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This is a bit f'd, Quora

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Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#231

Post by mercutio2 »

wpietri wrote: post #219
mercutio2 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly confident you mean "The Transparent Society", which happens to be one of my all time favorites. While its true Brin advocates giving up the illusion of privacy and (especially poignantly) that we should stop screwing around pretending identity keys are secrets, he does so in a framework that we should each individually own and control our identities, a position which seems to me antithetical to the noxious…

Ah yes, thanks for the correction. I agree with you about not liking Facebook's capture of the medium. But I think the main way people are fighting that now is by pretending that they can go back to the age of privacy. I wish we could get past that.

Yes, I agree completely that even very technical people often have a surprising blind spot, thinking either we can put the database/facial recognition/cheap cameras genie back in the bottle, or alternately that leaving no digital trace is a Good Idea for the mainstream.

One good thing Facebook has done is demonstrate that most people (arguably with a lot of unethical shifting of visibility preferences) are happy to live portions of their life in public. These people are not sheep, they're happy sharing portions of their identities.

If only we had more nuanced, robust, personally controlled identity infrastructure. Much harder to achieve with Facebook owning a rudimentary, simplistic but very large subset of the social graph.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#232

Post by dkersten »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #213
meritt wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora is simply turning into ExpertsExchange. I haven't found anything terrible insightful on Quora that I can't find at the top of an HN, Reddit or StackOverflow thread. Never quite understood the hype centered around it.

Never quite understood the hype centered around it. It had tech celebrities. It was known as the place where famous silicon valley / tech people (from google to even microsoft) would answer questions in their gated community away from all the noise of Yahoo answers. Of course now Quora is just another Q&A site but back when it first started, I remember it well. It felt so exclusive. Registration wasn't open to the pu…

I could never figure out how to actually search Quora to find answers to stuff. Maybe you have to log in to do this, but I don't want to create an account just to see if I like the sites content enough to create an account, so I never used Quora and likely never will, especially after reading the article.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#233

Post by yuhong »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #213
meritt wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora is simply turning into ExpertsExchange. I haven't found anything terrible insightful on Quora that I can't find at the top of an HN, Reddit or StackOverflow thread. Never quite understood the hype centered around it.

Never quite understood the hype centered around it. It had tech celebrities. It was known as the place where famous silicon valley / tech people (from google to even microsoft) would answer questions in their gated community away from all the noise of Yahoo answers. Of course now Quora is just another Q&A site but back when it first started, I remember it well. It felt so exclusive. Registration wasn't open to the pu…

Of course, best of both worlds would be better, though obviously not possible for every question.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#234

Post by adastra »

forensic wrote: post #215
adastra wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this graph by technology review says it all: http://www.technologyreview.com/graphiti/427964/is-facebook-... Looking at the value per user (shown as circle size), it's easy to see the huge difference between late 90's companies and the companies of today. Google and Facebook stand out, of course. Notice any outliers? There's at least one company that seems to be over-hyped... (Hint: it begins with Q, and ends…

why does that show that Quora is overhyped? your contention is just that the value per user could not possibly be as high as facebook/google etc? Quora has pretty rich content and while they'll never have a userbase like facebook i don't see why the value per user number is wrong

My contention is that the average value per user of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest, Instagram, Yelp, and Youtube is $56.

You take the average of those and you're probably looking at a pretty decent ballpark for the value per user of a website that depends on user-generated content and that people use every single day.

At $145 per user, Quora is almost THREE TIMES that average. If that's not an over-hyped valuation then I don't know what is.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#235

Post by adastra »

combataircraft wrote: post #177
cletus wrote: post #91

I can't help bit feel vindicated by moves like this because they're a sign that Quora isn't the Next Big Thing that many inside the bubble that is Silicon Valley seemed to think it is (eg [1]). Actually Quora is better than that (for me) in that it's a double hit on the hype on both Q&A and social. These kinds of moves: - requiring login to view content; - partially obscuring content on Google results to maximize sig…

I just created a bookmarklet to kill the shitty login form of Quora and keep reading it without logging into it: http://jsfiddle.net/PUyAQ/6/embedded/result/

This is awesome. Much thanks.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#236

Post by lotharbot »

lazugod wrote: post #180
koglerjs wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lose something when you cross that wall.

Money? Metafilter seems particularly relevant in light of Quora and App.net, and while the price tag has kept it obscure I've only heard good things about its community. So I'm curious what criticisms you have.

You lose access to answers from the sort of people who won't spend 5 bucks to get onto the site.

In some circumstances, that may be extremely relevant.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#237

Post by prodigal_erik »

lotharbot wrote: post #236
lazugod wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money? Metafilter seems particularly relevant in light of Quora and App.net, and while the price tag has kept it obscure I've only heard good things about its community. So I'm curious what criticisms you have.

You lose access to answers from the sort of people who won't spend 5 bucks to get onto the site. In some circumstances, that may be extremely relevant.

Or anyone who doesn't want the admins to have their True Name via paypal.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#238

Post by mcgwiz »

What's all the hullaballoo about?! LinkedIn does the same thing: you can see who viewed your profile if you enable your own views of other profiles to be seen by their owners.

Or do we only get riled up when the perp is a small startup that still holds the promise of cracking the holy grail of sustainability without charging a usage fee? ...Damn sell-outs, it's like all they care about is finding a way to make money.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#239

Post by singular »

Tycho wrote: post #150
Johngibb wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have asked a bunch of questions on HN, and, like, actually gotten really good answers to them. Same with stackoverflow. Just because there are people on quora that answer questions well doesn't mean that they don't partake in questionable business practices and that you can find the answers elsewhere.

HN is not a Q&A site, neither is Reddit. StackOvereflow is focussed on narrow topics (and moderated by Nazis). That leaves plenty of room for a site like Quora which is oriented around finding answers to questions you have on any serious topic. Other sites might have better matereial when you do a direct comparison, but that's like saying a book of essays by Richard Feynman is always more interesting than looking the…

> HN is not a Q&A site, neither is Reddit.

True, but both have Q&A 'modes', e.g. Ask HN and IAmA AMA.

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