This is a bit f'd, Quora

http://giantrobotlasers.com/post/29340797003/this-is-a-bit-fucked-quora

by webwright • 14 years ago

827 226 14 years ago

olalonde• 14 years ago

Also, you can't view some answers anonymously anymore (blurred out a la expertsexchange.com). Seems they are desperate for new users...

mcphilip• 14 years ago

I really hope this blows back hard on Quora.

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...

spinchange• 14 years ago

>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.

omegaworks• 14 years ago

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.

blhack3• 14 years ago

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.

vladd• 14 years ago

You can no longer browse Quora while being logged out:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332978

pygy_• 14 years ago

There's a Chrome extension that allows to read without logging in (not sure how long it will work, though).

https://github.com/benvinegar/Spectacles/blob/master/README....

DodgyEggplant• 14 years ago

direct links work. try http://www.quora.com/Conversion-Optimization

_delirium• 14 years ago

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.

roguecoder• 14 years ago

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 ;-)

manaskarekar4• 14 years ago

Unfortunately with supercookies, IP address-based identification (maybe even machine signature based id-ing?) and such, I think incognito mode is practically a placebo.

blhack3• 14 years ago

You'd be wrong. Try this from incognito: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

rmc2• 14 years ago

"supercookies"? What's that?

chermanowicz• 14 years ago

While I agree with you, I think Quora did announce in advance that they were rolling this out

timmyd2• 14 years ago

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.

minm• 14 years ago

This should not be a default option. I accidently found out after reading an article in YC. So creepy.

jlgreco• 14 years ago

If they announced such a change properly, then you should not need to "think" they did so. There shouldn't be any uncertainty.

its_so_on2• 14 years ago

Blhack,

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.

nandemo• 14 years ago

Relevant: (?)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366002

jrockway2• 14 years ago

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.

yuvadam• 14 years ago

... the fuck did I just read?

blhack3• 14 years ago

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.

-Blhack

CEO, coffeespace rocket lab

ghshephard• 14 years ago

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.

doktrin• 14 years ago

This was a great piece, thank you for putting it together. The language and phrasing is absolutely spot on.

tsieling• 14 years ago

I tip my hat. The passive-aggressive corporate speak that commits to nothing while cutting a throat is a master work.

brown9-2• 14 years ago

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.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Well it seems they've learned from the company they came from - Facebook.

boomzilla• 14 years ago

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.

diego• 14 years ago

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.

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/quora

hkmurakami• 14 years ago

The latest round was funded nearly entirely by Adam D'Angelo and Peter Thiel, so the investor effect is a bit mitigated I think.

tatsuke95• 14 years ago

>"They have $61M in funding [1], which means that their investors must be demanding bold moves."

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...

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

4 times their current size of 40 employees? This is Digg 2.0 all over time.

The obvious question: Why the HECK do they need 40, let alone 160 employees?!

notJim• 14 years ago

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.

[1] http://ask.metafilter.com

ozataman• 14 years ago

Wow, this is a really big lapse of judgement on Quora's part. I'm contemplating if I should delete my account altogether.

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.

vijayr2• 14 years ago

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.

btipling• 14 years ago

I emailed them a long time ago and they still haven't deleted my account.

samstave2• 14 years ago

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!!

nilium• 14 years ago

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.

nmcfarl• 14 years ago

Yeah - I deactivated mine, less hassle than deleting, but still good enough to stop me from using the site.

engtech• 14 years ago

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.

timmyd2• 14 years ago

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.

Splines• 14 years ago

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?

melvinmt• 14 years ago

Thanks, I posted a link to this post on Quora to my followers and deactivated my account.

heyitsnick• 14 years ago

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.

m_for_monkey• 14 years ago

You are right, people shouldn't jump to conclusions, but, unfortunately, they often do.

drharris• 14 years ago

+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.

masterzora• 14 years ago

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.

ctdonath2• 14 years ago

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.

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

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.

ryandvm• 14 years ago

Hmmm. I wonder how Myoung Kang feels about this post...

dotmanish• 14 years ago

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.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

Quora must be doing well. They've outgrown their Palo Alto office and are relocating to Mountain View:

http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-is-Quora-moving-to-Mo...

espeed• 14 years ago

You can disable that in your settings.

brandoncor2• 14 years ago

Yes, but the default is on. I didn't know that until I saw this post 5 minutes ago. Now I'm thinking of deactivating my Quora account.

SebMortelmans• 14 years ago

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.

robforman• 14 years ago

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.

incision2• 14 years ago

Smells desperate to me.

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.

mnicole• 14 years ago

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.

incision2• 14 years ago

That's exactly the kind of thing I feared upon hearing of Quora's focus on real names back when they launched.

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.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

"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.

alanh• 14 years ago

I sent feedback@quora.com a message to let them know I am very upset with this gross violation of privacy and Web norms.

I encourage you all to do the same. (Or call them, if you know someone.)

rmc2• 14 years ago

This is why you need Data Protection law (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive )

cheald2• 14 years ago

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.

illuminate3• 14 years ago

"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.

jongold• 14 years ago

I think this is the Quoraish way to answer the question - meta enough? http://www.quora.com/Quora/What-do-Quorans-think-about-Quora...

electic• 14 years ago

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 quite upsetting.

ajju• 14 years ago

Sigh, another day, another useful service decides to overshare on my behalf.

FYI, to turn off this setting, go to Views -> Allow others to see what content I've viewed in feed

ivankirigin2• 14 years ago

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.

mkolodny• 14 years ago

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.

Karunamon3• 14 years ago

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.

ereckers• 14 years ago

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.

justinph• 14 years ago

Here is the thread screenshotted in the blog post, in case any one was interested:

http://www.quora.com/Personal-Finance/How-much-money-have-mo...

lifeinafolder• 14 years ago

FYI, you cannot delete your Quora account from there website. For that, you need to email: privacy@quora.com

brandoncor2• 14 years ago

I don't believe that's true. I see a "Deactivate" button in my settings. Or is that not the same thing as "deleting"?

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

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).

jlarocco• 14 years ago

No, it's true.

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...

gojomo• 14 years ago

Quora clearly announced this change of policy. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".

http://hitchhikerguidetothegalaxy.blogspot.com/2006/04/bewar...

fairramone• 14 years ago

Quora's new walled garden reminds me of expertsexchange.com. And that's not a good thing.

rjsamson• 14 years ago

This is exactly why I now stay logged out of Quora and use Spectacles (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kbckpcgmpkkfdjhmhi...) if I need to browse over to Quora.

cs702• 14 years ago

It seems that almost every week I read about yet another "social" company breaching longstanding societal norms regarding privacy. Quora is just the latest example.

What happens next has become rather predictable: a few voices criticize the company in question, the company (maybe) issues some kind of public apology, and then... nothing seems to change.

Maybe our society doesn't really care that much about privacy.

joe_bloggs• 14 years ago

Equally f'd up is the fact that you cannot delete your Quora account. Seriously. Try searching for any such option in your settings page. They only have a "deactivate" option, and once you deactivate, you can reactivate anytime by just logging in again :)

Found this quora post:

http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-...

According to a Quora engineer, it seems you can delete your account by emailing privacy@quora.com

Wow! This certainly sounds like something EFF (https://www.eff.org/) should try and do something about.

cletus• 14 years ago

I can't help bit feel vindicated by moves like this because they're a sign that Quora isn't the Next Big Thing that many inside the bubble that is Silicon Valley seemed to think it is (eg [1]).

Actually Quora is better than that (for me) in that it's a double hit on the hype on both Q&A and social.

These kinds of moves:

- requiring login to view content;

- partially obscuring content on Google results to maximize sign-ins; and

- showing what you view to other people.

come across to me as a company coming off hype and approaching a crunch point. I believe now, more than ever, than Quora will end up an acquisition for Google or Facebook or will simply slide into irrelevance.

[1] http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/08/23/the-power-of-q...

koglerjs14• 14 years ago

>Actually Quora is better than that (for me) in that it's a double hit on the hype on both Q&A and social.

well said. fuck Quora, as the OP suggested.

The best place to ask questions from the article like "What is the best way to hide an affair"--as if Quora could ever manage an honest discussion like that--is reddit.

Of course, you couldn't ask the question just like that. It'd have to be more genuine, a post on /r/AskReddit like:

"People who have had affairs: How did they happen?"

Reddit has the kind of simultaneous anonymity and validity to look at things in [1] a very accurate way.

[1] http://www.alternet.org/inside-mind-serial-rapist

ceol5• 14 years ago

That rapist thread in /r/AskReddit was, next to the time a poor girl was harassed due to a user thinking she faked her assault story, the worst thing I've ever seen on reddit. The direct responses were exactly what the OP had asked, but the comment replies by users were flooded with rape apology and victim blaming. In one instance, a rapist had to tell people to stop apologizing for him because he knew he was an actual rapist.

I would never, ever point someone to reddit as a place to have an honest discussion. You might as well make a thread on 4chan and only ask for the worst possible answers.

crag• 14 years ago

"The best place to ask questions from the article like "What is the best way to hide an affair"

Nahh ask it on 4chan- /s (of course). Be more fun. ;)

adastra4• 14 years ago

I'm sorry but this whole branch of this thread needs to be downvoted straight into the abyss. It's a massive distraction from the actual topic at hand. No thank you.

simonbrown• 14 years ago

Also, their real name policy (a while after I signed up, they emailed me asking me to use my real name).

There do seem to be anon posts, though. Not sure why.

daveying99• 14 years ago

You have to use your real name by default, but you an follow a question or ask one anonymously by clicking a button if you choose to.

meritt• 14 years ago

Quora is simply turning into ExpertsExchange. I haven't found anything terrible insightful on Quora that I can't find at the top of an HN, Reddit or StackOverflow thread.

Never quite understood the hype centered around it.

Tycho2• 14 years ago

Have you ever tried, like, actually posing a question that you want the answer to?

sciurus• 14 years ago

Don't forget Ask Metafilter (http://ask.metafilter.com/), going strong since 2003.

ChrisNorstrom2• 14 years ago

Never quite understood the hype centered around it.

It had tech celebrities. It was known as the place where famous silicon valley / tech people (from google to even microsoft) would answer questions in their gated community away from all the noise of Yahoo answers. Of course now Quora is just another Q&A site but back when it first started, I remember it well. It felt so exclusive. Registration wasn't open to the public. When a question was asked it was answered by people who mattered or were in the industry. The answers weren't nessessarily better but they felt like they mattered more because of who they came from.

They used celebrity status to promote the site, then opened it to the public. Before they had something special. Now it's just another Q&A site. Looking back in hindsight, it might have been better to keep the exclusive gated community feel where only people with credentials (startups) are allowed in.

How would the community keep itself exclusive? I thought about that last year and came up with this: http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/invention-creating-and-...

adastra4• 14 years ago

I think this graph by technology review says it all:

http://www.technologyreview.com/graphiti/427964/is-facebook-...

Looking at the value per user (shown as circle size), it's easy to see the huge difference between late 90's companies and the companies of today. Google and Facebook stand out, of course.

Notice any outliers? There's at least one company that seems to be over-hyped... (Hint: it begins with Q, and ends in "uora".)

forensic• 14 years ago

why does that show that Quora is overhyped? your contention is just that the value per user could not possibly be as high as facebook/google etc?

Quora has pretty rich content and while they'll never have a userbase like facebook i don't see why the value per user number is wrong

combataircraft• 14 years ago

I just created a bookmarklet to kill the shitty login form of Quora and keep reading it without logging into it: http://jsfiddle.net/PUyAQ/6/embedded/result/

adastra4• 14 years ago

This is awesome. Much thanks.

lucian3032• 14 years ago

It is largely irrelevant.

ivankirigin2• 14 years ago

This is apparently a new feature, just launched a 2 weeks ago: http://www.quora.com/blog/Introducing-Views-on-Quora

ctdonath2• 14 years ago

Anyone remember Belkin's fiasco of selling a router which would randomly replace webpage requests with ads for their products? Some do, and still won't buy Belkin anything due to trust destroyed. Same here: Quora may survive this, but many users will never go there for permanent lack of trust.

guelo2• 14 years ago

This isn't much different from what Facebook does showing friends all your likes and comments, except Facebook doesn't let you turn it off.

roc• 14 years ago

There's a huge difference between sharing what people have explicitly interacted with (making a comment, clicking "like") and sharing what people have passively viewed with no explicit action on their part.

guelo2• 14 years ago

With Facebook's f'ed up app ecosystem I've seen friends Like some pretty embarrassing stuff without realizing they had done so. And besides, the change has been recent, there has been a training period as people realized their Likes and comments were shared. I can't imagine how many millions of awkward embarrassing conversations have happened because these vampire companies don't care about their user's privacy.

dm8• 14 years ago

Question is, will it turn out to be "News Feed" feature of FB or FB Beacon?

Their founding team were present when FB introduced News Feed and Beacon. I'm sure they've given lot of thought to it.

Common sense dictates, it is screwed up move. I had the same thought when I saw news feed feature. But it turned out to be pretty rad and successful. Not sure what Quora team are envisioning here.

wpietri5• 14 years ago

The forced login stuff really enraged me. This is the rant I posted to Quora on the topic in hopes of getting them to change their minds:

For a long time I've been meaning to write personal stuff about my mom's death last year from a brain tumor. The question "Death and Dying: What does it feels like when doctor says you'll just live X days / months?" popped up in my feed. So I answered it. In detail. Crying as I went. At some point I realized I was hyperventilating from the sobs, but I knew if I stopped I wouldn't finish. So I wrote and wrote and clicked "Add Answer".

Since I was sharing it with the world, I decided to man up and share it with my loved ones. I copied the link and posted it to Facebook, so that my friends and family could read it. Like you'd do with any other link in the world.

And then began the fucking tech support circus. Within an hour, somebody said:

I'd like to read this but I'm unable to without giving them my FB login info. Am I missing something?

I immediately checked, and I wasn't bothered when I clicked through, even when signed out of Quora. No idea what was going on. I thought it might be some referrer sniffing plus cookies; I suggested they copy-paste the link. Another friend made other suggestions. But that didn't solve it for everybody; another person just now commented:

I wanted to read, but I got this thing saying I need to approve an app called Quora - an app which "may post on my behalf" - which seems like a rather large presumption for an app to take. Or am I misunderstanding something which is actually quite benign? Sorry to interject a facebook question into this thread, but I do want to read what you wrote....

And they're right. It's a fucking giant presumption to ask for that just so my friends can read something I wrote and wanted to share with them. So I just gave up and copy-pasted the text into the little Facebook comment box, arguing meanwhile with Facebook about what the goddamn enter key means. (It means new line, motherfuckers.)

The end result: what I was hoping would be a solemn remembrance of my dead mom is now cluttered up with people trying to defend themselves against Quora's quest for better user numbers at their next fucking board meeting.

So thanks, Quora, for strip-mining my personal tragedy to up your AARRR metrics. I hope it was worth it, because you've lost a lot of my trust.

Edited to add links:

The rant on Quora: http://www.quora.com/rage-against-quora/Rage-forcing-Faceboo... And the answer I wrote: http://www.quora.com/Death-and-Dying-1/What-does-it-feels-li...

samstave2• 14 years ago

Quora was founded by facebookers. People who actually have the worst fucking view online about what should be private and what should be public.

People who have no digital-cultural compass because the only reference point they have is from working at Facebook, thus they think that "this is how it was thought of and done at Facebook - and Facebook is the most overly hyped company in history, so I must be a fucking genius!"

No thanks.

Done with quora forever.

sek• 14 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Only Facebook makes such disrespectful moves... and then i remembered where the Quora founders came from.

I hope they fail, Facebook is a horrible example and everybody should realize that.

wpietri5• 14 years ago

I get your perspective, but I think Facebook is basically correct in the long term. Privacy is basically a historical accident belonging to the few hundred years in the west where transportation tech got ahead of information technology.

An excellent read on the topic is David Brin's "The Transparent Hand". He basically makes the argument that we face one of two futures: either all of us know everybody's business or a small elite controls the flow of information. Basically, our choice is a surveillance democracy vs a surveillance state.

I think he's right that there's no way to put the genie back in the bottle. That's not to say that Quora's moves aren't fucking annoying, but I do think just refusing to participate won't make a long-term difference in how things turn out.

cheald2• 14 years ago

And just like that, I no longer have a Quora account.

This is a "dark pattern", and it's sleazy any way you slice it. They could have easily fixed it by popping up a dialog when I first sign in that says "Hey, do you want to share the things you read in your feed? Yes/No", and I could select "No" and be on my merry way. Instead, they decided that they would make a decision about my privacy for me, and they've lost me as a user in the process.

sidcool• 14 years ago

This looks like a big gaffe by Quora.

confluence• 14 years ago

I understand people's outrage at this invasion of privacy - but honestly why do people think that anything they have ever done online hasn't already been tracked and recorded (not being paranoid or anything - just being realistic).

There is a lot of value in figuring out who someone is, what they like and don't like and what they are likely to buy (ad networks/trackers etc.).

Hence you MUST assume that everything you have done, and ever will do, is, for all intents and purposes, PUBLIC FOREVERMORE.

Not "whisper public" but shared across YouTube public with 100 MILLION PEOPLE.

Once you assume that situation you attempt to mitigate possible pitfalls and these things don't bother you so much (they still will - but the sting isn't nearly as strong).

And no - the web isn't going in the opposite direction - privacy is dead - long live privacy!

You can try and shame or regulate it away - but seeing the web as it is today and where it's going - there is no turning back.

lazugod2• 14 years ago

> why do people think that anything they have ever done online hasn't already been tracked and recorded

Because their friends, family, and coworkers don't get to see those records, and it is difficult (important, but difficult) to care about the unseen omnisciency of Google/Facebook data junkies.

pbreit2• 14 years ago

I can't think of any other situations where merely viewing a page is made public.

stfu• 14 years ago

So far I counted 10 fuck/ings and one nazi calling in this discussion. Please guys, I come here for a civil discussion and not some ragefest.

onedev• 14 years ago

stfu

malloreon• 14 years ago

your username is stfu.

damian2000• 14 years ago

I just got my quora account demoted to read-only for not using a real name .. wtf

Requiring login to view is their biggest problem. Requiring real names is their second problem.

This is just making things worse.

codezero• 14 years ago

The views feature isn't enabled until you read the announcement which is forced into the view on top of the page when you view the web site, you have to specifically click Hide to remove it and acknowledge the new option.

If you turn it off, it will retroactively remove any of your views, you can turn it off here http://www.quora.com/settings

pbreit2• 14 years ago

I am very surprised that there is so much support for this feature. I can't think of any other situation where such a passive action is made public.

bambax• 14 years ago

This is why you need to login to Quora (et al.) under a pseudonym. (It's against the TOS but 1/who cares? and 2/how are they supposed to find out?)

ngsayjoe• 14 years ago

Yahoo does the same thing ... and i immediately uninstall it upon such discovery!

valdiorn• 14 years ago

And that's why you don't use Quora

chefsurfing• 14 years ago

It seems to me there is only one good response to this type of corporate behavior: remove yourself from the equation. ou are free to quit and have them remove your data from the system. I did this last week and I feel much better now. To Quora's credit it only took 24 hours to be removed from the system. If you consider it abuse, staying in an abusive relationship is just plain stupid :)

lucian3032• 14 years ago

You don't pay for it, thus you're the product, not the consumer. The product doesn't get what it wants. Not how things work.

mcgwiz• 14 years ago

What's all the hullaballoo about?! LinkedIn does the same thing: you can see who viewed your profile if you enable your own views of other profiles to be seen by their owners.

Or do we only get riled up when the perp is a small startup that still holds the promise of cracking the holy grail of sustainability without charging a usage fee? ...Damn sell-outs, it's like all they care about is finding a way to make money.

89a• 14 years ago

never understood why people bothered with this garbage

Expert Sexchange 2.0

This is a bit f'd, Quora

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