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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
I usually use the site's own domain -- so a fake account on quora gets an @quora.com domain.
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.
You've made those tactics succeed. It is your fault that sites keep using them.
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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…
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.
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..
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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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…
"1. Third party statistics sites like Alexa and Compete are horribly untrustworthy indicators of reality." They're always wrong. But, from what I can tell, they're usually wrong in ways that are still usefully predictive. If you compare two sites at Alexa.com, and there is a vast difference in popularity (as is the case between Quora and StackOverflow), you can probably assume StackOverflow is bigger and growing fast…
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.
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…