121–130 of 146 posts
I agree in the case of Scribd. Quora is not as clear-cut. While I dislike their 'login-wall', it doesn't feel like a company focused around short-term profits. I think their aim is noble, only that they are struggling somewhat to find ways to increase engagement and scope. Although subjective, I feel they are still on the right half of a good-insidious scale (Scribd less so).
I hate pay-walls and even login-walls, so I genuinely disagree with Scribd's payment model. However, I do think the service provides value in that users are able to upload a PDF and it renders in a pretty widely-compatible viewer format (in HTML5). Embedding PDFs across multiple platforms are still a terrible native experience, and on some systems it launches tons of painful Acrobat toolbars or just doesn't show up a…
Just out of curiosity, what is it about pay-walls that you hate so much? I don't hate them (my wallet does, when the content I want is behind them of course), but I find it to be a pretty reasonable model. Have a bite of the content, if you enjoy it then pay for the rest. It doesn't seem crazy to me that people should be compensated for their work, and while the "pay what you want" model is a lovely ideal, some peopl…
There IS a case where paywalls work and work well -- if some of the value in the information is information asymmetry. This is why the Wall Street Journal works better behind a paywall than the New York Times does -- the audience for the WSJ is a bunch of people who deal in investing, where the value sometimes isn't in merely being informed but being more informed than the others.
Quora is dangerously close to being a nuisance with all the pointless emails they send. I think I browsed the site a half dozen times max, and contributed to two-three questions. Now I get daily emails about distant friends activity on Quora. LinkedIn this the only site I've been tricked into joining that is worse with their spammy emails.
I get "things you might be interested" emails from Quora all the time. The thing is, they usually are interesting questions/answers (probably helped by all the things I have clicked on in the past)
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Yes, you can turn off those emails. All you have to do is un-click 25 checkboxes! http://cl.ly/image/3J2Q3o1M213h/quora-email-settings.png
Don't forget you'll have to re-un-click them every time they add another point to the list!
They've done heaps of annoying shit, but that in particular is one of the few things they haven't done.
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So they do something slightly different from Stack* and they're "considered harmful"? The screenshot I linked should be enough to immediately disprove any accusations of "spam".
The screenshot you link seems to me indicative of a dark pattern: User unsubscribes from all categories (one-by-one-by-one) = invent a new category and auto-subscribe the user.
I want to highlight one part of my blog post no one's picked up on: "some engineer actually wrote code to deliberately break document sharing on the web." Think of all the things an engineer can do with the skill to program computers, to make amazing things on the Internet. And he or she spends that time developing new ways to make it hard to read text on a web page. Ugh. Frankly making fun of Quora and Scribd is lik…
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Yeah, I think Quora only makes sense if they are bought and a piece of it is implemented within one of the giants like Google. It's an interesting new business model I guess.
Yahoo Answers is already scary enough.
"Can anyone tell me if Optoma is the best brand making projectors?"
Best Answer Selected by Voters: "Nigga, I saw in a previous question that you havin a baby. what the fuck you spending money fo bitch, save that shit"
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A service emailing me anything I did not explicitly ask it to is sending me spam - unsolicited commercial email - by your own definition. Just because you find the spam useful doesn't mean it isn't spam.
By that definition, Stack Overflow's weekly email is "spam". You signed up for it the same way you signed up for Quora.