereby you can authenticate identity online.
Handling fake names or other identifiers is like handling software piracy. You can't prevent it and technology can't prevent it. The pathological cases will do their thing anyway. The best you can do is make it sufficiently inconvenient that the bulk of users will simply go the legit route and the bulk of clowns will go away. Incurring some false positives is a cost, which Quora has chosen to bear.
This is what government itself does for issuing its own IDs. They just have the power for "sufficiently inconvenient" to include criminal charges.
> Incurring some false positives is a cost, which Quora
> has chosen to bear.
The issue here is that you cannot claim to be an 'international' company just because anyone can sign up. If you discriminate against people whose names are 'weird' just because they don't conform to your cultural norms, then all you're doing is exposing your ignorance to the international community that you're hoping to embrace. Stating that Quora is 'open to entire world, so long as they conform to American cultural ideals' is just confirming that stereotype of the American business man that shows up in a foreign country to do business, expects everything to work like it does in America and views all local culture/customs to be 'inferior' because things work so much better in America.
On top of that Quora doesn't seem to even have a consistent policy, or so it appears from their communications. The first 'your name appears to be fake' communication implies that the user just needs to say, "Yup, that's my real name," and all will be well. The further communications relay the message that once you've been determined to be 'fake' you need to provide a government id.
> If you discriminate against people whose names are 'weird'
I'm curious why this issue triggers a knee-jerk response of "that's discrimination".
Seems to me that Quora may just perceive that it's not a worthwhile use of customer-service time and resources to deal with edge cases in output from their name approval algorithm. "Fax in your ID" allows a remedy with a standardized procedure and minimal resources spent on their part.
Keep in mind what a small population this really is. You need the intersection of three sets: "rejected name", "bona fide applicant not a scammer/clown", and "unable or unwilling to access a scanner like by getting oneself to a Kinko's". It's quite plausible that this set of corner cases is sufficiently small as to simply not be worth Quora's time to handle. Quora is not a government with an obligation to serve everybody. Of course it sucks for those who happen to fall into that set, but the overall perspective is that those are small points in a large sea of data.
Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice. This includes incompetence by willful neglect in favor of other priorities.
Right, what's commonly meant when people say 'discrimination' is that someone is making choices between people on criteria that shouldn't matter, such as skin colour, sexual orientation, gender or ... name.
It's not intentional discrimination, but it has a discriminatory - harassing Arab and Indian customers more often.
Whatever the case, it makes them come across as jackasses.
It's not like "real sounding names" is going to prevent trolls. Trolls have the time and patience to pick a credible-sounding fake name. People who want to use the site for it's proper purpose will just feel insulted.
If they want real names, they could do it just by creating social pressure to provide a real name, and doing the Facebook trick of using user-submitted data to build your user name. If a few hold-outs don't want to play along with it, what's the big problem?
>It's not intentional discrimination, [...]
Whatever the case, it makes them come across as jackasses.
The level of decorum here appears to have dropped significantly in the last few days with a lot of this sort of personal attack.
If they unwittingly discriminated against someone because of an unintentional consequence of an action taken in good faith and believed to be benevolent (preventing trolling, spamming and such on Quora) then how does that make the programmers "jackasses" (ie contemptibly foolish/stupid)?
Why not just say that it's a flawed filter, why the need for this sort of talk?
That isn't a personal attack on a HNer (unless the tech support happens to be a HNer, then that's unintentional). If my project does well enough to get a HN discussion, I'm sure I'll be stunned at the rude responses, but that's not people trying to be mean, it's just that people talking about someone they see as a third party tend to be a lot more straight-talking than if they are talking about each-other.
It's just that asking somebody to show some ID just because their name seems strange seems a bit ... strange. It's a website, not a home loan.
Related idea I got: one "easy" (nonmanual, not super-invasive) way for them verify names would be to do a credit card verification, which would verify that they had a credit card in that name.
But people probably wouldn't be too keen to give their credit card info to a free site just for "name verification".
Credit cards don't verify names anyway, it's not even an option to get back from the authorization network. You can use a credit card to verify addresses, but not names.
I know from experience the difficulties an unusual name can bring, but Quora hasn't called me out just yet. I value their desire to build an authentic community, but other sites have grown without resorting to this sort of tactic. Fakes eventually are known based on their posts.
Speaking of fakes, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake has had all kinds of problems due to her (real) last name:
http://caterina.net/archive/001011.html At worst, I've been asked if I was "one of them foreigners" by a landlord years back.
I'm not sure what you mean by an "authentic community". I have many friends on social networks whom I've never met in real life and whose names I have no knowledge of, but they are real people, and the relationship is authentic, based on our interactions.
They are not fake, they are simply anonymous.
Further, by having some anonymity, I can say things that I otherwise would not be comfortable saying. This is important on a site where the purpose is to answer questions.
Is it better to get a vague question or to have an answer that fails to reveal critical information because this information might make a business associate look bad? Or would it be better to be able to say X attempted to do Y because they believed Z, and I thought Z true, but Z turned out to be W and so Y caused a Q. X is a good entity, they just made a mistake here, so beware of this kind of error if you do business with X.
For now. It would be a mistake to assume their system is so secure now (and forever into the future) that the data can't be found, or simply leaked inadvertently by Quora.
I would say that they're not "anonymous" so much as "pseudonymous", if you can even say that. A name is whatever a person calls himself; if it's adopted at the age of 23 and only used online that doesn't make it any less a name.
I try to say "legal name" rather than "real name" when interacting with people. While this is not perfectly correct (according to Wikipedia, in common law a "true name" is any name used non-fraudulently), it does help to remind people that assumed names aren't less real than given names.
I remember one of the first bugs I ever fixed in a production system involved a Mr. Null who wasn't getting billed because he didn't show up in queries. I also once encountered someone named Mr. Blank though I didn't manage to ask him whether he had similar problems.
Ditto -- it seems that I read about Quora on HN nearly every day, but I've never actually been taken to the site for any real purpose, or seen any of its actual content linked on HN.
To me, Quora is almost the ultimate non-story. There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform.
The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.
Another way to put this is that it's a bubble story: journalists and Valleywags think it's much bigger than it is because all the other people in the same bubble talk about it. Outside of SV/SF, nobody really knows nor cares.
It's a bit like the AT&T-iPhone story. Sure it sucks in SF/NY (it really does) but journalists and bloggers seem incapable or uninterested in considering that these two cities are representative of the whole country.
Last year Quora got funding at a staggering $86M [1] (this sounds like post-money). It's Yahoo Answers meets Facebook, which just so happens to have an insider audience that won't necessarily translate more broadly. Frankly, I'd sell before people catch on.
> There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform.
Don't quite agree, I think their real-time update system excellent and sets them apart. It definitely (IMO) makes the site more addicting. Not that it couldn't be written by competitors of course
I don't disagree that Quora is overhyped though, they seem be Techcrunch's pet company of 2011.
"WELL membership is available to almost anyone, but requires a paid subscription and use of one's real name."
"The WELL was frequently mentioned in the media in the 1980s and 1990s, probably disproportionately to the number of users it had relative to other online systems. [...] This early visibility was largely the result of the early policy of providing free — comped — accounts for interesting journalists and other select members of the media. As a result, for many journalists it was their first experience of online systems and, later, the Internet, even though other systems existed."
Real names are part of Quora's premise. They can afford to reject people who make that hard to pull off. If they'd been founded in another country, they'd presumably have the same problem with some standard American names, but since they weren't, Hasan Hasan's argument falls a little flat.
If he needs to use it, he can go by a middle name. I go by my middle name, because I share my first name with my father. No TechCrunch drama required.
Respectful discussion is also a part of Quora's premise. It's hard to foster that discussion, though, when you've started giving users the runaround because their name doesn't look right to you.
This puts me in mind of my credit card, whose database believes I am "Patrick McKenzie" and whose web tier enjoys throwing a "That input wasn't written in kana, please try again" on the "sign up for online access" page. When I called the credit card company to complain, they told me that they would need a government issued ID certifying to my name in kana prior to changing their DB record. The government will happily issue me an ID, and indeed legally mandate that I carry it everywhere, but only for my name exactly as it appears on my passport. US passports don't include kana? "Not our problem."
Strangely enough, the small town bank that I do business with has been absurdly solicitous about this, and when a similar string comparison caused a bill payment to fail, the manager added a note to the file saying that dishonoring any bill directed to a foreign client at our branch office would henceforth require his written approval. It's just the gigantic megacorp bank in Tokyo which hasn't figured out that foreigners exist yet.
Somewhat understandable.
Most passports that use different alphabets also tend to have romanized names on them to prevent this type of thing at immigration points.... do you think US Banks and tellers accept names in kana or kanji, cyrillic, greek, arabic, etc?
My first name is "Judge" and it gets dropped as a title every once in a while. I had a credit card issued with my middle initial as my first name. When I called to have it changed to my real name they insisted that documentation be provided to prove it. My immediate response was to cancel the credit card because creating a new account had a lower barrier to entry than correcting information in an existing account. Likewise, this was a "megacorp" bank.
After all, unless you’re Cher or Sirhan Sirhan, nobody has the same first and last name.
One of our top managers' name is Herman Herman. 10 years ago or so, he was working next to a guy, whose name was Martin Martin. Of course, Martin Herman was lurking nearby as well.
Names in Egypt often follow this pattern, because the second name is actually the father's given name. So you get combinations like Youssef Youssef or Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Was Martin Martin from Germany? Here at ITA, we used to (before my time) have someone of that name. He was born in Germany, but naturalized in the US; his last name was too difficult for many Americans, so he gave up and had it changed to match his first name, so it'd be easy to say and remember.
The uni department I worked at once had a student called "Daniel". He was on a engineering scholarship from somewhere in remote Africa and had never needed another name. He was rather rueful that nobody had told him to make one up when he applied for his passport, because it caused him all kinds of difficulty. He was all kinds of things on different bits of paper: "Daniel Daniel", "Daniel -" and, memorably, "Daniel Dash".
I have no problem with displaying my full name (and address etc) but something irks me about forcing my full name to be displayed, it should be optional, if I want to use a username (which more people will recognise me by) why shouldn't I?
No-one's forcing you to use Quora, Quora's goal is to maintain high-quality and one of the strategies that they're using to do that is require people use their real name. It's a perfectly legitimate strategy.
Asserting that something is true doesn't make it so. I can say that you look like a ham sandwich but that doesn't mean you look like a ham sandwich. There are a number of reasons that it isn't a legitimate strategy. This story illustrates a few of them, namely that false positives and false negatives are hard to detect, and that alone is reason enough to reject the idea.
Perhaps it is useful to examine the reason for identifying people. If it is, as you say, to maintain high quality, I would ask upon what causal basis that that conclusion rests; I submit StackOverflow and HN as examples of entities that show real names not to be a requirement for high quality discourse.
Why not require them to be on LinkedIn and verify through that? Or verify through Facebook? Granted there are trolls on both but it's better than requiring ppl to send a scan of their gov't ID.
The whole thing is ridiculous, but I want to point out something else the editor said that bugged me and seemed unnecessary: "...in order to use a site approximately as useful to the world as Yahoo! Answers."
Do people really think it's that bad? I really like Quora for the most part and think it's way more useful than Yahoo! Answers.
as it stands, Yahoo! Answers is currently far more useful to the world than Quora. This may change as Quora grows and builds a broader audience, but in terms of value delivered to # of people, it isn't even close...
I don't force users to use real names, I think there's a real benefit in allowing people to use aliases. Rapportive allows me to really quickly grok whether the alias has an underlying real ID in terms of fighting spam and trolls.
It's hardly a fool proof technique, but it answers the questions 9 times out of 10 which removes any need for me to create obstacles for my users to jump through.
PS: Interesting aside: I really loathe Facebook due to a personal incident in my life that occurred on there. Rapportive were kind enough to understand this and then to write an exception into their codebase such that it never prompts me to connect with Facebook. Talk about customer service.
Look at other things like your IP, user agent, etc.
Spammers, things done by scripts... They give themselves away really easily. All I want is an obstacle enough that I know people aren't spamming and that if they troll they understand that it will reflect on their reputation.
Do I need a real id? Nope. And clearly Quora don't either as they don't require over 99% of users verify their real id. It's just a spam prevention policy and helps cut down on trolls as it will (or has risk that it will) reflect on you.
It's really not a good thing to start applying onerous terms and your users.
This is really lame, but parents, do heed: if at all possible, try to name your kids something normal. This is going to get much worse WAY before it gets better.
Obviously you can't predict all cultural phenomenons (for instance, if you named your child "Ken Ryu" before Street Fighter hit the shelves) and you shouldn't do it just to please ignorant folks or know where your child will be living in the future ("Kumar??? What is that, like 5 O's and 2 U's?"), but don't intentionally make life difficult on your children just to make yourself laugh or to fulfill some nerd agenda.
My name got me made fun of constantly as a kid, but if someone asked me if I would have rather been named something else, the answer is an immediate and resolute no. These days all I get is compliments for my name. Yesterday a new person at my tai chi class heard my name as I was showing up and started shouting out loud how awesome it was, then asked if we could switch (she had a pretty unique name as well).
Weird names get you made fun of for maybe 8-10 years, but then the rest of your life is filled with compliments. Think of it as an investment.
Aside from cultural issues, and aside from the notion that people should name the children to make up for the lack of a proper personal identification system on the Internet, that ship has long sailed. Have a look at your local paper's birth announcements - there aren't many Dicks and Janes anymore. Even older names have "creative" spellings that render them practically unrecognisable.
Normality can be statistically proven. If using an abnormal name is not something that will benefit a child, what is the purpose of it, other than satisfying a sick urge to imprint the parents personality on the child?
Would you only buy your boy pink clothes or name him "Elizabeth"? You are choosing for your child, and they deserve a name which is as neutral of a canvas as you can provide for them.
If their approach lets fake but English sounding names go through, then they shouldn't discriminate against other names, period.
If Quora wants people to use their real names, they should require them to link their facebook account -- and these days, even that is a poor guarantee of real names. Let's face it, people are striking back at the "real names" thing by altering their names on facebook, because you never know what they're going to make public by default next.
So what if you were lady gaga or something? Would she not be allowed to use quora without her real name? Or are fake names okay if you have celebrity status?
I love that I can use different pseudo-anonymous handles on different websites.
It gives me a chance to experiment and explore different facets of my life and personality that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing if that exploration were tied to my real name.
Maybe Quora isn't the place for experimenting with identity.
The Internet used to be a place where we were able to freely express ourselves. Increasingly it seems that we can only express ourselves if it's congruent with our IRL selves.
I knew a guy in college that had the name "Harrison". He was from south-east asia. In fact, he told me that from where he comes from, they don't have such thing as first and last name, his name was really just "Harrison". But since no one in the "western world" could handle that, he used Harrison both as first and last name.
Lessons for me: things might be very different on the other side of the globe. Don't try to arrogantly believe you can judge wether things can be true or not from your limited experience and imagination.
One need only look at the quality of comments on a site like Hacker News to see that "real names" is not a requirement for quality and valuable discussion.
No doubt, real names would be an effective aspect to quality content, but if the system of verification is flawed, it's meaningless.
131 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadSo I've left.
Oh no - wait - I did.
But no, I didn't try to register with RiderOfGiraffes. That would just be silly.
I have to wonder about a mother who names her kid "Quora" anyway, and I would like to point out that Quora isn't giving us her last name, yet she demands that we give her ours?
I learned my lesson with facebook, which promised privacy and then years later made the data public. That is the last site that got my real name. I've changed my name on facebook several times to completely obviously fake names, and while they claim that you have to use your real name and they claim to review them, no repercussions. I'm only keeping the account while I go back, and delete old status updates a few months at a time anyway.
And really, no website actually needs it. Trying to fight it is silly, as there is no mechanism whereby you can authenticate identity online. Faxing a passport doesn't even work, unless the business is tied into the government network, and if it is, then other businesses are as well and fake passports become easier.
This is why their real name policy is flawed. A real name that sounds fake gets flagged as fake. A fake name that sounds real does not get flagged. The process is completely subjective as to what sounds real. Requiring ID is one way to prove/disprove it, but checking scanned IDs does not scale well.
Handling fake names or other identifiers is like handling software piracy. You can't prevent it and technology can't prevent it. The pathological cases will do their thing anyway. The best you can do is make it sufficiently inconvenient that the bulk of users will simply go the legit route and the bulk of clowns will go away. Incurring some false positives is a cost, which Quora has chosen to bear.
This is what government itself does for issuing its own IDs. They just have the power for "sufficiently inconvenient" to include criminal charges.
On top of that Quora doesn't seem to even have a consistent policy, or so it appears from their communications. The first 'your name appears to be fake' communication implies that the user just needs to say, "Yup, that's my real name," and all will be well. The further communications relay the message that once you've been determined to be 'fake' you need to provide a government id.
I'm curious why this issue triggers a knee-jerk response of "that's discrimination".
Seems to me that Quora may just perceive that it's not a worthwhile use of customer-service time and resources to deal with edge cases in output from their name approval algorithm. "Fax in your ID" allows a remedy with a standardized procedure and minimal resources spent on their part.
Keep in mind what a small population this really is. You need the intersection of three sets: "rejected name", "bona fide applicant not a scammer/clown", and "unable or unwilling to access a scanner like by getting oneself to a Kinko's". It's quite plausible that this set of corner cases is sufficiently small as to simply not be worth Quora's time to handle. Quora is not a government with an obligation to serve everybody. Of course it sucks for those who happen to fall into that set, but the overall perspective is that those are small points in a large sea of data.
Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice. This includes incompetence by willful neglect in favor of other priorities.
When you decide that two things are different you are discriminating between them, political correctness aside.
Whatever the case, it makes them come across as jackasses.
It's not like "real sounding names" is going to prevent trolls. Trolls have the time and patience to pick a credible-sounding fake name. People who want to use the site for it's proper purpose will just feel insulted.
If they want real names, they could do it just by creating social pressure to provide a real name, and doing the Facebook trick of using user-submitted data to build your user name. If a few hold-outs don't want to play along with it, what's the big problem?
The level of decorum here appears to have dropped significantly in the last few days with a lot of this sort of personal attack.
If they unwittingly discriminated against someone because of an unintentional consequence of an action taken in good faith and believed to be benevolent (preventing trolling, spamming and such on Quora) then how does that make the programmers "jackasses" (ie contemptibly foolish/stupid)?
Why not just say that it's a flawed filter, why the need for this sort of talk?
It's just that asking somebody to show some ID just because their name seems strange seems a bit ... strange. It's a website, not a home loan.
But people probably wouldn't be too keen to give their credit card info to a free site just for "name verification".
Speaking of fakes, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake has had all kinds of problems due to her (real) last name: http://caterina.net/archive/001011.html At worst, I've been asked if I was "one of them foreigners" by a landlord years back.
They are not fake, they are simply anonymous.
Further, by having some anonymity, I can say things that I otherwise would not be comfortable saying. This is important on a site where the purpose is to answer questions.
Is it better to get a vague question or to have an answer that fails to reveal critical information because this information might make a business associate look bad? Or would it be better to be able to say X attempted to do Y because they believed Z, and I thought Z true, but Z turned out to be W and so Y caused a Q. X is a good entity, they just made a mistake here, so beware of this kind of error if you do business with X.
http://www.quora.com/How-anonymous-are-anonymous-questions-i...
It's a very false-anonymity, even by internet standards.
http://www.quora.com/Have-Quora-admins-ever-unanonymized-a-q...
I try to say "legal name" rather than "real name" when interacting with people. While this is not perfectly correct (according to Wikipedia, in common law a "true name" is any name used non-fraudulently), it does help to remind people that assumed names aren't less real than given names.
To me, Quora is almost the ultimate non-story. There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform.
The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.
Another way to put this is that it's a bubble story: journalists and Valleywags think it's much bigger than it is because all the other people in the same bubble talk about it. Outside of SV/SF, nobody really knows nor cares.
It's a bit like the AT&T-iPhone story. Sure it sucks in SF/NY (it really does) but journalists and bloggers seem incapable or uninterested in considering that these two cities are representative of the whole country.
Last year Quora got funding at a staggering $86M [1] (this sounds like post-money). It's Yahoo Answers meets Facebook, which just so happens to have an insider audience that won't necessarily translate more broadly. Frankly, I'd sell before people catch on.
[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchma...
Don't quite agree, I think their real-time update system excellent and sets them apart. It definitely (IMO) makes the site more addicting. Not that it couldn't be written by competitors of course
I don't disagree that Quora is overhyped though, they seem be Techcrunch's pet company of 2011.
The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.
Replace "Quora" with "Hacker News" and you'll see how valuable getting Valley insiders to use it can be. It's the community.
Obligatory wikipedia background:
"WELL membership is available to almost anyone, but requires a paid subscription and use of one's real name."
"The WELL was frequently mentioned in the media in the 1980s and 1990s, probably disproportionately to the number of users it had relative to other online systems. [...] This early visibility was largely the result of the early policy of providing free — comped — accounts for interesting journalists and other select members of the media. As a result, for many journalists it was their first experience of online systems and, later, the Internet, even though other systems existed."
Not much happened with them, either.
For example the discussions of many business models on Quora are unsurpassed in quality anywhere else on the web.
If he needs to use it, he can go by a middle name. I go by my middle name, because I share my first name with my father. No TechCrunch drama required.
Strangely enough, the small town bank that I do business with has been absurdly solicitous about this, and when a similar string comparison caused a bill payment to fail, the manager added a note to the file saying that dishonoring any bill directed to a foreign client at our branch office would henceforth require his written approval. It's just the gigantic megacorp bank in Tokyo which hasn't figured out that foreigners exist yet.
One of our top managers' name is Herman Herman. 10 years ago or so, he was working next to a guy, whose name was Martin Martin. Of course, Martin Herman was lurking nearby as well.
Grew up somewhere in Indonesia (I think) and never got a last name. So they just duplicated his first name.
Perhaps it is useful to examine the reason for identifying people. If it is, as you say, to maintain high quality, I would ask upon what causal basis that that conclusion rests; I submit StackOverflow and HN as examples of entities that show real names not to be a requirement for high quality discourse.
But that's an awfully big rathole to crawl into.
See also: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
Do people really think it's that bad? I really like Quora for the most part and think it's way more useful than Yahoo! Answers.
All you have to do is make a new Facebook account with a real sounding name, and noone would be the wiser.
So whats the point of wasting valuable resources enforcing something this stupid?
All I do to check whether someone appears to be real is to use Rapportive in Gmail and see whether they appear on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
http://rapportive.com/
I don't force users to use real names, I think there's a real benefit in allowing people to use aliases. Rapportive allows me to really quickly grok whether the alias has an underlying real ID in terms of fighting spam and trolls.
It's hardly a fool proof technique, but it answers the questions 9 times out of 10 which removes any need for me to create obstacles for my users to jump through.
PS: Interesting aside: I really loathe Facebook due to a personal incident in my life that occurred on there. Rapportive were kind enough to understand this and then to write an exception into their codebase such that it never prompts me to connect with Facebook. Talk about customer service.
Or people like me who use a different email address for every site?
Spammers, things done by scripts... They give themselves away really easily. All I want is an obstacle enough that I know people aren't spamming and that if they troll they understand that it will reflect on their reputation.
Do I need a real id? Nope. And clearly Quora don't either as they don't require over 99% of users verify their real id. It's just a spam prevention policy and helps cut down on trolls as it will (or has risk that it will) reflect on you.
It's really not a good thing to start applying onerous terms and your users.
Obviously you can't predict all cultural phenomenons (for instance, if you named your child "Ken Ryu" before Street Fighter hit the shelves) and you shouldn't do it just to please ignorant folks or know where your child will be living in the future ("Kumar??? What is that, like 5 O's and 2 U's?"), but don't intentionally make life difficult on your children just to make yourself laugh or to fulfill some nerd agenda.
Weird names get you made fun of for maybe 8-10 years, but then the rest of your life is filled with compliments. Think of it as an investment.
Normal to whom?
Aside from cultural issues, and aside from the notion that people should name the children to make up for the lack of a proper personal identification system on the Internet, that ship has long sailed. Have a look at your local paper's birth announcements - there aren't many Dicks and Janes anymore. Even older names have "creative" spellings that render them practically unrecognisable.
Would you only buy your boy pink clothes or name him "Elizabeth"? You are choosing for your child, and they deserve a name which is as neutral of a canvas as you can provide for them.
Her name is currently set as Sushii to compensate.
If Quora wants people to use their real names, they should require them to link their facebook account -- and these days, even that is a poor guarantee of real names. Let's face it, people are striking back at the "real names" thing by altering their names on facebook, because you never know what they're going to make public by default next.
It gives me a chance to experiment and explore different facets of my life and personality that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing if that exploration were tied to my real name.
Maybe Quora isn't the place for experimenting with identity.
The Internet used to be a place where we were able to freely express ourselves. Increasingly it seems that we can only express ourselves if it's congruent with our IRL selves.
Lessons for me: things might be very different on the other side of the globe. Don't try to arrogantly believe you can judge wether things can be true or not from your limited experience and imagination.
People that don't have family names often use patronyms and the "[W]estern world" seems to cope just fine.
Harrison ben Harry, Harrison Harrinpoika, Harrison Fitzharry¹ or what have you.
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1 - all mean "Harrison son of Harry"
No doubt, real names would be an effective aspect to quality content, but if the system of verification is flawed, it's meaningless.