171–180 of 276 posts
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 mi…
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 bef…
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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…
Same. It takes a lot to get on my blocklist and the only site that now populates it is quora.
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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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but: 1. Third party statistics sites like Alexa and Compete are horribly untrustworthy indicators of reality. 2. Growing traffic isn't the best way to foster a community. I believe pg has written about this a few times, with regards to communities in general and HN. I think the Quora community is amazing. It's very populous and the quality of answers is generally on par or better than special…
That said, as tools for relative comparisons they're quite useful, as long as you put a sufficiently large gray area around the results (50% or so). That way you can compare sites in magnitude without getting bogged down over whether a site at rank 1200 is larger than a site at rank 1201, the difference is small enough to be meaningless.
The final way in which you can use them is to use their time series to determine a trend. And that's where both are very useful, because assuming their sampling method is the same over time and assuming that there is some significant relationship between all the traffic you're interested in and the portion sampled the trend will be quite strongly reflective of what is actually happening. So growth, stagnation and decline can be determined with some accuracy (you still have to do some smoothing out but on 'max' with Alexa and a site that's a couple of years old the trend will be clearly visible).
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.
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.
[1]: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
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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.
login form. bam, you have your page. edit. works just fine on a mobile phone.
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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.
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.
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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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but: 1. Third party statistics sites like Alexa and Compete are horribly untrustworthy indicators of reality. 2. Growing traffic isn't the best way to foster a community. I believe pg has written about this a few times, with regards to communities in general and HN. I think the Quora community is amazing. It's very populous and the quality of answers is generally on par or better than special…
Alexa and Compete are bad sources.
Other third party sources like Quantcast, comScore, Nielsen, etc, do a better job of measurement, especially if they've been beaconed. You will never get complete agreement because of variations in implementation. A site's own "internal" analytics, like Google Analytics or Omniture, will never quite agree either.
Third party data is still ordinally and directionally correct most of the time. Google Trends and Quantcast both show a general trend upward, but it's not hypergrowth. What isn't mesaured here is engagement, and that's a much more interesting metric for Quora.
[1] http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=quora [2] http://www.quantcast.com/quora.com
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.