Querying my full name brings up my Quora profile as the top result on Google, even over my G+ and Facebook profile. No idea how it happened.
Scribd and Quora considered harmful
131–140 of 146 posts
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The screenshot I linked should be enough to immediately disprove any accusations of "spam". Really? You have to uncheck something like 20 checkboxes to avoid spam. And they used to have a tendency to re-enable all of them each time they add a new option; so you had to repeat the process on and off. (Hopefully that last bit has tapered down)
Your spam is someone else's notification from a service they use. Can we stop torturing the definition of words, please? Spam is unsolicited commercial email. A service you registered for emailing you when one of your questions is answered or commented on, or a digest of interesting questions from the week, and so on is not spam by any possible definition. Now, where have I seen that behavior before? Is this spam too…
> The worst thing you can accuse Quora of is being very, very granular as to what you can turn on and off
I just don't see how having a good granularity is incompatible with having an easy way to turn the whole thing off. Neither do I see a point in having the settings revert back once in a while.
> Hence why I call it confirmation bias. People have been told the site is crap and so go looking for reasons to confirm it.
> All of this Quora hate is really, really unjustified for the simple difference of having a registration requirement to view their content
You seem to have strong opinions about why other people's dislike of Quora is unjustified. But this amounts to just putting words in people's mouth.
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#133For avoiding using Scribd for public PDF hosting, I've been looking at http://pdf.yt/ (I keep wondering when the powers that be at HN will finally remove the Scribd autolinks on submissions, and keep being disappointed.)
Archive.org is also an option: https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#Uploading_Content
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#134I 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…
How is someone who builds software to sell digital goods any different? They deliberately put a border in between the user and the content (music, ebooks, software, etc.) I don't see many people complaining about that.
You don't see many people hating DRMs?
Anyway, the point you were answering to specifically mentioned "make it hard to read text on a web page". "music, ebook, software" aren't web pages, it's not the same end goal (the browser displaying stuff on your screen).
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#135I just want to point out that Academia.edu is not much different from the two examples brought by the OP
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that definition, Stack Overflow's weekly email is "spam". You signed up for it the same way you signed up for Quora.
Yes. Most mail from corporations at this point is spam. That is completely true.
Your definition is so broad as to be utterly meaningless.
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#137Scribd is one of YC's flagship companies, and rightfully so I think. People forget how painful PDF viewing used to be: the viewers were slow to load, crashed browsers a lot, and spread viruses. I remember how some forums considered linking to a pdf without adding something like [pdf] after it to be a form of abuse (more technically sophisticated forums just added that on their own). Scribd, and things like google vie…
Ironically, I think that links to Scribd content on HN follow the same [idiom].
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The key difference is that on SO we don't make you give us your email address to read an answer. So when you "sign up" for the newsletter, you're explicitly signing up for email (in fact, you can do so without even bothering to create an account).
Not saying SO doesn't send too many emails to registered users in other scenarios (it's something we argue about internally fairly often).
And to be fair, both sites put "unsubscribe" links in the footer of every email, so it really shouldn't be that much of a burden.
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#139I've followed and contributed to some questions on Quora that have I've gained useful life and business knowledge from. Saying that, I like to add random bits to Evernote and it drives me nuts you can't copy ANY text from Quora's IOS apps, not even a sentence. That kind of scarcity mentality bugs me enough that I no longer use it.
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#140I 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…
You say our motivation is "to force users to pay or share advertising data or some such bullshit". Actually, we don't charge users anything, and we don't run ads or sell user data or anything like that. We only try to get users to sign up because they have a better experience when they do and in the long term they write more answers and more knowledge gets shared that way.
You may not want to sign up yourself, or you may disagree with this tradeoff on principle, which is fine, but I want people to understand the motivation. We just want to increase the total amount of knowledge shared. In the short term requiring signups means some people don’t join. But a lot of people do join and start to use Quora regularly, a lot more than if there was no requirement, and those people end up contributing so many more answers that we judge this to be the right decision for the long term.
In fact, at this point, most of the answers written every day would not exist if we had not had the signup requirement. I realize that this choice makes the product worse for people who refuse to join. But in the counterfactual world Quora is a product with much less coverage of any topic, and that is a much lower quality experience for users. We are trading off a little annoyance at first for a much better experience and the ability to access a vastly larger base of content in the long term.