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Scribd and Quora considered harmful

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Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#141

Post by dangelo »

bsenftner wrote: post #10

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.

There is a clear one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of every single email we send, and there always has been. It says: "To disable all email from Quora, visit the following link: Unsubscribe."

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#142

Post by dangelo »

capedape wrote: post #139

I'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.

The copy/paste issue on iOS is a bug, and should be fixed within the next week. Sorry about that. We want people to copy and share content out of Quora far and wide, which is why our terms of service gives people an unusual amount of legal permission to copy and reuse content. See: http://www.quora.com/about/tos

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#143

Post by dangelo »

dror wrote: post #59
nacs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing "noble" about spamming search engines with full text results then putting up a login-wall for the same content you arrived on the page for. Tricking random users looking for an answer that's supposedly there into registering so they can see the 1 answer is not increasing engagement, just signup counts.

How is it that Google doesn't penalize them for this? I thought it's considered a big no-no to show people something different than what you show the crawler.

We serve the same content to Google that we serve to users. We have no interest in deceiving them.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#144

Post by dangelo »

nacs wrote: post #11
sandstrom wrote: post #8

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).

There's nothing "noble" about spamming search engines with full text results then putting up a login-wall for the same content you arrived on the page for. Tricking random users looking for an answer that's supposedly there into registering so they can see the 1 answer is not increasing engagement, just signup counts.

We don't care about signup counts, only about real engagement. Most people have no problem with registering, and the engagement from logged in users is so much higher that it more than offsets the small minority of people who don't want to register.

More detail at my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7808698

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#145

Post by NelsonMinar »

dangelo wrote: post #140
NelsonMinar wrote: post #82

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…

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…

Thanks for the thoughtful response, I'll link it in my blog post. My apologies for mischaracterizing Quora as running ads. http://www.quora.com/Quoras-Business-Model-and-Monetization/...

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#146

Post by joepie91_ »

tonywebster wrote: post #89

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…

It was already posted elsewhere in the thread, but here you go: http://pdf.yt/

Free, open-source, embeddable, ad-free, and accessible to anybody.

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of PDFy.

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