I'd like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IdLikeToUseTheWebMyWayThankYouVeryMuchQuora.aspx

by johns • 13 years ago

902 261 13 years ago

astrodust• 13 years ago

Once Quora started blurring answers like Experts Exchange, I had no use for it. You're holding user-contributed content hostage? Go away.

Complaining about usability on Quora is like complaining about not having privacy on Facebook.

RockyMcNuts2• 13 years ago

Yeah... pretty much have to start banning them from my Google search... definitely makes me rage if I search for something, click on what looks like a good answer in Google, and then get a nonresponsive page like that. Rage both at Quora and at Google. A page like that shouldn't show up in a Google search.

chaqke• 13 years ago

yea, isn't this blatant "ghosting", punishable by delisting?

MBlume2• 13 years ago

Is there a way to ask google to permanently blacklist a domain while I'm logged in?

paulgb4• 13 years ago

Just like expert sex change, Quora has a way to see the answers without signing in (remember scrolling to the bottom?). Click the datestamp at the bottom of a blurred answer to see it.

As a long-time Quora user, it disappoints me that the content I donate is held ransom in an attempt at "growth hacking".

wilfra4• 13 years ago

As a long-time Quora user I actually like this and it is one of the main reasons I share so freely on Quora. If I knew anybody could read anything I write via a Google search, I would be much more guarded - and if they suddenly stopped this practice I would put serious thought to deleting all of my answers. But the way they do it preserves a good deal of anonymity.

I don't know if that is their intent, but it's the result.

agilord• 13 years ago

this made my day and ended my grumbling with quora, thank you!

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

I forgot about Experts Exchange! I used to love them, but when they broke their shit all I had was a medley of frustration and rage every time I bumped into their site until they went away. Shame they screwed up so badly.

On a side note, what does Quora achieve by forcing people to view the data using a native app rather than through the browser? It seems a little ... pointless, or perhaps I'm being unduly myopic with regards to their strategy.

greglindahl• 13 years ago

Quora is an iPhone-only app. Too bad for all those retina iPad users, you paid for all those pixels in vain.

eropple2• 13 years ago

Agreed. My favorite trick? I was going to sign up for a Quora account today, finally knuckling under to the stupid ExpertsExchange fuzzing crap. So I click "Sign Up With Google" (because the register page on the answer page doesn't show Twitter). They demand permission to "manage my contacts". This is a throwaway email, so I say sure, okay.

They go back to the registration screen and still want an email and password just for their special snowflake site.

I am forced to believe that the only reason for the misleading and, frankly, fucking dishonest path through my social media connections is to have more names to potentially spam in the future. Fortunately they won't get such from Dick Wickerson, Completely Fake Account.

beaumartinez• 13 years ago

I think it's in case Google's auth (or even Google itself!) goes down—Facebook's was down the other day, and if you don't provide alternative sign-in mechanisms, users can't sign in.

RoboTeddy• 13 years ago

I used to happily contribute answers where I could, as a public service.

When Quora gated my pro-bono work for their short-sighted purposes, I turned elsewhere.

andymcsherry2• 13 years ago

I'm hoping that Google will penalize them someday. They download all the content in the page so that they'll get indexed for it, but they don't offer it up without an account to the user.

niggler6• 13 years ago

How would google determine that the content being served to other users differ from what the crawlers see?

baddox• 13 years ago

Most likely by someone at Google hearing about it if it gets negative coverage like this.

jsnk• 13 years ago

Just penalize any content from Quora.com in page rank.

artursapek2• 13 years ago

If it's simply divs masking the content there must be a way to load the page on an iOS emulation, screencap the entire length of the page, and compare the amount of "content" in the source to what shows up in the screencap.

I'm not saying it's worth the trouble for Google. Quora is probably the worst example of this bullshit. But it's certainly possible to automatically catch devilry like this, isn't it?

andymcsherry2• 13 years ago

Probably if enough people report them for cloaking: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en

dannyr• 13 years ago

Change user agent to crawl as a mobile browser.

cbs• 13 years ago

The big fish (experts exchange etc...) are big enough to be caught manually. Programatically they can crawl with a typical browser user agent, from a netblock not registered to google nor announced by their ASes. They'd need to account for the dynamic nature of sites to determine if the difference between different crawls is a sign of trouble, but as luck have it they're already in the business of algorithms and archiving websites.

chazandchaz• 13 years ago

Important expression of opinion

spankalee• 13 years ago

I hit this on Android the other day and quickly closed the page and put Quora out of my mind. I'll never use it again.

bengillies• 13 years ago

It's funny because (on Chrome at least) you can select the "request desktop version" option from the menu and this goes away completely (although you do still have to login).

niggler6• 13 years ago

Quora does the same thing in chrome when you aren't logged in ...

PS: I can't think of ExpertsExchange without being reminded of the url fail.

nwh• 13 years ago

It's one sucky business model. Force people to sign up in the hopes that they'll stick around. It sounds fun, but the existence of services like BugMeNot says otherwise.

MatthewPhillips2• 13 years ago

I don't think that's the plan at all. This is so user hostile that they must be at the point where they don't feel they need to grow any more (I find it very hard to believe they are still growing with these moves).

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

> Force people to sign up in the hopes that they'll stick around.

Not just that. It's also done knowing that they default you into a half dozen different types of notification e-mail.

kawsper• 13 years ago

I am on Quora, but I can't for the life of me remember how I signed up. One day I got an e-mail saying that somebody was following me.

There seem to be some interesting debates going on there, but I haven't used it that much.

Osmium2• 13 years ago

Quora is irritating in this respect; they're always so pushy. They keep sending me weekly digest emails even after I asked them not to and repeatedly tried to unsubscribe. As it happens, I then started reading them and found them quite interesting, so I guess it worked -- but I still resent the tactics used.

im3w1l• 13 years ago

I always mark such messages as spam.

lmm• 13 years ago

You've made those tactics succeed. It is your fault that sites keep using them.

Osmium2• 13 years ago

I thought there was a legal requirement to have unsubscribe links that work? I was charitably assuming the unsubscribe function was broken by accident rather than by design. Furthermore, this tactic only works if the site has content interesting enough to overcome the extreme irritation that ignoring my attempts to unsubscribe: this is not only rare, but the site is shooting itself in the foot. There's no way I'd ever let a Quora app have access to my phone after pulling that kind of stunt.

dinkumthinkum• 13 years ago

I just can't understand why Quora continues ... in an existential sense (why does it exist). I also find it odd when anyone in this sort of community has anything but derision for it. They want to play this identity game and control their users like little children. It's just too much. At least Experts Exchange, in the old days at least, didn't basically ask me for my social security number to figure out why my winmodem wasn't working or whatever.

Helianthus• 13 years ago

Who would have thought we'd be nostalgic for Experts Exchange.

rdtsc• 13 years ago

At least EE had the funny mis-pronunciation -- "expert sex change" going for it.

Simucal• 13 years ago

I have the same frustrations as other people regarding the choices Quora has made regarding its platform.

However, I have also found a lot of high quality answers to some very interesting questions on the site. It has some really good content once you get inside.

smegel• 13 years ago

Seeing things like this makes me want to punch a hole in the wall.

Buzaga• 13 years ago

Just opened Quora to see if my user was still there:

User name: Alsfkj Alskfjaslkfj

E-mail Quora probably sends weekly e-mails: alsfkj@x.com

(sorry if any of you owns x.com)

rbn• 13 years ago

eBay owns x.com

rurounijones3• 13 years ago

This is a good place to use alsfkj@example.com

With example.com (which cannot be registered) you know you are not potentially smacking around the domain of a poor company

devicenull• 13 years ago

eBay is not exactly a poor company (current owners of x.com for some completely bizarre reason)

rdl2• 13 years ago

I usually use the site's own domain -- so a fake account on quora gets an @quora.com domain.

gallerytungsten• 13 years ago

How much money does Quora have left, and what is their burn rate? Are they making any revenue? It seems not.

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

> [nytimes paywall measures] These techniques are wide and varied. They appear to look at your IP, use cookies, use HTTP_Referer, use URL querystrings.

"Appear" what now how? Nope, it's just cookies. Very easy to defeat for anyone who cares on the desktop -- somewhat harder on apple walled garden mobile. But apparently good enough for their revenue, so.

venomsnake2• 13 years ago

Nytimes paywall depends on inducing different feelings. They just use it to remind you that "Hey we are doing great work here, show us some support" ... so they don't mind it being porous.

shanselman2• 13 years ago

Hm, I looked into this, and as of recently you could get around it just by changing the QueryString: http://twitchy.com/2013/02/12/paywalls-are-hard-new-york-tim...

The cookies are for the number of times viewed, yes.

The HTTP Referer header is used to tell if you came from google or twitter: http://www.labspaces.net/blog/1258/Thwart_the_NYtimes_paywal...

They definitely look at IP address for geographic reasons: http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2011/03/on-the-new-york-times-pa... but you are correct, they don't appear to use it for the paywall.

Thanks!

shurcooL• 13 years ago

I completely agree with the article.

Apps are just fancy web bookmarks with some advanced abilities (interruptions, native code, state). I prefer to have as little apps as I can get away, so anything that can be viewed in a browser, I view in a browser.

I just want to know if you can get around this forced solution by picking "Request Desktop Site" in Chrome for iOS?

aaaqw2• 13 years ago

you give them too many rights when you install their app

MatthewPhillips2• 13 years ago

This was posted an hour ago and still no one has released a bookmarklet to circumvent? Come on HN!

logn• 13 years ago

I recommend Noscript browser plugin. I've added Quora and a whole slew of news sites to my block list. The trick is to globally trust all sites in your prefs and then access the blacklist through about:config or manually add each one through the context menu.

walkon2• 13 years ago

That's not a bad idea. Here is some bookmarklet code that retrieves and displays the actual answers when hovering over the blurred out answers. The downside is, it cannot do anything about the answers that do not have a permalink (clickable datestamp).

  javascript:(function($) {
    var $answerTextDivs = $("div.answer_text:has(.blurred_answer)");
    function heal() {
        $answerTextDiv = $(this);
        $answerLink = $answerTextDiv.find("a.answer_permalink");
        if ($answerLink.length === 0) {
            showError($answerTextDiv, "could not find answer - no permalink.");
            return;
        }
        $.get($answerLink.attr("href"), function(d) { 
            var $permaAnswerDiv = $(d).find(".answer_text");
            $answerTextDiv.empty();
            $answerTextDiv.append($permaAnswerDiv.first());
        }).fail(function(e) {
            showError($answerTextDiv, "ajax call failed - " + e);
        });
    }
    function showError($container, message) {
        var $errorDiv = $("<div>");
        $errorDiv.text(message);
        $errorDiv.css({
            'background-color': 'red',
            'color': 'white',
            'padding': '2px 6px',
            'position': 'absolute',
            'margin-top': '38px',
            'z-index': 2000
        });
        $container.prepend($errorDiv);
    }
    $answerTextDivs.one('mouseenter', heal);
    $.ajaxPrefilter(function(options, originalOptions, jqXHR) {
        /* this is to prevent annoying UIX usage tracking POSTs to Quora */
        if (options.type === 'POST') {
            jqXHR.abort();
        }
    });
  }(jQuery));

NamTaf2• 13 years ago

I have a bookmark on my iPhone that scrolls to the bottom of the page using Java. Is it not possible to hack something together that takes the hidden data (since the OP says it loads the actual info behind the white blocking screen) and reveal it instead of the white?

It's another couple of button presses but if it fucks them over for this scummy tactic I'm all for it.

silencio• 13 years ago

I wrote a script that would unblur Quora answers (that one of my friends turned into an extension) a while back. Turned out that Quora started to just substitute blurred images instead of just blurring text via CSS soon afterwards.

I'm pretty sick of this constant cat and mouse game, and I just used the Google Personal Blocklist extension for Chrome to remove Quora from my Google search results.

nollidge2• 13 years ago

I'd rather just not visit their site at all. It's a big Internet.

d0m• 13 years ago

I hate when they say "Log in to read the answers".

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

Yep. In the past month or so, I've been conditioned not to click on Quora links for disappointment-avoidance.

"Oh, look at that, someone had my exact problem on Quora!" ... "Fuck this nonsense, I'm going back to Stack Exchange/Google."

...Which then prompts this response: http://xkcd.com/979/ The answer might as well be that far away.

This drives me up a wall. I hate it when websites try to restrict their readership so brazenly.

On the one hand, I respect that the website has the authority and right to control its own information. On the other hand, it was submitted by a collective pool of users, and I just don't have the time to bother with side-stepping the shitty blurring mechanism. I just learned not to click on Quora links anymore.

codeka• 13 years ago

Worse than http://xkcd.com/979/ is when the only answer is the OP saying "never mind, I figured it out."

sgdesign• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm the exception but I really like the new "download this app" banners. Much less intrusive than the standard splash screens and integrating them with the OS makes sense.

spc476• 13 years ago

Hmm ... it seems like it's a replay of the web circa the late 90s. http://boston.conman.org/2013/02/07.1

aaaqw2• 13 years ago

scrape quora's content and share

pg4• 13 years ago

I think Adam's mistake here is to go too much by the numbers. He presumably has numbers that show that Quora ends up net ahead if they force people to create accounts to read answers. He grew Facebook very effectively by following the numbers. But he may not realize how different this case is from Facebook's. It may well be that for a site like Quora, at this stage in its life, users are not all equal. It may be a mistake to alienate the sort of people Quora has been alienating by doing this, even if they end up numerically ahead in the short term.

I'm one of them. Quora has now spent several years training me to be bummed out every time I click on a link to their site. Every time it happens, I dislike them more, and become more resistant to creating an account. I now think of it as a site for other people, who are willing to put up with the stuff they do. I'm pleased to find there are others like me.

I like Adam, but I wish he'd stop doing this.

rdl2• 13 years ago

I'm a pretty heavy user of Quora, and I have been "trained" the same way, at least on mobile.

When I click on a Quora link inside FB app or whatever, it takes me to iTunes to re-download the Quora app. Or, I click in Twitter, and it doesn't have my credentials, so same problem as you.

It also keeps me from posting links to Quora content anywhere else.

binarycrusader2• 13 years ago

It's so utterly broken. At the beginning I was just annoyed because you could select the blurred text and still read it, but now (for the desktop site) they actually substitute the text with dynamically generated images that are a blurred version.

I became so enraged over this that I decided to install the "Personal Blocklist (by Google)" Chrome plugin and then added quora.com to the blocklist just so that I wouldn't see them in results when I searched for things on Google.

Like you, they've trained me to never want to contribute to their site, and to never, ever want to consume the content they provide.

davidandgoliath• 13 years ago

Same. It takes a lot to get on my blocklist and the only site that now populates it is quora.

niftylettuce• 13 years ago

This is the same reason why I wrote this Quora Login Prompt Block that was on HN a while back...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-quora-login-...

254 users and growing, quick hack is to add ?ref=fb

markdown• 13 years ago

Who's Adam, and what is his role in all this?

staunch• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_DAngelo

markkanof• 13 years ago

Apparently Adam is one of the founders of Quora. Depending on what online communities you are part of, Paul Graham's comment may be confusing as he is directly addressing the founder of Quora, not Scott Hanselman who is the author of the article.

largesse• 13 years ago

Weren't Quora the ones who tried to tell other users which pages you read also?

Yup, it was them: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/08/09/creepy-quora-erod...

This more than cluelessness, it's the same sort of low-grade sociopathy that underlies Facebook's shifting non-privacy policies.

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

>Quora has now spent several years training me to be bummed out every time I click on a link to their site.

"Bummed". Yeah that really describes it perfectly. Especially with how immaculately their digest emails are constructed, to be hit with that asinine wall is a straight-up bummer, and stops me dead in my tracks.

eshvk2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I have been incredibly impressed by how good their digest email is designed. I am sure there is a serious amount of cherry picking (or machine learning) that goes into them but they are damn good, I say.

semilshah• 13 years ago

I am a huge Quora fan and user but would have to agree with this assessment. Most of Quora's traffic "lurks" and this will be the search audience they need to get. What they're doing now is trying to make sure they have your account credentials to monitor what you "lurk" for. At some point, my guess is that they'll remove this tactic. I will say, however, that the web created "inside" Quora is some of the richest, most high-fidelity information on the entire web, and it may not exist elsewhere.

bitcartel• 13 years ago

Quora is now 3 years old and has taken $61 million from investors. Are there any numbers publicly available to show user growth over this period?

SwellJoe2• 13 years ago

All the numbers show stagnation, and Quora getting dwarfed by other (less prone to ass-hattery) answers sites, like StackOverflow. Quora traffic hasn't grown in years, according to Alexa and others.

I believe they're simply optimizing the wrong variables. It has certainly driven me away. I use the google personal block list, and Quora was among the first sites to go on it.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

It's funny, I'm more likely to fiddle about with chrome's inspector to try to remove just the right divs to get a quora page to be readable than to spend however long it takes to sign up. It's personally grating to me that they take such a boneheaded tack to content in the 21st century. Did they learn nothing from expertsexchange? It grates even more that they are putting crowd sourced content behind a wall.

megablast• 13 years ago

Ah yes, firebug is also great for stuff like this. Click on firebug, click on the overlay, press delete. Bam, you have your page.

Doesn't work so well on mobiles though.

ap22213• 13 years ago

I've thought about doing this. But, why bother? Most of the time the answer I'm looking for is just one or two more searches away.

bad_user• 13 years ago

Personally I don't do that. Unlike many technical people, I don't have AdBlock installed either.

Giving a service attention and eyeballs in this day and age is like giving them money. It's actually worse, because you're the product and so they don't treat you like you're the customer. Even if they don't get money from you, even if you're using AdBlock, even if you are totally immune to advertising or any other means of indirect monetization, they might get something from your friends, which is why Quora is insisting on logging in with your Facebook account and showing your activity to your friends. And even if you don't log in with your Facebook account by bypassing their wall, you might send links to your friends at some point. So the mere act of giving them eyeballs is helping them grow and is encouraging them (and others) to use the same tactics.

What I do is that I simply don't use Quora or any service or website that doesn't treat me well. Quora does have some interesting content in there, but it isn't valuable enough for me to do any sacrifice. Even if it's a free service, I'm not putting up with free services that don't respect me. If companies need to monetize and provide value worth paying, all they need to do is ask for it, as I've got money to spend on valuable things.

Otherwise I would rather focus my attention on things and products that actually deserve it.

piyush_soni• 13 years ago

I do exactly the same through Firebug in Firefox. :) I do actually have login for Quora, but when at times or on machines I'm not logged in, I just do that quickly to read the answers.

balajinix• 13 years ago

Yahoo Answers is open. Has millions of questions and answers. Lot of people who truly appreciate a good answer, use it. Just that elite don't want to answer questions from ordinary folks and seclude themselves in quora.

ImeldaTheHun• 13 years ago

Yahoo Answers is also STUPID. Full of not-all-that-bright high school and middle school kids trying to get help with their homework. I have written answers for some of those kids on Yahoo Answers, in subject areas where I know a lot. It drives me to despair. The best answers I see on YA are workmanlike.

On Quora most of the questions are reasonably good, most of the names are real, and some of the answers are brilliant.

mickhagen4• 13 years ago

Here comes the mob. Really? Are we all gonna throw up our arms because of this? We use their service, we consume, read and digest their content like blood-suckers and now we get mad they're asking us to sign up? PG you've been reading Quora for "several years" and you think it's unjust they are asking you to sign up?

Quora has let us eat at their house for years and now all they're asking is we take off our shoes before entering. Let's not forget, we're in their house!

As an entrepreneur, how will we ever convince users to actually pay for products when the mob and pitch forks come out when they ask us to sign up?

We are so entitled it's sad. Really hope Quora doesn't bow down here. They aren't asking for your first-born. If you wanna be a member of their community, then be a member. Nothing unfair about that.

lusr2• 13 years ago

Read his comment again. He's describing the same frustration I and apparently many others have experienced clicking on a link (from a search engine, a blog, etc.) only to hit a wall. At this point I'm not a user of the site yet. The gist of your argument is how we're using a service, etc. That's fine, they can setup their service however they choose. And we, as potential users, can point out what a poor setup they have chosen.

The irony is I have an account... linked to my Facebook profile. But I can't log in with that from work. There may or may not be a way around this (perhaps a new account or linking my account to an email login), but I'm so irritated by their antagonistic approach that when I see the wall appear I just close the browser tab.

It's now gotten to a point where I don't even bother using Quora from home because I so strongly disagree with their policy.

Katelyn• 13 years ago

I agree with this argument, but not necessarily the tone of it.

Quora is a business as much as it is a consumer facing service with a strong mission to uphold. But the reality is, if Quora didn't keep its numbers out of the red and into the black by doing "annoying things" like forcing app downloads or account creation, then they would run out of capital and cease to exist. So, take your pick. Or better yet, just stop complaining.

Also, their mobile website isn't fully functional or in some cases usable. I beta test it, and it's riddled with bugs and missing features. Frankly, a lot of services today are skipping mobile web all together, and focusing on driving app downloads to provide a richer experience.

Bottom line: Services valuable to end users are also running a businesses. We must learn to give and take.

skrebbel2• 13 years ago

I disagree with your point but also disagree with the downvotes. (are people downvoting commenters who disagree with pg?)

Anyway, you're forgetting something important: We're completely entitled to not use a sucky service and blog about it. That's what going on here: there's people who decide to vote with their feet, and tell others about it.

hmbg• 13 years ago

I believe the argument is not that the Quora team should be incarcerated for putting up a wall, but rather that this setup may not be the best way to build a large community and, in the long term, a profitable company.

pg4• 13 years ago

Their content? I don't think even Quora would claim that.

And how exactly is creating an account taking off one's shoes before entering? I would not be contributing anything to the Quora community by creating an account. I'm not depriving the community of anything by not creating one.

I believe the reason Quora tries to force people to create accounts is not because this helps the community, but simply because this is the first step of the funnel of their viral spread mechanism.

h2s• 13 years ago

It's good to see a dissenting point of view, but I disagree with your point about a collective sense of entitlement. It's more of a shared set of expectations about how the web works. In fact I'd argue that perhaps this point could be turned back on itself: it's the entrepreneurs who are guilty of a sense of entitlement because they want to build a closed system on top of an open one out of some perceived "right" to acquire signups.

If everybody on the web were using this tactic it would be a valueless platform. The only rational reaction, then, to those that use it, is rejection.

ubernostrum• 13 years ago

There are answers sites that require registration. There are answers sites that don't. If one of those models outperforms the other -- say, by producing a more profitable company -- then that's that. It's not my job, or anyone else's job other than a business owner's, to make it easy to get paid customers.

pi18n2• 13 years ago

The problem is that they work hard to appear in the top page of Google and then don't show the answer unless you sign up. I'm not going to be signing up and I very much resent that they've taken a position that could have been filled with a resource I want to use.

ahoyhere• 13 years ago

You got downvoted but I wanted to address one of your questions:

"As an entrepreneur, how will we ever convince users to actually pay for products when the mob and pitch forks come out when they ask us to sign up?"

Ah, but the mob don't attack with pitchforks when you charge for a service. What they object to is bait & switch. Only a handful of random weirdos from the bowels of the internet have complained about me charging for my software.

Here's why:

Because I only have one audience -- my customers -- my job is making them happy. If I don't make them happy, they take their money elsewhere. This doesn't mean I have to do everything they ask, and for sure I don't. But the nature of our relationship is clear: Customers are the butter to my bread.

My job is simple. I do not have competing interests. Thoughts that will never arise: "Gee, I need this data for advertising, but users don't want to give it to me." "Gee, we use all this bandwidth for our free service… we need to put ads on it… but they won't like that if we tell them… I know, let's phrase it really confusingly and maybe they won't notice!" or my fave "Gee, we need to make money… I know, let's claim the rights of everything people post on our service, and stop third-party developers from distracting people from our proprietary interface."

That temptation is what leads these apps to ruin. That temptation is nearly impossible to resist… they do want & need to make money, after all.

Better to avoid temptation altogether by creating a business where charging is natural, expected, and welcomed by the would-be customers.

tlogan• 13 years ago

You are 100% right. I think we (readers of HN) are the wrong demographic for any company to be profitable. We are "everything should be free because we are cool" demographic. Do we like Oracle Database? No - because it is not cool (even if all our money and investment is managed using that evil database). Do we like Mongo? No - because it is not PostgreSQL. Do we like Facebook? Hell no - they are evil. Do we like Google? Not really - even they are a lot people from Google here. And so on...

And, I have to admin: I'm the same demographic and really hate what Quora is doing but nobody outside Silly Valley really cares.

zallarak4• 13 years ago

I disagree - they are building a valuable repository of knowledge. If a simple login form is a deterrent for you in learning or understanding something new, that's unfortunate. Don't get me wrong, I also get a little dissapointed when it happens, but don't really mind logging in.

codelust2• 13 years ago

I'll keep aside the logic of whether I like what they are doing or not and ask if they have any other option.

The die has already been cast in Quora's case, from what it looks like from the outside (I'm speculating wildly here), it looks like the company realized a while ago (around the time of the Charlie Cheever ousting saga) that they're growing at a pace much slower than what is expected out of them.

A $11 million series A to $50 million series B usually fits the profile of a company in hyper growth stage.

Is Quora a company that fits such a profile? All pointers (admittedly imperfect) say 'no'. Even going by their latest feature, blogs, it would appear that they're also running out of tricks. Such a feature is often a clear indicator of the flattening of user growth, leading companies to chase down usage growth aggressively to make up for the decline in the former.

But a $50 million series B should fly in the face of such an assumption. Well, maybe not. Money can either help you unlock known avenues for growth or it can help you explore unknown avenues. Either option buys time, but with different ends in sight. DAngelo putting up some of his own money certainly points at the latter. It looks like an attempt to buy time to explore.

While it is hard to wager what their burn rate should be, it is probably not enough to burn $11 million in two years. Even with the really nutty assumption that they have actually burnt $11 million in 2-years, with the current round they should be good for another 2-3 years. That's enough time to focus purely on how to massively grow the product without having to worry about how will you pay the bills in the coming week.

With that perspective in mind, it is easy to see why they're less interested in being a warm-and-cosy small community with great answers that pushes all the right buttons with the power users.

Their road ahead is a choice that's already been made. Where they will get to on that road, I don't think anyone knows yet.

One thing is certain, though. They'll either win really big, or will flame out pretty badly. They've already boxed themselves into a place where there is little space in-between.

hollerith3• 13 years ago

>I'll . . . ask if they have any other option.

The other option would have been to choose not to take VC money -- or to have chosen a "business model" not heavily dependent on high-quality uncompensated contributions from users.

jonathansizz• 13 years ago

Maybe they're not growing very fast because (quite apart from their other failings as indicated here) their entire business model is based on convincing large numbers of intelligent, knowledgeable people to produce content for them for free, which Quora can then make money off?

kamaal2• 13 years ago

>> He presumably has numbers that show that Quora ends up net ahead if they force people to create accounts to read answers.

Well you don't have to be a genius to realize this.

So as long as there is a unlimited supply of free email accounts, asking for a compulsory log in to do things like reading answers is going to lead to only one thing: Users creating fake id's to read them. Good luck if they remember the login of that fake id next times they come in. Else what you will see is the same user creating as many id's he wants at his disposal.

If you by these numbers you are going to get the most misleading figures of number of users your site has.

I hope Quora realizes what they are doing.

snarfy• 13 years ago

Quora is just another set of URLs in my google blacklist.

uladzislau• 13 years ago

I created a "test" Facebook account which I use for Quora sign in and many other sites. Works like a charm!

jim_shook• 13 years ago

Another reason this is dumb is that this is the kind of thing that Google doesn't much like. They don't want to index and rank content highly just for it to be mostly inaccessible.

I have no idea how much new traffic to Quora comes from organic search, but I have to imagine its not unsubstantial.

wslh• 13 years ago

Now Quora reminds me of "Experts Exchange" and other spammy Q&A sites. Just because they hide the questions.

abp• 13 years ago

A little late to the party, but I want more Users!

psadri• 13 years ago

In other words, Quora is trapped in a local maxima.

mofle2• 13 years ago

I just created a Chrome extension that removes the Quora login requirement: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker

mofle2• 13 years ago

I also created a Userscript for non-Chrome users: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker-userscript

jamesmcn• 13 years ago

The day this happened was the day I stopped contributing to Quora.

I did not delete all my contributions, but almost did.

eliben• 13 years ago

Interesting. Such tricks is exactly why Stack Overflow originally went against Expert Exchange, promising never to hide user-contributed content, and explicitly licensing it as Creative Commons.

Quora is its content. Its content is user contributed. Hiding such content from other users is just plain evil.

martinced• 13 years ago

StackOverflow does modify user-contributed content and have very serious moderators issues.

Which is why I'm sure there's going to be something new coming along one of these days: something where users are in control of what they post (e.g. not a wiki unless the user who did post does accept himself others' edits).

Collaborating to answer questions is fine. But modifying and closing questions artificially (due to very serious moderators issues) isn't acceptable either.

So I'm waiting for the next big thing and I'm sure it shall come.

damian20002• 13 years ago

The difference is that SO mods are actually trying to improve the quality of the site, or at least that's their purpose. Whether people perceive them as doing that in all cases, that's another issue.

Quora is hiding answers to make you sign up.

Apocryphon2• 13 years ago

The mod vs. unmodded issue is a classical problem on the internet, and may never be solved fully. I don't think SO's modding is any worse than Wikipedia's. As such, both are good enough.

insteadof• 13 years ago

And these are all laid out in front in their footer, the FAQ and About page.

You know what you're getting into when you post on a Stack Exchange site. If you don't like it, then you're okay to not use it.

Not like when you post on Quora. Do they tell you that your answers will be blurred and hidden behind a login-wall?

But really, the best programming joke hidden in source code is nothing more than noise. There are other places for that. When you want to cram that into Stack Overflow, then you'll have problems with its moderation.

zem2• 13 years ago

stackoverflow modifies user-contributed content in much the same way wikipedia does. there is a very clear audit trail for who changed what; as far as i've seen there is never the case where my name is on something but it has been silently changed by someone else.

NelsonMinar• 13 years ago

The user-contributed content is the central issue. They rely on the kindness of Internet people to create the content, but then they do various tricks to hide that content from Internet visitors. It really is just plain evil.

SquareWheel2• 13 years ago

My only experience with Quora has been Googling for a question, seeing they "blurred" the answer, and immediately closing the tab. Was I really expected to make an account? I don't have time for that, there's a dozen other search results I could be checking instead.

My first and only experience with them, and I assumed they were just another scummy ExpertSexChange type of site. We have open platforms, no need for this nonsense.

ehc• 13 years ago

Totally agree with the article also. I've run into this in the past when getting there from search results, and it makes me really hate Quora.

xefer• 13 years ago

I've never understood how anyone thinks they can be successful by making the web worse.

T-hawk• 13 years ago

Because "successful" is defined as baiting users into yielding their personal information in order to force-feed them ads and other marketing junk. Success isn't defined as users finding what they want or otherwise having an informative or pleasurable experience.

The ur-example: Zynga and their addiction-center manipulators that masquerade as games. Zynga succeeds if they pay, not if they enjoy it.

lukejduncan• 13 years ago

Even worse are mobile sites that ALWAYS display a full "download our app!" page.

The New York Times handles this rather gracefully I think. Go to a mobile page and they have a swipable banner that says "hey we have an app, but you can easily ignore me."

I wish more sites would do this. I understand you want conversion to your app. I get it. But stop undermining your mobile experience. Sometimes it's what I need / want.

r00fus• 13 years ago

The worst part of the "We have an app" div/interstitial is that sometimes I have that app - and I'd love for the page to redirect me.

Instead, that's too hard, and they can't detect installed apps on my phone, so I get the spam every time.

damian20002• 13 years ago

Another thing I dislike from Quora are their annoying "Kumar asked you to answer this question" style emails that come in addressed to you. Its probably their way to increase the answer rate. I think I did actually contribute an answer on the first one of these I received.

ozataman• 13 years ago

I close the tab immediately and without a second thought every time I get their "you must be a registered..." page after following a link there.

This is like forcing a girl to say "I love you".

joshualastdon• 13 years ago

Look, I love Quora and what they are doing. You like quality answers and want to get access to the community of users providing it? Then, at the least make the tiniest contribution back to that community by creating an account. Simple!

pg4• 13 years ago

How does someone merely creating an account contribute to the community?

Robin_Message• 13 years ago

If you create an account, they have another user which makes it easier for them to raise money and/or figure out a way to monetise in the future, which means they are less likely to die, which means you have contributed life to the community.

Of course, actually having a business model might be a better plan for them, but there have been plenty of QA sites that have not found a model that works, so that sounds harder than just getting more users.

vegashacker2• 13 years ago

Nitpick on the NY times stuff: In my experience at least, they do not paywall you for links that come from an email, as the author claims. It's only links that originate from clicking to articles when you are already on the site that count against your monthly limit of 10. Links from Google, Twitter, email, etc all take you straight to a paywall-free article.

shanselman2• 13 years ago

Ah, good nit, I'll double check. Maybe I've met my limit on all my browsers.

vegashacker2• 13 years ago

Nope, I'm wrong. I think actually nytimes has been changing stuff recently, but I just reproduced a case where I was blocked even by emailing myself the link. Pasting the link into Google still works tho.

diziet• 13 years ago

When viewing a site's content that shows up high on google's search requires me to break out the inspector and hide divisions, or to spoof being a different user agent, something is wrong... very wrong.

eranki• 13 years ago

I used to like Quora a lot but always hoped it would grow out of its Silicon Valley cliqueyness... I think a lot of these recent changes ensure that it's going to continue only serving that niche.

dmor• 13 years ago

I also noticed they force you to login on the desktop version in order to read answers. Maybe this works, but the friction was seriously annoying and as a really active social media they probably missed out on a Facebook post or tweet I would have made about what I found.

I feel like it is a bait-and-switch, because as an early user I LOVED LOVED LOVED Quora and contributed a ton. Now I'm just annoyed by them all the time.

intellegacy• 13 years ago

If you could redesign Quora, what would you come up with?

volandovengo• 13 years ago

I really don't understand why people are so up in arms.

First everyone was in love with Quora, now everyone hates them? What changed?

Yes - they want you to join their community because their ecosystem depends on people signing up. I signed up for Quora once and since then it's never forced me to sign in again.

d0gsbody• 13 years ago

I, too, signed up for Quora once. But I don't want to sign in every time I want to browse the site.

The ironic thing is that, if they'd just let people browse, they'd sign in on their own.

venomsnake2• 13 years ago

Because people hate being coerced to do something. Stackoverflow didn't need to force people to do so. A Q&A site only purpose is to give you the best possible answer. FAST. Anything else degrades your experience.

If quora breaks me out of the flow to register to their site ... they have cost me way more productivity than they could possibly bring back.

Cryode• 13 years ago

I had a similar thought when reading the article and these comments. I've been a member of Quora for a long time, and I can't remember the last time I had to log in again in my desktop browser. Any time I've navigated to a Quora page, I've seen all the answers no problem. So a lot of these complaints are news to me.

I completely agree with the mobile blocking through Safari & others, though, especially if the whole page is being downloaded.

marshray2• 13 years ago

I put thought and care into putting a few answers on Quora. I regret it now. I never would have done so had I known they were going to go Full Retard like the reviled ExpertSexChange.

I hope this pattern of bootstrapping with domain experts and later ditching them for leveraging volume users doesn't portend the future. Or maybe I'm just a little slow to catch on.

halfninety2• 13 years ago

Signing up wasn't so simple back in the days. I still remember when I wanted to see the full text of an answer, Quora asked me to sign up, so I went to the signup page, and it said something like Quora is in closed beta, you need an invitation to sign up.

brador• 13 years ago

Who owns the content on Quora?

Could someone just scrape all the user contributed stuff and start a new site? Even if it was just all flat text I'd use it. Would this be legal?

skymt• 13 years ago

Quora's terms of service allow for republishing[0] of any amount of content posted after April 22, 2010, so long as the user didn't mark it as not to be republished. There are a few caveats around attribution and a requirement to update content on request if Quora's copy changes, but it's actually fairly liberal.

0: https://www.quora.com/about/tos (search for "Quora's Licenses to You")

dreamdu5t• 13 years ago

Try telling the manager that.

orangethirty• 13 years ago

So do you think I should black list them on Nuuton? I'd rather not waste my time with a site that does this.

fabian2k• 13 years ago

A second "feature" of Quora that is an absolute deal-breaker for me is that they require real names for the accounts. And I imagine that I'm not the only one who doesn't want to use their real name on just any site on the internet.

And am I the only one who finds the whole interface totally confusing? Navigating the site is anything but intuitive, and I never even found a list of topics/tags.

cncool• 13 years ago

Quora is a horrible site.

shirov_39• 13 years ago

http://blog.intercom.io/if-its-important-dont-hack-it/

xy0l0x• 13 years ago

Does anyone else think there might be a correlation between the amount of anti-user stuff at Quora and Charlie getting kicked out?

timc3• 13 years ago

This reminds me to get around to removing my account

tiramisu• 13 years ago

Good luck. They don't allow you to delete your account unless you write them an email, which they don't seem to answer.

eshvk2• 13 years ago

I don't agree with the author's opinion on the New York times's block being inherently evil. I am unsure of how else they could make money. The block is not hard to circumvent if you know enough to clear cookies. It is designed to give you just enough discomfort that you will probably cough up and pay for the articles (which are incredibly well written) than the Quora style which makes me want to rage and delete my account.

zem2• 13 years ago

the "evil" bit is not that they have a paywall, it's that they both want to have a paywall and use the organic google search results for free advertising.

return0• 13 years ago

I don't understand how it is comparable to the NYTimes at all. Times pays people to write articles, not appropriating random people's free content.

joelthelion• 13 years ago

There is still a need for a good general-purpose Q&A website, that doesn't do this stuff or close half of the good questions like SE does.

jamiequint2• 13 years ago

To steal a quote from Chris Dixon (http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/):

"1. If you are loved first by techies and then by normals you get free marketing and also scale. Google, Skype and YouTube all followed this chronology. It is startup nirvana.

2. The next best scenario is to be loved by normals but not by the techies. The vast majority of successful consumer businesses fall into this category..."

This is a case of #2. I know many "normals" who really don't care and just sign up or download the app. It is probable that Quora alienates some percentage of its content writers by doing this but probably not enough to account for the absolutely massive increase in lift it is seeing as a result (I would guess 3x minimum conversion improvement to account creation from just this one change.) If they don't break out of the tech minority the company is not going to be valuable anyway so it does not seem to make sense to optimize for that audience.

All comparisons to Experts Exchange (where you had to pay to sign up) are totally overblown, signing up for Quora takes less than one minute and its free. It's just not that difficult to even be worth complaining about. You are not entitled to the Internet your way as the user of a free product. As the saying goes "if you are not the customer, you are the product".

arocks• 13 years ago

That's an oversimplification of the situation. A Q&A based site like Quora can be compared to it's predecessors like Experts Exchange or Stack Overflow because the content is simply enhanced by greater participation of experts. The early adopters could be techies or otherwise, but they will notice the increase in friction for sharing and using content.

Also the problem is not really "signing up". As the article points out, downloading another app just to read content on the web feels like a overkill to most people (even non techies). Especially when the most common means of searching for answers remains Google which is usually found in the browser.

kamaal2• 13 years ago

Frankly speaking I don't see the problem at all. If you are a rare user/reader at Quora not installing the App won't hurt you or Quora. If you are a regular user you will install anyway!

Besides these days who worries about login's when there is unlimited supply of free email accounts.

frabcus• 13 years ago

Great comment.

I love Quora as a Q&A vertical focussed on startups.

As a content creator though, I'm increasingly tempted to put it in the similar StackExchange site http://answers.onstartups.com/, where at least my content is CC licensed and easy to link to.

Quora doesn't live in a vacuum, it has competition.

alanho• 13 years ago

I am fine with iOS smart app banner. Real problem to me is "view in app" never deep link to the content I originally intended to read

ardacinar• 13 years ago

The desktop version basically begs you to login with facebook or google account. Sign up with email is a much smaller link. Basically, the site screams "We need your data so much! We're begging for your data! It's our only monetization scheme" and if someone is that desperate for your personal data, chances are they're not going to do good things with it.

edem2• 13 years ago

I concur. The first time I saw that "you need to register" sign I laughed and noted to myself "these guys will never reach the popularity of stack exchange with that dumb restriction". I never opened Quora again.

halfninety2• 13 years ago

I have been hating Quora all along for this, and wondered whether this constitutes cloaking (because they serve different content to Googlebot and the user), which is against Google's TOS.

The following are excerpts from Google's First Click Free (FCF) program page[1]:

    If you offer subscription-based access to your website content, or if
    users must register to access your content, then search engines 
    cannot access some of your site's most relevant, valuable content.

    Implementing Google's First Click Free (FCF) for your content allows 
    you to include your restricted content in Google's main search index.

Apparently Quora's answer to this is: "Wrong! We don't need to implement FCF to get our restricted content into Google, we simply cloak!"

    To implement First Click Free, you need to allow all users who find 
    a document on your site via Google search to see the full text of 
    that document, even if they have not registered or subscribed to see 
    that content. The user's first click to your content area is free.

So clearly the program applies in Quora's situation, yet Quora doesn't follow the program's guidelines to show "the full text of that document". I see this as strong evidence that Quora's actions violate Google's TOS, because otherwise what's the point of the FCF program?

[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

ishansharma• 13 years ago

I've landed many times on Quora but then left site because they allow me to read only one answer without siging in.

This has been something that really irritates me. They are doing same thing on phones now. I don't know about others but from me, they are not getting any visits now.

Remocing Quora from my Google search results in 3..2..1..

cwharland• 13 years ago

The mobile quora experience is pretty horrible. The site has some gems of information but at the same time a vast amount of questions go unanswered and there is a not insignificant troll ish community growing. Hopefully they can find a way to turn it around.

mark_l_watson• 13 years ago

I will admit my bias: paying NYT subscriber, here.

The article has two main issues:

Nagging to install an app: yes, I hate this also. Quota, Techcrunch, etc. have been pretty bad about this.

NYT trying to pay for 300+ staff: reasonable. I sometimes use their app and sometime just use the email news summary they send me every morning. Works well for me.

jheriko• 13 years ago

bth, i have no idea how Quora achieves anything. The service is kind of okay I guess, but I was thoroughly turned off by my first visit. I got to read one answer 'for free'... I cant remember what the price was I had to pay but 'far too much' is how I remember it.

jimzvz• 13 years ago

I have no issue with quora wanting you to sign up to use their site but to allow their pages to be indexed by search engines and then hide content on those pages to humans unless they sign up (with their "real name') is ridiculous. With $61 million, you would think that they could hire someone to tell them that this is a bad idea.

I too have been trained to avoid quora search results.

jpd750• 13 years ago

Amen to this post! This is SPOT ON!

jscheel• 13 years ago

I've generally written off Quora because of their poor growth hacking techniques. What struck me about this article is the the data usage. I didn't realize they load the entire answer onto your phone, only to cover it up with the "use our app" junk. I know it's not a lot of data, but this still appears like a pretty big lack of respect for users.

oscargrouch• 13 years ago

This is not just about Quora, its more about Apple.. Apple is funny, cause its innovation creates the technology of the 2010-20, but with the old-fashion corporate mentality of the 80's.. it wins in the short-term because of its innovation quality, but lost in the long-term because of its yuppie/greedy pig style management: "Im a shark, i want all the market for myself and i will crush the competition trying to bite my cake"

This is also why Google in the long-term are winning, and this is also something to worry about, because its becoming more and more a monopoly colossus of technology; and as Andreessen use to say; "software will eat the world"

Quora are just replicating the bad/wrong side of Apple.. like a lot of old-mentality companies are doing.. trying to surf in the Apple's vacuum

Just bad for them. Just another company to be forgoten because of bad(greedy) decisions

abalone• 13 years ago

It's even a little worse than loading the whole page. Quora has some sort of poorly implemented background process constantly polling the server for updates. Look at the page load indicator -- it never stops. This drains battery like hell, even if you just have a quora tab open in the background. For a page that can't even be updated.

seanp2k22• 13 years ago

You know what happens when I'm clicking through a SERP link and you give me a pop-up asking me if I want to download your crappy app? I hit the back button in mobile safari and find an alternate source of information.

No one wants your crappy forum reader app. Stop bugging me about it every single time I visit your damn site.

seanp2k22• 13 years ago

Stack Exchange > Quora in every way possible.

Also, what quora is doing here REALLY seems like a black-hat SEO technique. They're baiting you with the link and then switching on you to download their app.

If I were Google, I would blacklist their whole domain for this crap and explain again what cloaking is if I were pressed on for an answer: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

baali• 13 years ago

Something in same lines, recent xkcd strip, http://xkcd.com/1174/

nasmorn• 13 years ago

The real problem is Google not throwing them out of the index

lttlrck• 13 years ago

Download our app!! http://xkcd.com/1174/

raintrees• 13 years ago

The amount of sites I have to use View Source to get to the content is slowly, slowly creeping up...

But then I also get to paste it in vim or gedit and don't have to deal with all the visual spam...

I'd like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora

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