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

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

#221

Post by piyush_soni »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #107
pg wrote: post #49

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 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.

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

#222

Post by jamiequint »

DenisM wrote: post #217
kamaal wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most frequent users start off as infrequent users. By discouraging infrequent users, you prevent formation of frequent users. That's the business argument. Personally, I just hate it when I click a google link and land on a blurred page. It's deceptive to promise an answer and then make me jump through the hoops before telling me what it is, all of which happens before I even know if the answer was good.

That is secondary to my point which is that people like you, a founder & developer who cares about cryptography (just guessing from your profile), are not like most people ("normals").

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

#223

Post by intellegacy »

dmor wrote: post #89

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…

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

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

#224

Post by codelust »

hollerith wrote: post #220
codelust wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 millio…

>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.

Not that I like much what they're doing, but I don't think those options exist anymore. As purists, we probably love the concept of organic growth a bit too much.

There's nothing wrong with being a small successful company, there are tens and thousands of that out there. But building a big successful company at scale is rarely done without taking on external investment.

Uncompensated users are a different issue altogether. I'm sure people have various reasons to keep contributing content there even after knowing that fact.

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

#225

Post by zallarak »

mrgordon wrote: post #177
zallarak wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

login form. bam, you have your page. edit. works just fine on a mobile phone.

login form. bam, you are being followed around the web. maybe Quora will even decide to tell your friends what articles you clicked on. who knows what new "feature" they've added today

Good point, by logging in you are consenting to their tracking. I must be honest though, I still think it's a fair trade off. I also suspect that making content public might make it worse - people know on HN and Reddit their comments are visible to a huge anonymous constituency and it biases the nature of responses.

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

#226

Post by zem »

martinced wrote: post #60
eliben wrote: post #53

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.

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 ver…

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.

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

#227

Post by jscheel »

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.

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

#228

Post by papsosouid »

Apocryphon wrote: post #104
martinced wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ver…

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.

>I don't think SO's modding is any worse than Wikipedia's

I agree, it isn't any worse than one of the biggest examples of biased, overzealous, insular, clique moderation online. I think setting our standards a little higher than that is pretty reasonable though.

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

#229

Post by wslh »

pg wrote: post #49

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…

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

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

#230

Post by hollerith »

kamaal wrote: post #190
arocks wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 point…

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.

the problem with this analysis (and the one in great grandparent) is that it considers only the behavior of readers.

But Quora is useless to readers without the voluntary contributions of writers.

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