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.
Ah, good nit, I'll double check. Maybe I've met my limit on all my browsers.
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.
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…
I just created a Chrome extension that removes the Quora login requirement: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker
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.
Can you elaborate on that? I mean, how exactly does it bias people's response? The "privacy" of a service can affect people's answer if it is that, private. But Quora is not a super exclusive club: anyone who's willing to spend some time signing up, and who's willing to risk having his posts revealed to his facebook friends because of a new "feature" can get into this club... So I ask again, what peace of mind does i…
My general feeling is that a lot of content on HN, Reddit, etc. is superfluous and non-value adding. Things like buzzy blog posts, sensational headlines, etc. Believe it or not, lots of PR firms and businesses use HN as a way to promote their features. On a walled garden (as much as my gut reaction is to dislike it) you don't have that issue. There are other scenarios too, I'd imagine you can come up with as well.
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…
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.
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.