Quora Feeds Will No Longer Show Data On What Other Users Have Viewed

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/after-privacy-uproar-quora-backpedals-and-will-no-longer-show-data-on-what-other-users-have-viewed/

by spathak • 14 years ago

137 60 14 years ago

techcrunch.com

RonWeasley• 14 years ago

But this feature is still partially turned on. Thanks for misleading us TechCrunch and Quora. Stop compromising our privacy.

alexqgb2• 14 years ago

Worth noting: they won't let you get rid of your account. All you can do is "deactivate" it, meaning other users can't interact with you. Oh, and you won't get email updates. But as soon as you log in again, your account is "reactivated".

It's very Hotel California.

codezero2• 14 years ago

You can have your account deleted by emailing in to privacy@quora.com see: http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-...

joe_bloggs• 14 years ago

Is this common practise, to not provide an option to delete your account except by contacting customer service? Personally I'm not aware of any other product being so sneaky in making it hard for users to quit.

Facebook was one of the first companies that started this trend of burying the "delete account" feature deep inside and making it hard to find. But by removing the option altogether, Quora seems to have raised the sneakiness bar much higher.

alexqgb2• 14 years ago

Just tried that. Here's the auto-response I got.

From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailerdaemon@googlemail.com> Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) Date: August 14, 2012 7:20:01 PM PDT

We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (privacy) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group. A few more details on why you weren't able to post:

* You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly. * The owner of the group may have removed this group. * You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post. * This group may not be open to posting.

If you have questions related to this or any other Google Group, visit the Help Center at http://support.google.com/a/quora.com/bin/topic.py?hl=en_US&....

Thanks,

quora.com admins

djtriptych3• 14 years ago

I believe Quora is taking the Facebookian view of going overboard with privacy issues, then pulling back iff users revolt. It is, technically, the best way to push social interactions as far as possible, especially if you are not punished for temporary lapses in judgement.

Users WILL NOT actually punish Quora for stunts like this, so, from the company's perspective, it's a good bet, temporary bad press notwithstanding.

I remember successfully arguing down a similar bad privacy decision at another well-known company I once worked for. It took a treatise on social software, including multiple citations of other social snafus, the painstaking gathering of stakeholder acceptance, and a near-fanatical perseverance to stymie a feature that was absolute poison to our privacy model. The guys at the top were happy to launch-and-see. I suspect that's what's going on here.

tl;dr - For this to get out at all, either Quora's process is broken, or their strategy is to overshare and pull back only when necessary.

mhp2• 14 years ago

Why do you say "WILL NOT" in such a definitive way? It doesn't seem like a good bet as a company to rely on your users and the public to forgive you when you step too far, especially if you do it repeatedly.

djtriptych3• 14 years ago

Can you point to a company that actually got bitten by this strategy? I can point to several for whom it's working well.

zizee• 14 years ago

I have already requested that Quora delete my account via email (which they did).

I might not represent the majority, I am not sure. But I think that it is wrong to say that users will not punish them.

People are becoming more jaded with each incident (regardless of which company) and becoming less tolerant of these antics. Eventually people will reach their breaking point.

Or it just might be that I am getting old and crotchety. Get off my lawn!

tsieling• 14 years ago

Some users will. I asked Quora to delete my account today over this issue. I'm just one person, and many of those who are angry and hurt care about the service, so they feel betrayed (rightly).

djtriptych3• 14 years ago

Yes people feel temporarily annoyed and quickly forget, and a tiny, tiny minority actually leave for good. Not even a blip.

hkmurakami2• 14 years ago

I completely agree that in the current age of digital social products, and I hate the fact that I can't come up with a way to make this bullshit end.

I find companies' recent behavior of this kind (FB, Quora, and was it Path?) to be revolting, yet I feel powerless to stop them from partaking in this vulgar behavior.

illuminate• 14 years ago

Or the Facebookian view of pretending to pull back, but not really. Pushing forward too far, then pulling back somewhat, gaining all that they wanted to begin with.

gbog• 14 years ago

Not counting the fact that bad publicity is still publicity, and better than nothing. I bet after this event they will have more accounts than before.

slaven• 14 years ago

"In some ways, this could be seen as a failure of communication more than anything."

What communication? If they had let people opt-in, or even asked them to opt-out then that would have been communicating.

rdl4• 14 years ago

It was opt-in. The opt-in message wasn't at all clear (even to me, and I'm a top-100 Quora user), and was presented on first use, not in a settings pane, when you first tried to view a view list -- it wasn't really clear that it reciprocally opened your own views to tracking.

The feature itself isn't horrible (followers on questions and topics are already public, and this is well understood and IMO worthwhile -- you CAN follow anon too, but it at least increments the counter), but was badly presented to users. I think just out of incompetence, not malice.

sanxiyn• 14 years ago

It definitely was not opt-in at the beginning.

http://www.quora.com/blog/Introducing-Views-on-Quora states "All Quora users participate in Views by default, but you can delete any individual view from the content's views page, or you can turn off Views anytime on your settings page."

minouye• 14 years ago

I don't think TechCrunch really understands what's going on here. Views are still being tracked and shared, albeit not as broadly.

http://www.quora.com/blog/Removing-Feed-Stories-about-Views

http://www.quora.com/Views-on-Quora-feature/Which-of-my-view...

juddlyon• 14 years ago

Reminds me of the "oh shit" SOPA backtracking GoDaddy did. Too late, you creeped a lot of folks out.

diego2• 14 years ago

Quora's latest investment round (May) valued the company at $400M [1]. According to Alexa, Quora has perhaps 1% of the traffic of Wikipedia. It seems to me that Quora has two options:

1) Be acquired by Facebook or Google. The problem is that it's no Instagram, so today it could not command a significant premium over the valuation of the latest round.

2) Find a way to make money. Just like Facebook or Twitter, ads seem to be the only way. Only, it does not have the traffic; no growth at all in the past year [2]. Therefore, the management must be doing everything they possibly can to improve their metrics. It's do or die, goodwill be damned.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#cite_note-15

[2] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quora.com

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

I always wanted an internal Quora at my company - I figured that was a possible product for them in the future.

diego2• 14 years ago

It's possible, but run the numbers. Companies that would pay for that * monthly price = ?

Very hard to justify a Twitter-like valuation with that.

true_religion2• 14 years ago

Ditto, I'd like it if they would offer it out as a whitelabel solution.

It's much better away of dealing with somethings than an FAQ or endless forums.

bravura• 14 years ago

AskBot is an open-source StackOverflow clone that has a hosted option. (Easier than hosting it yourself, since correctly installing can be tricky.)

AnswerHub (formerly Qato) is a managed clone of Quora for orgs. They caused quite an uproar because they originally hewed much too closely to Quora's design.

[edit: I see that AnswerHub is now more like StackOverflow.]

rdl4• 14 years ago

If I worked for a big company, I'd love this (or, a Quora for a loose social network like HN people, YC companies, attendees of a series of security conferences, a university department, etc.). Makes a lot less sense for a 3 person startup (at that scale, email and/or wiki makes more sense).

I think Opzi was also potentially this at one point in the past, but just like everyone else doing "enterprise Q&A", pivoted away. I think there's no way to build something which makes money, is simple, is usable and worth using, and complies with stupid enterprise policies on Q&A.

samstave3• 14 years ago

I deleted my account. There was a fair bit of a debacle in doing so, which appears to have been rectified.

Honestly, I really liked Quora for some of its content, but the UI/UX is just simply atrocious (I have said ad nausea here on HN and other places that Quora suffers from the Digg Effect; trying to wrap their idea of UI/UX around the content too much and thus preventing users from fast, mass consumption of its content.)

I deleted my account on principle: Facebook is simply the wrong model to follow on privacy issues, and the founders of Quora, being ex-facebook have no fucking clue what is an acceptable level of privacy.

And before HNers like Wpeitri and people like Brin/Schmidt can chime in; NO you're fucking wrong. 100% transparency in every little aspect of life is NOT the future, because fuck you, that's why.

I estimate about ~500K active users on quora (pure guess) which puts the user account value quite high (which would put the account value at $800) -- and personally, if my account is that valuable, then fuck them screwing with the privacy settings on the account I make there.

I refuse to be a part of this BS, and will not go back to quora.

nodemaker• 14 years ago

Although I agree with some of your points about transparency, I'm not a fan of the tone. Hence downvoted.

samstave3• 14 years ago

NP. I am pretty emotionally tied to my view of quora in this regard.

So, I accept your downvote and will take it as constructive criticism to look at my tone in the future.

I LOVE getting a comment explaining a downvote. Frankly, I have said before here on HN, that I think that downvotes should require a comment explaining why the downvote.

So, Again, i appreciate the feedback. Upvote.

jmduke• 14 years ago

I don't really agree with your assessment, but I admire the fact that you put your money where your mouth is and deleted your account.

Every time Facebook rolls out a new change, my feed is flooded with mock protest and boring complaint that aren't even backed up by any action, since people on the internet tend to be lazy (myself included.)

Deleting your account for a specific cause is, in my opinion, the best way to tell a site like Quora exactly how you feel.

rdl4• 14 years ago

There is no way there are 500k active users on Quora.

There are probably <10k people actually contributing meaningfully to the site, and another 50k or so who are upvoting/etc. in a useful way. There are other users who come to Quora via SERP.

They screwed up communicating the impact of opt-in on this feature (by making it reciprocal to seeing the views of others), and didn't do a great job of explaining it after launch. Cautionary tale for other people rolling out features. Maybe rolling it out to a few hundred friendly to Quora users (i.e. not you, apparently) for feedback would have been smart.

Also, it's not like they killed your child or anything; I don't see why you care that much, or maybe you just like being offended about comparatively minor things. I'd be filled with furious anger if my previously-anon answers got un-anoned, but other than that, there's not much Quora could do to make me seriously angry. (un-Anoning users without court orders would bring out justified pitchforks and probably lawsuits, though)

samstave3• 14 years ago

I took my estimate from their non-logged-in frontpage which shows the number of followers per topic. It was <100K per topic, with the average, subjective guess, at around 50K per topic. I figured that not everyone would be a sub to each topic and then gave a generous guesstimate at users...

re: your last paragraph, their actions have shown me that they dont give a shit about any user sentiment (unless major backlash, like this issue) and thus, I simply don't trust them with any information/content I produce/consume.

So, I deleted my account because I am so tired of not only companies like Quora, but where this general direction is taking us.

Hell, the NSA is archiving and data-mining every online transaction of everyone online and I think the acquiesence of the populous, even though seemingly small, through the actions of companies like Quora is simply unnacceptable.

Quora and Facebook are tools against freedom, not for it. If you have no safety in your sharing of information, you have no freedom.

adastra• 14 years ago

Can I ask how precisely you deleted it? When I tried a few months back, they wouldn't allow a deletion, they would only allow it to be "disabled".

My reason for trying to delete it was also privacy related, although it will seem like a minor thing. It turns out that when you initially sign up, they turn any friend you have on facebook into someone you "follow" on Quora. My list of facebook friends is not public information. The list of people you follow on Quora is. Ergo, they turned a subset of my private friends list into a public list that anyone could see, and without warning.

Again, seems like a minor thing, but in principle it was a privacy violation, so as soon as I realized this I attempted to delete the account.

roc• 14 years ago

You have to email privacy@quora.com

I also deleted my account when news of this nonsense non-feature hit. And their disabling it doesn't earn them back any points in my book.

There's no way to honestly make that move as a mistake. There's no way to 1. implement this feature as an opt-out and 2. do it without any notification to the userbase, as a mistake or as a "failure of communication".

This move can only happen, and only happen the way it did, because there is a core irreconcilable difference between my concept of privacy and theirs.

And as far as I'm concerned, their concept of 'privacy' can go get fucked with a rusty pitchfork.

wtvanhest• 14 years ago

I emailed this address: privacy@quora.com

With:

"Hi, Can you please delete my account and all data associated with it. I was originally impressed with Quora, but the main issue is that it is hard to navigate and its utility is limited. I do not want my information being passively shared on any service, especially one where I may be looking for answers to confidential questions.

After all, why else would I go to the Internet rather than just asking a friend?"

They deleted my account after about a day. The user experience is as much of a problem for me as the privacy. Navigating that site is probably the most fustrating experience on the web.

chefsurfing2• 14 years ago

Does not seem like a minor thing to me and worthy wanting to leave the system. Emailing them worked for me last week. This behavior reminds me of an early ( now-defunct ) social network which upon a person's registration would attempt a login to their email ( hotmail etc ) using the password ( not encrypted ) that the person used to register on the social network. Upon gaining access to the person's email the system would copy all the email addresses from the archive and begin spamming those users with invitations to the social network. As many naive people do use the same password for many services this attack would often succeed.

Quora ( among others ) seem to be taking advantage of our current naive attitudes about social networking, privacy and sharing. It might seem extreem to compare the email hack to these sharing hacks right now, but I think in time we will come to see that these two infringements have more in common than not.

Gratuitous plug for the Freedom Box Project: http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

pbreit• 14 years ago

Merely hiding Views is even worse since the data is still public but people are now less likely to find out. Stupid Quora.

kamaal• 14 years ago

I don't what people are even doing on quora. I hadn't even heard about it. It was only a incidence that a colleague tweeted a link, and only one answer was displayed it required login to proceed further and read more answers. At that moment I lost interest and closed the browser tab.

I can understand the need to demand login to answer or ask questions. But asking people to login to read answers is just too much for today's internet environment.

This is just a re incarnation of expertsexchange all over again.

dinkumthinkum• 14 years ago

Too little too late. Honestly, I have a lot of other problems besides this recent dust up but I think it was a last straw for a lot of people. They have just as arrogant a view about privacy as Facebook, just far less users.

I think StackExchange is far superior with a few notable issues, such as the lack of breadth and long road to go from the Area 51 or whatever it is to actually being a full site. I think StackExchange.com should have an easier of finding subject sites. If nothing else, SE shows you don't need to surrender your identity or privacy at the door just to ask and answer questions, which for many people is the time they'd raher not surrender their identity.

hkmurakami2• 14 years ago

It is truly an era of "do it, then apologize later if it blows up in my face."

I see this kind of new feature -> public outrage / privacy breach -> apology / retraction progression far too many times over the past 6 months.

How have we come to this? :(

coldpie• 14 years ago

Can you name a time in history when it was not like this?

manaskarekar• 14 years ago

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

- Grace Hopper

Quora Feeds Will No Longer Show Data On What Other Users Have Viewed

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