Agreed. I'm on the verge of leaving facebook, I've been for quite some time. Their stupid change in chat (people know when you read what they wrote) almost made me quit, but Chrome extensions to disable it allowed me to stay.
With such a move, I would not stay one day longer on the "service".
I'd forgotten what Quora was, or that it had existed. Now I'm very glad that's the case, since I wouldn't want to have to stop using something I actually liked.
What value does this have over, say, an anonymized view count? While it's nice to know that people have seen what you've written, does their identity really need to be known?
What people you are following have viewed now shows up in your feed. This will presumably improve discovery, as your feed is the primary way to find interesting content on Quora.
You can turn it off, but then you can't see who viewed things. (Similar to how LinkedIn and OkCupid work with anonymous browsing.) And if you really want to see I'm sure you can do so via another account. (I think it is possible because okc and linkedin hide private data but quora hides public data.)
I've learned to go with the flow and trust them when they make changes like this. My first impression is usually to want the 'old Quora' back but once I get used to them, the changes do nearly always improve the experience. I would imagine this will be the same.
They are very skilled at interpreting needs and desires we didn't know we had and quickly correcting themselves the times they do make mistakes (like the recent notification spam issues).
edit: lol @ downvotes. Unacceptable to not be a Quora hater I guess...
I'd be curious to know what/how you use Quora. I've had an account on there forever, but it just doesn't quite seem to hit the right level of utility for me to go back to it.
very skilled at interpreting needs and desires we didn't know we had
This is basically the same line that I use when I'm mocking targeted ads and joking around with friends about how thankful they should be for them. If your edit wasn't there I would have guessed this was a level aka fooling someone w/ sarcasm or non-serious remark.
That quote is based on the (false) premise that privacy is there to conceal illegal/shady activities. It puts you in one of two groups; You're either guilty of something and have a reason to hide it, or you're not guilty and have no reason to hide anything. It doesn't include the possibility that you might not be guilty of something but may still want to keep something hidden. I'll give you an example. You might NOT want to give your phone number when you register on some social website because you don't want that data used for marketting purposes.
Yes, Schmidt showed a complete lack of understanding of why anonymity is still often a necessity online. Do we really need to keep going over the examples that clearly show he is wrong?
I got the impression that by doing "it" he meant searching Google for it, not actually doing it. I think most people realise that Google works by tracking what you search for, so it makes sense that if you want something to remain unknown, you shouldn't search Google for it.
Quora is in the same boat as FB (and to a certain extent, Twitter)
They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary.
A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history.
I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me.
Deactivated!
Edit:
I followed up with an email to FEEDBACK@QUORA.COM asking them to delete my account and data.. will see what happens. I dont like the idea of a limbo account that can be reactivated/mined.
Absolutely. Their policy to force your true_full_name is an absolute no-go for many users. A friend of mine from south India has a very lengthy name. Few parts of his name are direct reference to his ancestors and the villages they come from. Sort of like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._D._Deve_Gowda where H. D. parts of his name are references to ancestry, places etc.
My friend was denied permission to use Quora, rather insultingly blocked, for not revealing his ancestor name. We thought it was plain stupid on part of Quora to behave this way, so didn't bother to follow up with them either. What's amazing here is that even Government passports don't force revealing names of ancestors like they do.
My friend was denied permission to use Quora for not revealing his ancestor name.
Could you explain how it happened in this specific case, since it sounds like the name that your friend gave appeared to be real. That it, it wasn't something like "Fake Name" or "Bite Me", so how did Quora know?
And, in general, could someone explain how the likes of Quora and Facebook decide that a name isn't "real"? Does someone at Quora or Facebook manually scan new account names? Do they wait for complaints from other users? Is it something algorithmic like noting that you receive messages such as "Hi Mike" but where you registered as "Fred Flintstone"?
>Does someone at Quora or Facebook manually scan new account names?
At facebook they certainly do. When you change your name you have to wait for some period of time before it gets approved by a human. The person doing it doesn't seem to give a shit though. It is the fashion amongst a certain sector of the youth to use utterly ludicrous pseudonyms on FB - most of my friends do. I would love to quote some of them here because they're very funny but I don't want to jeopardise anyones privacy.
Personally I have changed my name several times on FB over the years and never had a problem. For a long time it was 15 letters with no vowels. That was fun at parties - "What are you called on facebook?" "I literally can't remember. Guess I'm going to have to add you."
I've noticed the same phenomenon (knowing tons of people on Facebook--to be clear, just "normal people" I knew from college--with ludicrous handles on Facebook). It thereby really bugs me when people hold up Facebook as an example of why real name policies are good, or claim that forcing real names is ok because Facebook set a precedent, when it is fairly clear that Facebook doesn't really care.
I suspect in this case, he just used initials for the last name instead of expanding it. It's a common style followed in India. For example He use Deve G. or Fred F.
I was contacted by Quora 2 days after creating an account. They thought "Ring" was a joke.
OT: my favorite "delete your account" is at buy dot com. At least couple months ago, there was no option to do so, so I called them and someone told me: just add "DELETE" in front of your account; this way you wont be able to login to it anymore.
I didn't mind their real full-name policy until now, since you could still answer questions anonymously. Allowing other members to see the questions I'm viewing by default, however, crosses the line.
apparently you have to e-mail privacy@quora.com to get your account deleted completely. That in itself is reason to delete your account btw. It speaks volumes of their regard for users and their privacy.
Wow. I'm certainly asking for a deletion now, too. I haven't used it in a while, but I hate these tactics of not allowing the user to delete the account when he wants to.
First I'm manually deleting all of my answers, then I'll ask Quora to delete the rest. I've had bad experience with deleting accounts in the past, where my content would remain on the website even though my account was gone. And not having an account, there's nothing I can do about that data afterwards. I want to be pretty sure that all my Quora content is gone.
Fun fact: There's no way to get a list of your anonymous answers on Quora. They don't show up on your profile at all. All you can really do is browse through your list of followed questions and manually check each one to see if you responded anonymously.
As far as I understand it, this /etc/hosts entry is not so much about you accessing Quora, but more about other sites that want your browser to connect to Quora (e.g. via embedded content or JavaScript).
Of course you could trust them not to track you. But for the same reason you prefer your account to be deleted (not just inactivated), you might want to make sure on your side that they can't track you (not just taking their word for it).
>>They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary.
>>A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history.
I cannot comment on the morals but same thing applies to a lot of YCombinator companies - where the product is complete trash, gains traction just because they allow you to do something 'social', used by the cool kids because apparently they are developed in Lisp (or similar 'cool' languages) and is built to be sold. Most of them are bought by large companies where the decision makers are equally foolish.
I am huge fan of Quora, primarily because it allows opinions. In technology, often a best answer is an opinion, recommendation and comparison between things - something which Stackoverflow discourages. I have found a lot of value in reading answers in Quora and this just a small price to pay.
I have to take the minority position and stand up for Quora here. I'm a huge fan of the service, and though I agree this latest move was a mis-step, I remain a loyal Quora user.
Unlike you, I've gained a ton of value from it. Unlike the trivial discussions or content spam posted on Facebook or Twitter, Quora features tons of interesting conversations. The closest comparison to it might actually be Wikipedia, at least in terms of general scale of ambition.
It's the one online community I've found that I think is better than Hacker News (though admittedly the quality of discussing has slid as the audience has grown wider). There's few other places where a question about politics might be answered by a Washington insider, or a question about startups might be answered by a top name Valley VC, or a question about snipers answered by an actual sniper.
Their real name policy has generally been fairly sensibly and sensitively implemented (http://www.quora.com/Why-has-there-been-an-outcry-against-re...) - they've always allowed anonymous posting, and they've been more flexible on the definition of "real name", than, say, G+. For example, danah boyd is able to post with the legal, lowercase form of her name.
Whether they'll begin bowing to advertisers once they need to monetise of course remains an open question -- but I'm hoping they can find alternative revenue streams. For example, a lot of consultants post answers on there to gain clients -- that's an example of the concrete monetary value Quora creates, and if they can capture some of that value they can build a great company without stooping to Facebook-style data mining controversies.
One of the most appealing things about Quora is the extent to which it creates a pleasant community. When I saw this, I thought, "Hey, neat! I'll have a better idea who's reading my answers." But I understand why people are upset.
On the other hand, I almost murdered them when they started forcing people inbound from Facebook to log in with Facebook:
So I've got my eye on them. The extent to which they can square the community vibe and their relatively high moral standards with the expectations of their investors is still unclear.
I believe the age thing is more about them not having an accrued history of personally-attributed content on the internet and how that weighed into making this decision.
Whether or not that's related to their age is debatable, but one would assume that people who have been publishing on the web for awhile -- bylined or anonymously -- would understand the negative impact this would have on their community or at least would have learned from previous companies' mistakes that just isn't something you do (both the deploying a global change that opts users into something they didn't initially sign up for and the very concept of making previously private things public). There are separate services out there that one can use if they want others on the web to know where they are and what they're doing. I'll use those if I want to be transparent.
Just thought I'd point out that the method they used for the obfuscation is a simple CSS rule. It can be quite easily disabled with the developer tools, an extension or a proxy.
I've never signed up to Quora, but the last time I visited, it looked as though I was logged in which I assumed was via my Twitter cookie. (I don't have a Facebook account.)
It's not happening now so possibly was part of some A/B test.
That coupled with this passive browsing would be a step too far.
Quora has gone the way of expert-sexchange, showing up in Google search results for interesting questions, but then overlaying/replacing most answers with blur and "sign up to read".
> Quora has gone the way of expert-sexchange, showing up in Google search results for interesting questions, but then overlaying/replacing most answers with blur and "sign up to read".
This shit doesn't fly with Google. Delivering different content to Google bot and the user coming through search makes Google looks like a fool, since the user is unable to find the content he searched for. That is why expert-sexchange shows answers at the bottom when Google is your referrer.
If Quora is pulling up this shit, Google will penalize it. I think it's more likely Quora is simply hiding content behind css.
The answers are in a span with class "blurred_answer", which has css styles: "color: transparent; text-shadow: 0 0 7px #777". Which in effect makes the text completely unreadable to humans.
This is just one step above "color: #fff; background-color: #fff".
Yes, you're right, I can see the blurring in certain cases now.
If I go to the link you cited directly it is not blurred.
But I if search for "How do Bayesian algorithms work" in Google, then click the link that Google finds, then it is blurred.
Once you get the blurred Quora page, then even going to the link directly will get you a blurred page. If you delete all the Quora cookies, then it'll be back to being readable (non-blurred).
Interestingly, if you use Google's encrypted service ( https://encrypted.google.com/ ) to search for "How do Bayesian algorithms work", you'll get a non-blurred Quora page.
I can't see those in the HTML, whether I'm logged in or not, but I have used googleoff & googleon in HTML comments before - they're used to control which parts of a page can be ignored when using a Google Search Appliance.
So, if Quora use a GSA (or rack of them) to power their site search, they can ensure parts of the page aren't added to the index of the search. This can be helpful if you want to exclude areas that are repeated a lot in the site but are not helpful if you are searching, like navigation or help panels.
(Quick edit) googleoff/googleon are completely ignored by normal Google, AFAIK it's only used for their Appliance products.
It looks like they've changed it. I added quora to my list of blocked domains in google immediately after noticing the blurred responses... I don't think I'll remove them.
Correct. A lot of people blindly believe that Google can do no evil - I used to be one of them. But now I have come to realize that given that they are a public company, they will do whatever pleases their shareholders.
> Not only does this shit fly but Google are doing it on their own websites.
I am not claiming Google is benevolent. As I mentioned above, if a user searches for "rails select in query" and the user clicks on experts-exchange result summary showing partial answer only to be taken to the page where answers are hidden, the user failed to find something on Google. May be he will blame experts-exchange, but he will blame Google as well.
> EDIT: I'm guessing you don't believe me.
I am guessing you were downvoted. I didn't downvote you. If fact, you can't downvote immediate replies to your post. Since you directly replied to my post, the downvote link doesn't appear for me for your reply.
I just want to point out that search results like Quora or Experts-exchange, are definitely not going away. Some websites might be penalized here and there but I haven't seen any consistent efforts to stop them.
I'd be OK with this if I could click on a search result link and actually read the web page; I wouldn't mind other links on that page leading to a please-sign-up.
The scummy thing here is that you're taken to a web page where the interesting content is hidden on the first page.
Google wants to index as much content as possible. It's providing incentive to content owners to let Google index it. As pointed out by another commenter, clicking on the search result summary shows that document in full. It's only the subsequent clicks that can be paywalled.
> It's only the subsequent clicks that can be paywalled.
I find it annoying when that happens. Also, Google's recommendation is to allow 5 clicks a day and allow everyone with "GoogleBot" in their useragent. I wish the implementation was better.
> Is it asking to sign in? I tried in incognito mode and I could read the groups just fine.
You are right, I cleared my cookies and I stopped getting the login redirection.
I don't think that should be the case here. They have blurred answers enclosed in googleoff/googleon tags - which should make sure that they don't get indexed.
I have always assumed this was what Quora is about, but I have never seen a Quora result show up in a Google search? Is this supposed to be the case for a company with that focus, or am I just not using the right queries?
Quora seems nice but I cannot possibly feel comfortable with their policies, even before this. I can only participate very selectively because of this. I like the service and it has traction, too bad their invasiveness thresholds are too lax for me to accept.
I'd rather just pay a small quantity to be honest. I'm not sure if an alternative site working on subscriber money would be feasible.
To me, the fact that Quora feels it needs to share passive views means they're failing to get enough people to actively engage with their content.
If I don't care enough click a button, either A) I have no meaningful opinion, B) I don't want Quora to know what I think, or C) there's a "problem" with the button.
Quora, if you're going to just make assumptions about why I'm looking at an answer, you will very often be WRONG.
What's more stupid is their desperation for you to interact with their site. I went to remove my unused account, and this is what I got when I typed www.quora.com:
You'll notice that I couldn't do anything else - I "had" to choose 5 extremely broad subjects that I'm supposed to be interested in, in order to be able to view my profile. I selected 5 subjects randomly, and...
Only after that they kindly allowed me to view the main page and my profile. I deactivated my account, and won't ever click on a quota link again (and would add them to my spam list so they won't show up in my Google results).
Thanks for pointing that out. Is that a robot on the other end (which deletes the account if it contains "delete" or so etching like that in the subject field), or you have to talk to a human and ask them to delete it?
I really have the feeling we're all merely getting sold to advertisers. Where are the real innovations from tech people? It is not about "social interaction", in many ways it's only about getting as much data from the user as possible, to sell it.
I can't say how much i hate the "social trend" in this era of the internet boom.
"Yeah, our Product is a ripoff of Product X (proof concept, existing since 2000) BUT WE ADDED SOCIAL TO IT, ZOMG!!11"
What's bugging me even more is the fact, that there're so many stupid VCs who think they'll invest in the next big thing and support stupid ideas, too blind to see real innovations.
> I can't say how much i hate the "social trend" in this era of the internet boom.
It angers me greatly. I attribute it to tech going mainstream in a big way. It waters down the entire industry. Worse, it feels like it has slowed down R&D because everyone's so complacent with what we have.
Off topic I guess, but to me Quora seems to have passed it's peak for updates to topics which I find interesting, unfortunately. I was not an early adopter, and joined when the gated-community phase ended, selected my topics and enjoyed quite a few good answers. A week later I opened it up on a train ride, but the content had not changed at all.
And, perhaps more tellingly, in each topic the few scraps of fresh activity each time I've opened the app since have been from exactly the same users.
I do not have a Quora account, but I understand their move and it may not be all bad. There are 3 ways how a company may handle user passive privacy:
1. Not collect any information (in this case who read what article) at all. Obviously that company would be at a big disadvantage, having no access to a useful set of signals.
2. Collect the information and use it for their own goals.
3. Collect the information and make it freely available.
If I understand the article correctly, Quora went from strategy #2 to #3. From my perspective, this is a positive move. In case #3, users are aware of what is happening with their private information and may log out if they do not want to be tracked this way. It is way better than living in peaceful ignorance as in case #2. Also, the company cannot sell the private info, because it is publicly available.
> Also, the company cannot sell the private info, because it is publicly available.
Uh. Maybe you don't understand why people don't like it when companies sell their data.
It's because it ends up in the hands of every shady marketing agency and intelligence organization on earth. Making it public just means that these parties can get it with no barrier to entry.
See: Usenet, where any email address that's ever touched it is supposedly under constant siege by spam.
Maybe I have expressed myself not clearly enough, so once more: I prefer the collected information to be public because then it is clear to everyone that it is being collected and many more people are aware of the implications. I think it is better than when the same kind of information is being secretly sold while users have a false feeling of privacy.
The greatest thing about Quora is that it doesn't really "exist" outside of the valley. I stayed in Georgia for 3 months. Everyone in the startup scene out there (except for my friend who runs a successful website) doesn't know what Quora is. When I explained it to them, they thought they could get the same answers from Google.
To an extent, they are correct. I'm getting tired of these self-entitled startups who think they are running the show.
"get the same answers from Google" - well, I signed up for a Quora account out of curiosity some time ago and started receiving their weekly emails, which generally I delete or unsubscribe from with most companies but something about Quora's community has kept me subscribed, for example answers to questions such as 'What wass it like to grow up insanely rich' and 'What is it like to lose an Olympic event'. I checked my account and the default is still No for "Allow others to see what content I've viewed in feed" but I'll certainly be considering deleting my account should this be activated without my consent.
Early last year, when I was starting to get into using Quora, I stopped using it abruptly when I realised how limited their privacy features are.
Basically, I wanted to contribute quite heavily to the Depression topic. I'm a sufferer and I wanted to be able to help other people. But on Quora you have a choice of answering a question either Anonymously or as yourself, the problem with answering as yourself is that all your activity gets published to the feed of people who follow you, and with Quora being heavily integrated with Facebook I wasn't comfortable with this.
Which meant I was forced to answer questions anonymously, which I was equally uncomfortable with. I felt like I couldn't make an valuable contribution if I was hiding behind anonymity each time.
I don't mind people knowing things about me, which is why I don't mind saying this here, using my real name, but that's very different to being willing to shout from the rooftops.
I emailed Quora to suggest being able to decide what information gets published to the feed on a per-topic basis. I didn't get a response, which is hardly surprising, but if basic privacy-controls are outside of their plan for the site, I can't be part of it.
Because I feel part of being a community member is having a recognisable name, even if it's just a pseudonym, so just being "Anonymous" isn't sufficient for me.
Names are important because they allow you to build reputation (ignoring actual reputation algorithms for now). So if a particular question comes up, a user might think "I wonder what Joey Joe Joe thinks about this" or "Let's see what AmazingFace82's answer to this question is".
In the case of any community that's fundamentally about self-improvement, for example the Depression topic, it's useful to see how an individual's contributions change over time. Do they become more positive? What solutions did they try, which ones were most effective?
At the time, when I was getting into Quora. I was quite keen to have my Facebook friends be able to find me easily.
Additionally, my boss was the guy who encouraged me to use Quora more heavily, so he was following me already. Even unlinking Facebook wouldn't have changed that.
There's the option of maintaining multiple accounts, but I wasn't a heavy enough user yet to be willing to deal with the hassle.
Great point. I've noticed this trend on other sites, as well. Usually you have an option of facebook/google plus-integrated account, and maybe an anonymous option. You've laid out the core problem with this binary view. In your case, for legitimate reasons, you don't want to advertise certain aspects of your health to search engines, but you still want to have standing with the community. I've had a similar dilemma with politically-oriented sites. I don't hide my political views in "real life" especially when asked, but I don't want to have them associated with me whenever someone google searches my name.
This is misleading, as you CAN read anonymously if you disable the feature.
Personally, I read stuff for amusement or interest all the time that I would not want a large portion of my acquaintances knowing that I read, and certainly not without explanation. For instance, if I read an article about child abuse and get curious about the age of consent in Massachusetts, I don't want that showing up to random acquaintances in my feed anywhere.
Enabling this feature surreptitiously and without an opt-in is insanely stupid and insensitive to users. Given that Quora has very good support for anonymous questions and answers, you'd expect them to be more savvy than this.
Why Google doesn't penalize them for serving different content to google bot and to humans?! How can thy get away with it... I'm sure many people who work for Google and are part of team that has authority to make those changes have seen it..?-
There is space for competition in that area. StackExchange is pretty good, but since they don't allow questions with subjective answers, they basically exclude themselves from the vast majority of the market share. Then there is quora, yahoo answers, ... There is certainly enough space for a few good startups.
Reddit has some decent subreddits devoted to questions/answers, but the really good ones, like askscience, only allow objective answers. On second thought, that's probably why those ones are good.
StackExchange leaves a lot of open opportunities even in the areas they focus on. The objectivity mantra means they'll ban "best programmer jokes", perhaps understandable, but oddly they'll block questions like "best database for X, best book on X" as being "Not Constructive". (I could understand "subjective", but I can't see how it's not useful data.)
So when I see things like this, it makes me think there's surely an opportunity and the opportunity falls squarely in Quora's lap. But depending how they execute on it, they might still be leaving the space wide open for others.
190 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadNothing would kill Facebook quicker than then implementing this, for example.
With such a move, I would not stay one day longer on the "service".
Instructions: http://www.quora.com/Views-on-Quora/How-do-I-turn-off-the-Vi...
Quite an effective way to destroy some goodwill they'd built up with me over the past couple of years.
They are very skilled at interpreting needs and desires we didn't know we had and quickly correcting themselves the times they do make mistakes (like the recent notification spam issues).
edit: lol @ downvotes. Unacceptable to not be a Quora hater I guess...
This is basically the same line that I use when I'm mocking targeted ads and joking around with friends about how thankful they should be for them. If your edit wasn't there I would have guessed this was a level aka fooling someone w/ sarcasm or non-serious remark.
There is a difference, however, in explaining away unpopular changes as being this and actually being good at it. Quora is actually good at it.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/01/21/top-10-the-quotable-e...
That quote is based on the (false) premise that privacy is there to conceal illegal/shady activities. It puts you in one of two groups; You're either guilty of something and have a reason to hide it, or you're not guilty and have no reason to hide anything. It doesn't include the possibility that you might not be guilty of something but may still want to keep something hidden. I'll give you an example. You might NOT want to give your phone number when you register on some social website because you don't want that data used for marketting purposes.
Either you are being sarcastic, or idiotic. Please tel me which one.
Thanks
They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary.
A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history. I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me.
Deactivated!
Edit:
I followed up with an email to FEEDBACK@QUORA.COM asking them to delete my account and data.. will see what happens. I dont like the idea of a limbo account that can be reactivated/mined.
I'd prefer to have it deleted.
My friend was denied permission to use Quora, rather insultingly blocked, for not revealing his ancestor name. We thought it was plain stupid on part of Quora to behave this way, so didn't bother to follow up with them either. What's amazing here is that even Government passports don't force revealing names of ancestors like they do.
Could you explain how it happened in this specific case, since it sounds like the name that your friend gave appeared to be real. That it, it wasn't something like "Fake Name" or "Bite Me", so how did Quora know?
And, in general, could someone explain how the likes of Quora and Facebook decide that a name isn't "real"? Does someone at Quora or Facebook manually scan new account names? Do they wait for complaints from other users? Is it something algorithmic like noting that you receive messages such as "Hi Mike" but where you registered as "Fred Flintstone"?
At facebook they certainly do. When you change your name you have to wait for some period of time before it gets approved by a human. The person doing it doesn't seem to give a shit though. It is the fashion amongst a certain sector of the youth to use utterly ludicrous pseudonyms on FB - most of my friends do. I would love to quote some of them here because they're very funny but I don't want to jeopardise anyones privacy.
Personally I have changed my name several times on FB over the years and never had a problem. For a long time it was 15 letters with no vowels. That was fun at parties - "What are you called on facebook?" "I literally can't remember. Guess I'm going to have to add you."
AFAIK if you try to change your name to something obviously fake, like "Superman", it will reject it immediately
OT: my favorite "delete your account" is at buy dot com. At least couple months ago, there was no option to do so, so I called them and someone told me: just add "DELETE" in front of your account; this way you wont be able to login to it anymore.
It's this kind of BS that makes me create fake facebook or twitter accounts to log on shady sites like Quora.
It was non-obvious as to whom I needed to contact... Ill try that email as well.
EDIT: Done.
Fun fact: There's no way to get a list of your anonymous answers on Quora. They don't show up on your profile at all. All you can really do is browse through your list of followed questions and manually check each one to see if you responded anonymously.
127.0.0.1 quora.com www.quora.com
Unfortunately it's too old to edit.
>>A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history.
I cannot comment on the morals but same thing applies to a lot of YCombinator companies - where the product is complete trash, gains traction just because they allow you to do something 'social', used by the cool kids because apparently they are developed in Lisp (or similar 'cool' languages) and is built to be sold. Most of them are bought by large companies where the decision makers are equally foolish.
I am huge fan of Quora, primarily because it allows opinions. In technology, often a best answer is an opinion, recommendation and comparison between things - something which Stackoverflow discourages. I have found a lot of value in reading answers in Quora and this just a small price to pay.
I think you mean nothing short of revolutionary.
Unlike you, I've gained a ton of value from it. Unlike the trivial discussions or content spam posted on Facebook or Twitter, Quora features tons of interesting conversations. The closest comparison to it might actually be Wikipedia, at least in terms of general scale of ambition.
It's the one online community I've found that I think is better than Hacker News (though admittedly the quality of discussing has slid as the audience has grown wider). There's few other places where a question about politics might be answered by a Washington insider, or a question about startups might be answered by a top name Valley VC, or a question about snipers answered by an actual sniper.
Their real name policy has generally been fairly sensibly and sensitively implemented (http://www.quora.com/Why-has-there-been-an-outcry-against-re...) - they've always allowed anonymous posting, and they've been more flexible on the definition of "real name", than, say, G+. For example, danah boyd is able to post with the legal, lowercase form of her name.
Whether they'll begin bowing to advertisers once they need to monetise of course remains an open question -- but I'm hoping they can find alternative revenue streams. For example, a lot of consultants post answers on there to gain clients -- that's an example of the concrete monetary value Quora creates, and if they can capture some of that value they can build a great company without stooping to Facebook-style data mining controversies.
One of the most appealing things about Quora is the extent to which it creates a pleasant community. When I saw this, I thought, "Hey, neat! I'll have a better idea who's reading my answers." But I understand why people are upset.
On the other hand, I almost murdered them when they started forcing people inbound from Facebook to log in with Facebook:
http://www.quora.com/rage-against-quora/Rage-forcing-Faceboo...
So I've got my eye on them. The extent to which they can square the community vibe and their relatively high moral standards with the expectations of their investors is still unclear.
Whether or not that's related to their age is debatable, but one would assume that people who have been publishing on the web for awhile -- bylined or anonymously -- would understand the negative impact this would have on their community or at least would have learned from previous companies' mistakes that just isn't something you do (both the deploying a global change that opts users into something they didn't initially sign up for and the very concept of making previously private things public). There are separate services out there that one can use if they want others on the web to know where they are and what they're doing. I'll use those if I want to be transparent.
It's not happening now so possibly was part of some A/B test.
That coupled with this passive browsing would be a step too far.
Borderline SERP cloaking, to say the least.
This shit doesn't fly with Google. Delivering different content to Google bot and the user coming through search makes Google looks like a fool, since the user is unable to find the content he searched for. That is why expert-sexchange shows answers at the bottom when Google is your referrer.
If Quora is pulling up this shit, Google will penalize it. I think it's more likely Quora is simply hiding content behind css.
See for example: http://www.quora.com/Bayesian-Inference/How-do-Bayesian-algo...
The answers are in a span with class "blurred_answer", which has css styles: "color: transparent; text-shadow: 0 0 7px #777". Which in effect makes the text completely unreadable to humans.
This is just one step above "color: #fff; background-color: #fff".
Scummy.
http://www.quora.com/Bayesian-Inference/How-do-Bayesian-algo...
I checked with two different browsers (Opera and Firefox under Windows).
Could this mean that the Quora PR machine is up in full swing trying to undo damage (at least in the case of specific links that people cite)?
I tried this in Firefox and Chrome in both normal and Private/Incognito modes.
Although I see in the html source there are some html comments "googleoff". I've never heard of those before.
I guess "googleon"'ing the first answer is enough to get google juice while staying within the letter of rules, it's still really spammy.
(Plus, how does that play with other search engines?)
If I go to the link you cited directly it is not blurred.
But I if search for "How do Bayesian algorithms work" in Google, then click the link that Google finds, then it is blurred.
Once you get the blurred Quora page, then even going to the link directly will get you a blurred page. If you delete all the Quora cookies, then it'll be back to being readable (non-blurred).
Interestingly, if you use Google's encrypted service ( https://encrypted.google.com/ ) to search for "How do Bayesian algorithms work", you'll get a non-blurred Quora page.
Of course, it will be addressed by another "true name" purveyor. My head hurts.
So, if Quora use a GSA (or rack of them) to power their site search, they can ensure parts of the page aren't added to the index of the search. This can be helpful if you want to exclude areas that are repeated a lot in the site but are not helpful if you are searching, like navigation or help panels.
(Quick edit) googleoff/googleon are completely ignored by normal Google, AFAIK it's only used for their Appliance products.
Source: http://nerdr.com/see-quora-answers-without-signing-up/
Presumably I could View Source or something; but hey, there's no shortage of info on the web without the silly hoops.
Not only does this shit fly but Google are doing it on their own websites.
EDIT: I'm guessing you don't believe me. Try clicking on a Google Groups link.
This article has another example: http://www.seobook.com/googles-youtube-caught-cloaking-spam-...
Google repeatedly violates the "guidelines" they try to force on other webmasters.
I am not claiming Google is benevolent. As I mentioned above, if a user searches for "rails select in query" and the user clicks on experts-exchange result summary showing partial answer only to be taken to the page where answers are hidden, the user failed to find something on Google. May be he will blame experts-exchange, but he will blame Google as well.
> EDIT: I'm guessing you don't believe me.
I am guessing you were downvoted. I didn't downvote you. If fact, you can't downvote immediate replies to your post. Since you directly replied to my post, the downvote link doesn't appear for me for your reply.
In fact, Google wants even more such results. See First Click Free: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Oh and here are 240 million login-walled pages: https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:groups.google.com/grou...
The scummy thing here is that you're taken to a web page where the interesting content is hidden on the first page.
Google wants to index as much content as possible. It's providing incentive to content owners to let Google index it. As pointed out by another commenter, clicking on the search result summary shows that document in full. It's only the subsequent clicks that can be paywalled.
> Oh and here are 240 million login-walled pages: https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:groups.google.com/grou....
Is it asking to sign in? I tried in incognito mode and I could read the groups just fine.
I find it annoying when that happens. Also, Google's recommendation is to allow 5 clicks a day and allow everyone with "GoogleBot" in their useragent. I wish the implementation was better.
> Is it asking to sign in? I tried in incognito mode and I could read the groups just fine.
You are right, I cleared my cookies and I stopped getting the login redirection.
I'd rather just pay a small quantity to be honest. I'm not sure if an alternative site working on subscriber money would be feasible.
If I don't care enough click a button, either A) I have no meaningful opinion, B) I don't want Quora to know what I think, or C) there's a "problem" with the button.
Quora, if you're going to just make assumptions about why I'm looking at an answer, you will very often be WRONG.
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What's more stupid is their desperation for you to interact with their site. I went to remove my unused account, and this is what I got when I typed www.quora.com:
http://d.pr/i/WcMl
You'll notice that I couldn't do anything else - I "had" to choose 5 extremely broad subjects that I'm supposed to be interested in, in order to be able to view my profile. I selected 5 subjects randomly, and...
http://d.pr/i/P7ex
Only after that they kindly allowed me to view the main page and my profile. I deactivated my account, and won't ever click on a quota link again (and would add them to my spam list so they won't show up in my Google results).
I can't say how much i hate the "social trend" in this era of the internet boom.
"Yeah, our Product is a ripoff of Product X (proof concept, existing since 2000) BUT WE ADDED SOCIAL TO IT, ZOMG!!11"
What's bugging me even more is the fact, that there're so many stupid VCs who think they'll invest in the next big thing and support stupid ideas, too blind to see real innovations.
It angers me greatly. I attribute it to tech going mainstream in a big way. It waters down the entire industry. Worse, it feels like it has slowed down R&D because everyone's so complacent with what we have.
And, perhaps more tellingly, in each topic the few scraps of fresh activity each time I've opened the app since have been from exactly the same users.
1. Not collect any information (in this case who read what article) at all. Obviously that company would be at a big disadvantage, having no access to a useful set of signals.
2. Collect the information and use it for their own goals.
3. Collect the information and make it freely available.
If I understand the article correctly, Quora went from strategy #2 to #3. From my perspective, this is a positive move. In case #3, users are aware of what is happening with their private information and may log out if they do not want to be tracked this way. It is way better than living in peaceful ignorance as in case #2. Also, the company cannot sell the private info, because it is publicly available.
Uh. Maybe you don't understand why people don't like it when companies sell their data.
It's because it ends up in the hands of every shady marketing agency and intelligence organization on earth. Making it public just means that these parties can get it with no barrier to entry.
See: Usenet, where any email address that's ever touched it is supposedly under constant siege by spam.
To an extent, they are correct. I'm getting tired of these self-entitled startups who think they are running the show.
Basically, I wanted to contribute quite heavily to the Depression topic. I'm a sufferer and I wanted to be able to help other people. But on Quora you have a choice of answering a question either Anonymously or as yourself, the problem with answering as yourself is that all your activity gets published to the feed of people who follow you, and with Quora being heavily integrated with Facebook I wasn't comfortable with this.
Which meant I was forced to answer questions anonymously, which I was equally uncomfortable with. I felt like I couldn't make an valuable contribution if I was hiding behind anonymity each time.
I don't mind people knowing things about me, which is why I don't mind saying this here, using my real name, but that's very different to being willing to shout from the rooftops.
I emailed Quora to suggest being able to decide what information gets published to the feed on a per-topic basis. I didn't get a response, which is hardly surprising, but if basic privacy-controls are outside of their plan for the site, I can't be part of it.
Why is that?
Names are important because they allow you to build reputation (ignoring actual reputation algorithms for now). So if a particular question comes up, a user might think "I wonder what Joey Joe Joe thinks about this" or "Let's see what AmazingFace82's answer to this question is".
In the case of any community that's fundamentally about self-improvement, for example the Depression topic, it's useful to see how an individual's contributions change over time. Do they become more positive? What solutions did they try, which ones were most effective?
In my view pseudonymity is usually the best solution - with real names or complete anonymity only occasionally being preferable.
Additionally, my boss was the guy who encouraged me to use Quora more heavily, so he was following me already. Even unlinking Facebook wouldn't have changed that.
There's the option of maintaining multiple accounts, but I wasn't a heavy enough user yet to be willing to deal with the hassle.
Personally, I read stuff for amusement or interest all the time that I would not want a large portion of my acquaintances knowing that I read, and certainly not without explanation. For instance, if I read an article about child abuse and get curious about the age of consent in Massachusetts, I don't want that showing up to random acquaintances in my feed anywhere.
Enabling this feature surreptitiously and without an opt-in is insanely stupid and insensitive to users. Given that Quora has very good support for anonymous questions and answers, you'd expect them to be more savvy than this.
It's just ExpertSexChange all over again
So when I see things like this, it makes me think there's surely an opportunity and the opportunity falls squarely in Quora's lap. But depending how they execute on it, they might still be leaving the space wide open for others.