251–260 of 276 posts
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If their purpose is so focused on newsreader formatting, they should tweak their robots.txt to keep from polluting SERPs.
Google groups should modify its robots.txt to avoid showing up in SERPS. Gmane was around first.
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…
And, I have to admin: I'm the same demographic and really hate what Quora is doing but nobody outside Silly Valley really cares.
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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…
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 Goo…
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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 altog…
Let me stress that I am not talking about web sites in general but rather am talking specifically about sites that depend on quality unpaid contributions from a large numbers of people. >building a big successful company at scale is rarely done without taking on external investment. Wikipedia is a counterexample. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the sixth most visited web site in the world. But more to the point, no…
Atwood had an idea that SE would be "like Wikipedia" for QA, and Stack Overflow has certainly had success in that regard. I think that contributors to the site get very much the same value proposition as that of Wikipedia, if not slightly more in the user profile/karma regard.
Of course, none of this negates your point about the influence of funding!
No one wants your crappy forum reader app. Stop bugging me about it every single time I visit your damn site.
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&...
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I think we both agree on why Quora does this (viral spread mechanism, juicing numbers, etc). That's besides the point. When we are guests in someone else's home, seems only fair that we honor their requests. Asking you to simply create an account shouldn't be such a massive chore. I believe this attitude is dangerous for our community. I fear for what happens when we ask you to pay.
> When we are guests in someone else's home, seems only fair that we honor their requests. This is a ridiculous analogy. It's not a home, it's a business. If my friends want me to take my shoes off when I visit them, no big deal. If Best Buy does, that's frigging insane.
[And no, I'm not saying that that's a true analogy either — I'm just exploring what makes this one right or wrong, and where you think the insanity lies]