We need dramatic examples of companies' valuations being hit for making such privacy violations on a whim. Google and Facebook can mostly get away with similar violations since the large majority of users simply don't care and/or don't understand the privacy concerns, but maybe it's not too late to lash back at relatively insignificant companies like Quora for blatant disregard of privacy...
>We need dramatic examples of companies' valuations being hit for making such privacy violations on a whim.
They don't exist. Only a small subset of users even care and investors and stakeholders just want their site to succeed any way it can. While not expressly privacy-related, take a look at charts of LinkedIn stock after their massive security breach where it was revealed they weren't salting password hashes. Not only did it not dip, it rose on the news and held those gains until after the story was out of the news.
The blowback from stupid share-everything policies is what will eventually collapse this social media bubble. I disabled Spotify-to-Facebook sharing completely, even though I wouldn't mind if the controls were more granular and the notifications were less obtrusive. Right now people put a lot of faith and trust in their social media providers, and the more said services violate that trust, the less users will share by default and the less valuable the services will be as a result.
The new "social" web is really creepy. Browsing in an incognito browser and logged into nothing has sortof become my default.
I don't want google chrome saving my search history, or to accidentally read an article on some news website that then broadcasts that fact to all of my facebook friends.
I'm still confused how that gets by Google. The full text shows up in search results, but is blurred by CSS for humans. Isn't that not allowed? Even experts-exchange includes the readable plaintext answers way at the bottom if you scroll down, for that reason.
edit: removed discussion of googleoff/googleon directives in the HTML source. Seemed suspicious, but apparently it's something to do with Google Search Appliance.
Yeah Google better kick them to the curb on this one. Man, for all the quibbling over Google latest activity being evil or not, they still do a much better job with basic ethics than Facebook and their ilk. The non-stop attempt to actively change privacy norms by constantly defaulting existing users into more and more revealing new preferences is starting to get really irritating. Facebook I sort of have to put up with because of friends and family, but Quora I'm done with until they reverse this braindead decision. Seriously I don't know who they think they are.
They don't think they are anybody special. What they think is that it is acceptable, normal behavior. This is not even irrational, considering the precedent set by Facebook - not only doing the same kind of awful stuff over and over again, but actually maintaining that nobody should have privacy. And Facebook has thousands of full-time defenders.
Apparently you (like a lot of savvy people otherwise concerned with privacy) will tolerate it from Facebook but not from Quora. So I guess what Quora should do is just get bought by Facebook; then you will not (be able to?) complain about their sketchy behavior.
Google allows this if you show the first page's content for visitors that came from Google. If Quora does this, it's fine - it's Google's concession to old-world media.
(If anybody has a counterexample I'd be interested to see it, but try to make sure it's not just an old result that hasn't been re-indexed since the change.)
Just get rid of the css style for .blurred_answer_wrapper span.blurred_answer and add display: none to .blurred_answer_wrapper .signup_cta_on_answer. Not that I've had more than one Quora result pop up since that began, but css is easy ;-)
Unfortunately with supercookies, IP address-based identification (maybe even machine signature based id-ing?) and such, I think incognito mode is practically a placebo.
You may be unique, but within a very small pool. For example, my current user agent string alone narrows me down to within one in ~2-3 million users/browsers. When taken with the intersection of all those other bits, it's very easy to get an incredibly high-resolution snapshot of an individual...
Ack, typo. What I meant to say was that, even if you're not completely uniquely identified by your information, if you're so rare that only a few people on earth have your information, it's just as bad.
I'm looking at this from a different direction. I don't want my fingerprint to be unique, unless it is truly random on every request. I don't want any server to be able to tie any two requests of mine together without my permission (in the form of headers/cookies). That's the whole cookie/tracking argument right there. If you are isolated from a crowd, unique, then you can be tracked and analyzed.
I used Panopticlick, and no one else who has used Panopticlick had the same fingerprint. The meat of the uniqueness was in Browser Plugins and System Fonts. Think about that... If you've installed a few random fonts you found online, you're probably sending a unique font signature. If you've grabbed a few plugins, messed around with extensions, then you're probably sending a unique plugin signature.
I'm aware of that link and here's my result in Chrome on Incognito.
Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 1,172,808 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.
Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 20.16 bits of identifying information.
Then you'd be a British IP with a US user agent, which is probably a ton of bits. I just used User Agent Switcher & changed it to firefox 5.0 under XP.
They should have provided clear notification on the next login with a link to the details of the implementation. I recall no such action occurring in anyway.
I ran across this comment of yours - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377315 - and certainly appreciate your privacy concerns. A healthy private life is undoubtedly everyone's personal choice.
At the same time, HackerNews is YCombinator's tech blog, and highly visible. Frankly, your opinion comes off as somewhat paranoid. It's not that it isn't justified, I'm not saying that one way or another, but I would strongly consider the impact statements like this have on your image in the social space.
I heard back from Kenneth. He actually said that your social strategy is a "shambles", which is excusable, and also that you "had 0 interest in improving this" -- which is not.
He said that you were more interested in getting to the moon than in building a social network around the project.
blhack, the money we entrusted you with not appropriate to spend idly dreaming up conspiracy theories.
The world is social. People chirp, tweedle, and most recently iMessage those they care about and feel a community with.
This community is now your top priority. I want to be able to show Ken that you have put together at least 10,000 likes and 30,000 followers by the end of the year. Consider this "stage one" of your rocketry design phase.
While we are not saying that failure to meet this metric means the board will necessarily replace you, consider it a part of your job description.
We are also denying your proposed budget. Please work on your social program.
What? I'm not sure what's going on here. If you want to send blhack an email, do that. This personal letter is not an appropriate use of HN comments. And sending private messages in public is quite non-cool.
It appears to be a satirical, role-playing meta-comment about the new social web being creepy. The post seems to contain a bunch of quasi-personal info mined from the web.
Hey guys! Just wanted to give an update! We hired my cousin, who has a lot of experince building model rockets, and have begun exploring launch sites! The meatball sandwiches that those of you are getting at the $6 level should be coming out soon. Pick them up at subway with a $5 shipping fee.
Also, we are going to need a little bit more money for our new office in downtown San Francisco. See attached picture of our espresso machine.
You should know that we are disrupting the moon industry right now. Android.
You miss all the moonshots you don't take. Remember that.
Sir, I read about your CTO position you posted on Craigslist. Since we both read on Quora that the future of computing is Cobol then we are like brothers already. I know a guy who installed PHP and he has a friend on Facebook(my other friend even saw it). I'll give you his username on ExpertSexChange but I need a corner office and vesting in 6 months.
P.S. Everyone will have forgotten the lawsuit against Charbucks by now. We can sell some of the extra coffee beans from the leftovers burned on the "launchpad." Ebay?...I have 91% satisfaction account. I await your Linked-In Connection so we can start the next part to hire me. I am ready to live in a valley.
P.P.S You still on my _ ? Sir, Your photo looks different now than the one on your Instagram.
That was quick (going through the first seed), but justified. In view of your momentum and execution we are approving another seed of $2mil for the next twelve months in San Francisco as detailed under separate cover. The name is fantastic. Please run the final logo by us before putting it up, otherwise keep up the great work and we look forward to more.
This is great, bordering on brilliant satire. I don't even want to think of how much effort was required to create this comment - but, there is at least one person, who really appreciated it.
I think actions like this give everyone a bad name. I'm not sure if it's the "social web" being creepy - it's Quora being really creepy, and destroying their own goodwill.
I think this is a very bad move from Quora. My guess is that they have goals on user growth and had to resort to this tactics in order to achieve that.
If you want to grow your user base, provide more value to registered users. Here are a couple of bullet points you can start with:
1. Grow the community with real content. Do that by first focusing on a specific domain/topic that has a natural draw of users. Stack Exchange draws the programmers crowd and nailed that community. Once you got to a critical mass, other communities will follow. E.g., when you have enough programmers in the same place, some of them will share some common interests like photographs, salsa dancing, etc ... Looks like Quora's base supporters are Bay Area's start up community. This is probably too small a support base for sustainable growth. Either Quora needs to expand this support base quickly or it's the END ...
2. Better relevance/recommendations. I am reasonably active on Quora. I follow 82 topics and got 8 answers. However I don't see any good question in the main page even though I scrolled at 10 page lengths.
I get the impression that Quora is in a tough spot because of the perceived implosion of the "social bubble" after the FB IPO. They have $61M in funding [1], which means that their investors must be demanding bold moves. I don't personally know anyone who works there, so it's pure speculation.
Space for 160 employees doesn't mean they'll have 160.. They just have room to grow a bit. 40 is a lot of employees, but with their funding they can afford it, and it may just be essential, we can't really know from the outside looking in.
I think Quora would have been great as a “lifestyle business” [insert appropriate sneering as necessary.] Put ads on it for logged-out users, have good SEO and high-quality Q & A, and it'll make a living for a small number of people to keep the site up. This is how Ask Metafilter[1] works, and it is among the best Q & A sites. Metafilter (which includes metafilter.com proper) seems to provide a comfortable living for about 4-ish people (I'm guessing a bit here, I think you could find more info if you looked.)
The problem comes when the company gets funding, and suddenly it's not good enough to become a high-quality, community-driven Q & A site. Suddenly you need to generate some kind of huge exit for your VC owners, and then their recent action start to make sense.
You'll have to send an email to privacy@quora.com to delete your account. I did, and they deleted my account. I also told them politely that broadcasting what every user reads to the entire world is very creepy. It is a shame, as the quality of answers at quora is much higher than in other places.
See my earlier posts about this. I deleted my account and asked for confirmation this was done, they stated it was - but all my info, comments, edits etc are all still there just simply no longer under my name!!
Just checked, you are right, my questions are still there. Their email said (exact words)
you should find yourself completely removed from the site
So in effect, our "info" is removed, but not our discussions/answers/questions?
Sorry, I should've checked before posting my above comment. It didn't even occur to me, that they might simply "de-link" my name, but keep the data as is.
I did this a little bit earlier, very politely asking them to delete my account and why I wasn't happy with the direction they went with the site. I haven't yet heard back from them yet, but it's probably a slow process.
I don't like that they'd automatically opt me into displaying what I read. That ruins any sense of privacy I have to browse the site (ignoring the cynical and probably accurate view that I had no privacy there to start). Were I curious about something but didn't want it shared with the world, Quora is a dead end. I can opt out, but if this is their idea of the future, they may remove the option.
In the meantime, I tried deleting most of my answers, though Quora doesn't really do so. Instead, changes are kept in a list of edits, which allows you to revert the change. I like that, it's handy, but I can't remove my edit history. My hope is that the changes are lost once the account is deleted, though I doubt they will.
I also dislike that deleting my account, including all data associated with it, requires I e-mail them. It seems absurd to do all this work for your users and provide them no way to easily walk out if they're unhappy with site changes (as I am). If I own the content I publish on Quora, as they claim, then I should be able to completely delete it.
At best, it's a way to prevent accidental account loss. At worst, it's a slimy method of ensuring the service holds onto user-provided data. Sadly, the only site to allow me to delete my account without sending an email thus far was Facebook[1] -- though I'm sure they've held onto a great deal of my junk nonetheless. At least they provided the option, I guess.
[1]: I believe Google also allows this, though I haven't quite gotten to the point of deleting my Google account.
Why don't they show something like "4 of your friends" read this answer without identifying the friend? They would need a lower threshold were you would need a minimum number of friends before this feature would kick in to keep the data anonymous. They could also just say something like "4 people within your network" read this and use the network effect of 2nd and 3rd degree connections.
I'm surprised that no adult websites implement a social sharing feature like that. No one is clicking on the facebook / google+ buttons on purpose, but it might be interesting to see what videos people in your network are watching if it was anonymous.
Indeed the problem - as with Facebook - is that these settings are constantly "opt-out". This is perhaps as bad as the Beacon program in that as the author correctly originally notes - some personal items might be "viewed" which subsequently detail their actions to other users which they never intended to be public.
Classic examples of mistakes in the past are like "How to propose?" or "What's a good engagement ring size?" and so on. All these problems were exposed with Facebook Beacon and purchasing decisions and after much revolt they shut it.
I honestly can't understand why Quora would implemented "User X viewed User Y" - I think that's taking the privacy perspective to a whole new level. Indeed, even on Facebook if they started listing things like "User A viewed your profile 55 times today" - it would essentially kill the service in it's tracks as would "User B viewed this photo 33 times" and so on. People have always used Facebook to stalk their friends - but that doesn't mean it should be detailed publicly for all the world to see.
This should be "opt-in" if not removed all together in my mind. As part of internal metric tracking - it's obvious that this occurs - but it shouldn't be public or should be entirely opt-in.
Even with opt-out, it can make you wonder if Quora is still keeping this data. What stops them from disabling the opt-out portion of the feature and "outing" everybody?
I see the author's point, and users should be aware Quora does this and have the facility to disable this but ... is this not an over reaction? Viewing a question titled “Should I come out to my parents?” or “What is the best way to hide an affair?” doesn't in any way imply you are gay or hiding an affair... just that you showed some interesting the question and possible answers. I'd be interesting in both those topics just to see the variety of responses. I don't think i would need to hide the fact that i viewed those threads.
If they were providing complete Quora browsing history of a user, which you could see a general trend towards topics a person reads over time, I would see a serious breach of privacy. But a single one off "so and so just read this" is hardly damning.
+1. In fact our brains are wired/evolved to do so. Debating should vs. should not is ultimately philosophical at best. We should look at things like this from a framework of reality. Reality dictates people (including smart folks like us) will indeed jump to those conclusions and form opinions about others.
Sure, viewing a question with those titles doesn't imply (in the logical sense) that you are gay or hiding an affair but to some it may imply (in the looser English sense) them all the same. More importantly, if you're cis hetero you feel no reason to hide reading a question titled "Should I come out to my parents?" because you don't feel any implicit threat. If you're a 15-year-old gay kid in the deep south with fundamentalist parents who will totally freak out if they learn they have a gay child then that threat is there. Even if you can claim "no, I'm not gay, I was just reading an interesting thread" that doesn't eliminate that threat.
Now, in this particular example, that child will almost certainly be 100% decided not to tell their parents and not need to read such a question, but work with me here. It's easy to fill in with scenarios that almost certainly do occur and could be legitimately dangerous in a number of ways. I mean, hell, a physically abusive spouse noticing you reading "How should I deal with my spouse abusing me?" is NOT GOING TO END WELL. Even if you try to explain "No, I just thought it was interesting. Of course I don't think you're abusive."
I'll freely admit these cases are sufficiently rare among the general population but they are also cases worth protecting to the point where we're still far from overreacting.
Yes, it does imply. Extrapolated conclusions may not be correct, but it does imply. Sure there may be a sensible rational explanation proving the implication is wrong, but until reason is provided to analyze that motivation, it does imply. For many such allegedly misunderstandable implications, odds are high the implication is correct.
heyitsnick posted on Hacker News. Looking at just one post, and even noting that the post has absolutely no technical or business relevance, is a VERY strong indicator that heyitsnick has a strong interest in technology and business.
The fact that Quora publishes, by default, every user's every viewing will, in practice, pretty much demolish the "but it was just once" claim by making public whether such viewings (whatever the subject) were, in fact, just once.
If all of these vague insinuations were so valueless, then why are all of these privacy-raping sociopathic websites trying so goddamned hard to expose them all, whether publicly or to their "marketing partners"?
NB: to better under stand "social networking", wordsub "sociopathic" and you'll be far closer to the truth.
I personally agree - I would be annoyed if I discovered this (I haven't logged on to Quora in a long long time). They seem to have most recently updated their Privacy Policy (http://www.quora.com/about/privacy/) on August 1. Quoting "Specifically, you consent to Quora's disclosure of information related to the ways in which you interact with the Service, such as: landing pages, pages viewed".
On the counter-side, I would have been okay if they sent a mass-mailer saying "We have introduced a new feature on Quora - now you know how your peers are doing with Quora!" - making it sound marketing-like, but in reality, percolating the information to their users in the most seemingly-harmless way possible. This could have won them actual fans for this feature.
This is completely crossing the line. Showing others what you have searched without notifying me about this is just offensive to me. I love quora and what they are doing, but this is completely below the belt.
With a security background, I'm painfully aware of how very little is private these days. But this is just a disgrace. I deleted my account. I hope others get the message.
I just can't tolerate a site where people upvote you based on where you work and not based on the content of your answer. A recent thread on using "bullets" to separate text elements on a single line wherein a Facebook employee responded by saying "I stole it from Flickr" had more upvotes by far when it was put in the newsletter than a post below it highlighting (with images and historical references) that we've been using dots-as-spaces since we were writing on stone tablets really drove this home for me.
"Quora launched with all kinds of "Former Facebooker!" hype that it hasn't really lived up to."
With all of these privacy issues popping up with them the past couple of weeks I'd venture to say their "Former Facebooker!" hype is being lived up to quite well.
Legislating this sort of thing is killing a cockroach with a shotgun. I'm of the opinion that they should be free to be sleazy with their users, as long as I'm free to not be a user (and I no longer am).
Quora is committing good-will suicide with this move, and them's the breaks, but a legal requirement preventing it is overkill.
"Legislating this sort of thing is killing a cockroach with a shotgun. I'm of the opinion that they should be free to be sleazy with their users"
Sounds like you have a high tolerance for living with cockroaches if you can just move from one apartment to another instead of rooting out the infestation.
I honestly think having accounts on social networks is now becoming a huge liability. They start of as quite private and then morph into being open and you are left holding the bag. It just means the more networks you sign up for the more networks you have to main and the more networks you have to cancel later.
This is my post. I didn't expect this on HN, but I shouldn't be too surprised I guess.
I just want to stress that I really do love using Quora. It has some of the most unique content on the internet. It is because of this that I even care about my activity syndication there.
I upvoted your post for the same reason that you posted it - in hopes that Quora will decide not to kill privacy on the site. Now I kind of wish I hadn't since the sentiment on this thread is so anti-Quora.
I love Quora, too. The amount of knowledge you gain from even a few minutes there is truly incredible. If HN'ers could get over the fact that Quora is a social site started by Facebookers, I truly believe they would love it too. Quora (and the world) would benefit from more answers from the HN community.
I don't have much to add other than "yeah, that", and the fact that the breathless cry of "zOMG PRIVACY!" and the sanctimonious hand wringing about "Well what about people who don't want (some dangerous person) to know what they're doing" is starting to get irritatingly old.
There are a few people for various reasons who should stay the hell away from social media in all its forms. Okay, granted. For me, I don't see the point of privacy for privacy's sake. Oh no! An advertiser might know what I like! Oh no! The government might know what I like! Oh no! An ex might know what I like! And I care.... why?
Put another way, I can become some sort of privacy super-advocate which means hamstringing myself socially and professionally, making my online life more difficult in just about every fashion, (No social networking, no hosted anything.. have fun with that!), or I can pick my battles and realize that I'm not a spy and more likely than not have no reason to worry about targeted ads.
Rant off - I've needed to unpack this for a while. Quora is a great resource, and I'm sick and tired of seeing people slag on it for a feature they can turn off.
And I'd like to respectfully ask that any downvoters at least bother to explain themselves before clicking. I realize this is probably a highly controversial stance, but the least you could do is contribute to the discussion.
Agreed 100%. HNers belly-ache about Quora all day, but there is an incredible amount of information on there. If you doubt me, just go look at the best answers under the Machine Learning topic.
Part of Quora's value comes from identifying answerers' identities. HNers see this as a plight on the social web, yet they can (a) still turn off views in their settings at any time, and (b) use other forums with relaxed views on privacy if they wish.
"HNers belly-ache about Quora all day, but there is an incredible amount of information on there"
That's an exceptionally strange dichotomy, people are annoyed BECAUSE there is useful information there, and the company is enforcing mostly unnecessary "social" aspects to access the data. If the data was useless, why would anyone care when they change their policy to something aggressively anti-privacy?
" the breathless cry of "zOMG PRIVACY!" and the sanctimonious hand wringing about "Well what about people who don't want (some dangerous person) to know what they're doing" is starting to get irritatingly old."
Who are you to tell any person that they're misprioritizing their personal information and the value of privacy?
YOU can do whatever you want, publish it to the ends of the earth, however we want this to be a choice. Not decided for us.
You can't wrap your head around why someone would not wish to share these things and offer an argument from ignorance, you do not understand why, nor are you sincerely interested in knowing why.
>Who are you to tell any person that they're misprioritizing their personal information and the value of privacy?
As soon as someone puts their thoughts out on the internet for everyone to read, they become valid targets for critical discussion. So in short, "I am" just like any other commenter on any other blog. Who are you to, with such righteous indignation, tell me what I can and cannot talk about?
>You can't wrap your head around why someone would not wish to share these things and offer an argument from ignorance
Ah, stop. I said it was getting old. Nothing more. There was no "argument" here. Exasperation, not an attempt to convince anyone. Besides, usually you don't convince people of anything by telling them you're sick of hearing their opinion.
I am quite willing to be convinced though - I just haven't had anyone tell me why I should care that advertisers target me. At least, not in any way that wasn't based squarely on a slippery slope fallacy straight into a dystopian future that wouldn't look out of place in a Stephenson novel.
So please, enlighten me. I am genuinely curious why this seems to bug so many people so deeply.
There is nothing certain in life but death, taxes, and monetization. It's Quora's time to start making money. It's reaching the social site late stage end of life phase. The internet's natural order.
No. You have to send a mail to privacy@quora.com and they might take mercy on your asocial soul and delete your account for good (no guarantees though).
I don't know what "deactivating" does, but the account is reactivated if you log in. I tried it and it didn't appear to do anything except log me out. I also sent an email to privacy@quora.com to have the account deleted, but it hasn't happened yet...
239 comments
[ 385 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadWe need dramatic examples of companies' valuations being hit for making such privacy violations on a whim. Google and Facebook can mostly get away with similar violations since the large majority of users simply don't care and/or don't understand the privacy concerns, but maybe it's not too late to lash back at relatively insignificant companies like Quora for blatant disregard of privacy...
They don't exist. Only a small subset of users even care and investors and stakeholders just want their site to succeed any way it can. While not expressly privacy-related, take a look at charts of LinkedIn stock after their massive security breach where it was revealed they weren't salting password hashes. Not only did it not dip, it rose on the news and held those gains until after the story was out of the news.
I don't want google chrome saving my search history, or to accidentally read an article on some news website that then broadcasts that fact to all of my facebook friends.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332978
https://github.com/benvinegar/Spectacles/blob/master/README....
edit: removed discussion of googleoff/googleon directives in the HTML source. Seemed suspicious, but apparently it's something to do with Google Search Appliance.
Apparently you (like a lot of savvy people otherwise concerned with privacy) will tolerate it from Facebook but not from Quora. So I guess what Quora should do is just get bought by Facebook; then you will not (be able to?) complain about their sketchy behavior.
(If anybody has a counterexample I'd be interested to see it, but try to make sure it's not just an old result that hasn't been re-indexed since the change.)
Unique means "only one."
One in a billion.
Do you think those two are the same?
I used Panopticlick, and no one else who has used Panopticlick had the same fingerprint. The meat of the uniqueness was in Browser Plugins and System Fonts. Think about that... If you've installed a few random fonts you found online, you're probably sending a unique font signature. If you've grabbed a few plugins, messed around with extensions, then you're probably sending a unique plugin signature.
Now I come to think about it, changing the GB to US in my user agent would probably make it less unique.
Running Firefox with no-script/ad-block/request policy + UA string set to IE 8. Sites I enable scripting on will surely get more info.
Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 21.16 bits of identifying information.
In short: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Supercookie
I ran across this comment of yours - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377315 - and certainly appreciate your privacy concerns. A healthy private life is undoubtedly everyone's personal choice.
At the same time, HackerNews is YCombinator's tech blog, and highly visible. Frankly, your opinion comes off as somewhat paranoid. It's not that it isn't justified, I'm not saying that one way or another, but I would strongly consider the impact statements like this have on your image in the social space.
I heard back from Kenneth. He actually said that your social strategy is a "shambles", which is excusable, and also that you "had 0 interest in improving this" -- which is not.
He said that you were more interested in getting to the moon than in building a social network around the project.
blhack, the money we entrusted you with not appropriate to spend idly dreaming up conspiracy theories.
The world is social. People chirp, tweedle, and most recently iMessage those they care about and feel a community with.
This community is now your top priority. I want to be able to show Ken that you have put together at least 10,000 likes and 30,000 followers by the end of the year. Consider this "stage one" of your rocketry design phase.
While we are not saying that failure to meet this metric means the board will necessarily replace you, consider it a part of your job description.
We are also denying your proposed budget. Please work on your social program.
Your board.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366002
Exactly.
I have bumped into this on numerous occasions in MMO's.
Also, we are going to need a little bit more money for our new office in downtown San Francisco. See attached picture of our espresso machine.
You should know that we are disrupting the moon industry right now. Android.
You miss all the moonshots you don't take. Remember that.
-Blhack
CEO, coffeespace rocket lab
P.S. Everyone will have forgotten the lawsuit against Charbucks by now. We can sell some of the extra coffee beans from the leftovers burned on the "launchpad." Ebay?...I have 91% satisfaction account. I await your Linked-In Connection so we can start the next part to hire me. I am ready to live in a valley.
P.P.S You still on my _ ? Sir, Your photo looks different now than the one on your Instagram.
That was quick (going through the first seed), but justified. In view of your momentum and execution we are approving another seed of $2mil for the next twelve months in San Francisco as detailed under separate cover. The name is fantastic. Please run the final logo by us before putting it up, otherwise keep up the great work and we look forward to more.
Chair, Board of directors, coffeespace rocket lab
If you want to grow your user base, provide more value to registered users. Here are a couple of bullet points you can start with:
1. Grow the community with real content. Do that by first focusing on a specific domain/topic that has a natural draw of users. Stack Exchange draws the programmers crowd and nailed that community. Once you got to a critical mass, other communities will follow. E.g., when you have enough programmers in the same place, some of them will share some common interests like photographs, salsa dancing, etc ... Looks like Quora's base supporters are Bay Area's start up community. This is probably too small a support base for sustainable growth. Either Quora needs to expand this support base quickly or it's the END ...
2. Better relevance/recommendations. I am reasonably active on Quora. I follow 82 topics and got 8 answers. However I don't see any good question in the main page even though I scrolled at 10 page lengths.
[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/quora
Like a business plan? Who knew that they'd be actually expected to offer a return on that money at some point?
I'd love to know where that money is going/has gone.
Edit: Oh.
http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-is-Quora-moving-to-Mo...
The obvious question: Why the HECK do they need 40, let alone 160 employees?!
The problem comes when the company gets funding, and suddenly it's not good enough to become a high-quality, community-driven Q & A site. Suddenly you need to generate some kind of huge exit for your VC owners, and then their recent action start to make sense.
[1]: http://ask.metafilter.com
In any case, thank you for posting it here - at least people can take the precautions.
Edit: That yes/no button is not at all obvious! They need some form of green/red color coding.
you should find yourself completely removed from the site
So in effect, our "info" is removed, but not our discussions/answers/questions?
Sorry, I should've checked before posting my above comment. It didn't even occur to me, that they might simply "de-link" my name, but keep the data as is.
I don't like that they'd automatically opt me into displaying what I read. That ruins any sense of privacy I have to browse the site (ignoring the cynical and probably accurate view that I had no privacy there to start). Were I curious about something but didn't want it shared with the world, Quora is a dead end. I can opt out, but if this is their idea of the future, they may remove the option.
In the meantime, I tried deleting most of my answers, though Quora doesn't really do so. Instead, changes are kept in a list of edits, which allows you to revert the change. I like that, it's handy, but I can't remove my edit history. My hope is that the changes are lost once the account is deleted, though I doubt they will.
I also dislike that deleting my account, including all data associated with it, requires I e-mail them. It seems absurd to do all this work for your users and provide them no way to easily walk out if they're unhappy with site changes (as I am). If I own the content I publish on Quora, as they claim, then I should be able to completely delete it.
At best, it's a way to prevent accidental account loss. At worst, it's a slimy method of ensuring the service holds onto user-provided data. Sadly, the only site to allow me to delete my account without sending an email thus far was Facebook[1] -- though I'm sure they've held onto a great deal of my junk nonetheless. At least they provided the option, I guess.
[1]: I believe Google also allows this, though I haven't quite gotten to the point of deleting my Google account.
I'm surprised that no adult websites implement a social sharing feature like that. No one is clicking on the facebook / google+ buttons on purpose, but it might be interesting to see what videos people in your network are watching if it was anonymous.
Classic examples of mistakes in the past are like "How to propose?" or "What's a good engagement ring size?" and so on. All these problems were exposed with Facebook Beacon and purchasing decisions and after much revolt they shut it.
I honestly can't understand why Quora would implemented "User X viewed User Y" - I think that's taking the privacy perspective to a whole new level. Indeed, even on Facebook if they started listing things like "User A viewed your profile 55 times today" - it would essentially kill the service in it's tracks as would "User B viewed this photo 33 times" and so on. People have always used Facebook to stalk their friends - but that doesn't mean it should be detailed publicly for all the world to see.
This should be "opt-in" if not removed all together in my mind. As part of internal metric tracking - it's obvious that this occurs - but it shouldn't be public or should be entirely opt-in.
If they were providing complete Quora browsing history of a user, which you could see a general trend towards topics a person reads over time, I would see a serious breach of privacy. But a single one off "so and so just read this" is hardly damning.
Now, in this particular example, that child will almost certainly be 100% decided not to tell their parents and not need to read such a question, but work with me here. It's easy to fill in with scenarios that almost certainly do occur and could be legitimately dangerous in a number of ways. I mean, hell, a physically abusive spouse noticing you reading "How should I deal with my spouse abusing me?" is NOT GOING TO END WELL. Even if you try to explain "No, I just thought it was interesting. Of course I don't think you're abusive."
I'll freely admit these cases are sufficiently rare among the general population but they are also cases worth protecting to the point where we're still far from overreacting.
heyitsnick posted on Hacker News. Looking at just one post, and even noting that the post has absolutely no technical or business relevance, is a VERY strong indicator that heyitsnick has a strong interest in technology and business.
The fact that Quora publishes, by default, every user's every viewing will, in practice, pretty much demolish the "but it was just once" claim by making public whether such viewings (whatever the subject) were, in fact, just once.
NB: to better under stand "social networking", wordsub "sociopathic" and you'll be far closer to the truth.
On the counter-side, I would have been okay if they sent a mass-mailer saying "We have introduced a new feature on Quora - now you know how your peers are doing with Quora!" - making it sound marketing-like, but in reality, percolating the information to their users in the most seemingly-harmless way possible. This could have won them actual fans for this feature.
http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-is-Quora-moving-to-Mo...
Quora launched with all kinds of "Former Facebooker!" hype that it hasn't really lived up to.
I've had some good reads on the site, but only from the cream of the crop threads that make it into the digest emails.
Searching out a general question on Quora seems more likely to lead directly to hordes of marketers linking back to their own sites.
I expect the bubbling up of such things (stuff that is somehow "interesting", but not useful) is a problem for the majority of social sites.
I tend to think the like button / upvote concept is just busted and largely to blame, but I certainly don't know how to solve or supplant it.
With all of these privacy issues popping up with them the past couple of weeks I'd venture to say their "Former Facebooker!" hype is being lived up to quite well.
I encourage you all to do the same. (Or call them, if you know someone.)
Quora is committing good-will suicide with this move, and them's the breaks, but a legal requirement preventing it is overkill.
Sounds like you have a high tolerance for living with cockroaches if you can just move from one apartment to another instead of rooting out the infestation.
This is quite upsetting.
FYI, to turn off this setting, go to Views -> Allow others to see what content I've viewed in feed
I just want to stress that I really do love using Quora. It has some of the most unique content on the internet. It is because of this that I even care about my activity syndication there.
I love Quora, too. The amount of knowledge you gain from even a few minutes there is truly incredible. If HN'ers could get over the fact that Quora is a social site started by Facebookers, I truly believe they would love it too. Quora (and the world) would benefit from more answers from the HN community.
There are a few people for various reasons who should stay the hell away from social media in all its forms. Okay, granted. For me, I don't see the point of privacy for privacy's sake. Oh no! An advertiser might know what I like! Oh no! The government might know what I like! Oh no! An ex might know what I like! And I care.... why?
Put another way, I can become some sort of privacy super-advocate which means hamstringing myself socially and professionally, making my online life more difficult in just about every fashion, (No social networking, no hosted anything.. have fun with that!), or I can pick my battles and realize that I'm not a spy and more likely than not have no reason to worry about targeted ads.
Rant off - I've needed to unpack this for a while. Quora is a great resource, and I'm sick and tired of seeing people slag on it for a feature they can turn off.
And I'd like to respectfully ask that any downvoters at least bother to explain themselves before clicking. I realize this is probably a highly controversial stance, but the least you could do is contribute to the discussion.
Part of Quora's value comes from identifying answerers' identities. HNers see this as a plight on the social web, yet they can (a) still turn off views in their settings at any time, and (b) use other forums with relaxed views on privacy if they wish.
That's an exceptionally strange dichotomy, people are annoyed BECAUSE there is useful information there, and the company is enforcing mostly unnecessary "social" aspects to access the data. If the data was useless, why would anyone care when they change their policy to something aggressively anti-privacy?
Who are you to tell any person that they're misprioritizing their personal information and the value of privacy?
YOU can do whatever you want, publish it to the ends of the earth, however we want this to be a choice. Not decided for us.
You can't wrap your head around why someone would not wish to share these things and offer an argument from ignorance, you do not understand why, nor are you sincerely interested in knowing why.
As soon as someone puts their thoughts out on the internet for everyone to read, they become valid targets for critical discussion. So in short, "I am" just like any other commenter on any other blog. Who are you to, with such righteous indignation, tell me what I can and cannot talk about?
>You can't wrap your head around why someone would not wish to share these things and offer an argument from ignorance
Ah, stop. I said it was getting old. Nothing more. There was no "argument" here. Exasperation, not an attempt to convince anyone. Besides, usually you don't convince people of anything by telling them you're sick of hearing their opinion.
I am quite willing to be convinced though - I just haven't had anyone tell me why I should care that advertisers target me. At least, not in any way that wasn't based squarely on a slippery slope fallacy straight into a dystopian future that wouldn't look out of place in a Stephenson novel.
So please, enlighten me. I am genuinely curious why this seems to bug so many people so deeply.
http://www.quora.com/Personal-Finance/How-much-money-have-mo...
http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-...
I don't know what "deactivating" does, but the account is reactivated if you log in. I tried it and it didn't appear to do anything except log me out. I also sent an email to privacy@quora.com to have the account deleted, but it hasn't happened yet...