Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

First I'm manually deleting all of my answers, then I'll ask Quora to delete the rest. I've had bad experience with deleting accounts in the past, where my content would remain on the website even though my account was gone. And not having an account, there's nothing I can do about that data afterwards. I want to be pretty sure that all my Quora content is gone.

Fun fact: There's no way to get a list of your anonymous answers on Quora. They don't show up on your profile at all. All you can really do is browse through your list of followed questions and manually check each one to see if you responded anonymously.

Early last year, when I was starting to get into using Quora, I stopped using it abruptly when I realised how limited their privacy features are.

Basically, I wanted to contribute quite heavily to the Depression topic. I'm a sufferer and I wanted to be able to help other people. But on Quora you have a choice of answering a question either Anonymously or as yourself, the problem with answering as yourself is that all your activity gets published to the feed of people who follow you, and with Quora being heavily integrated with Facebook I wasn't comfortable with this.

Which meant I was forced to answer questions anonymously, which I was equally uncomfortable with. I felt like I couldn't make an valuable contribution if I was hiding behind anonymity each time.

I don't mind people knowing things about me, which is why I don't mind saying this here, using my real name, but that's very different to being willing to shout from the rooftops.

I emailed Quora to suggest being able to decide what information gets published to the feed on a per-topic basis. I didn't get a response, which is hardly surprising, but if basic privacy-controls are outside of their plan for the site, I can't be part of it.

This is misleading, as you CAN read anonymously if you disable the feature.

Personally, I read stuff for amusement or interest all the time that I would not want a large portion of my acquaintances knowing that I read, and certainly not without explanation. For instance, if I read an article about child abuse and get curious about the age of consent in Massachusetts, I don't want that showing up to random acquaintances in my feed anywhere.

Enabling this feature surreptitiously and without an opt-in is insanely stupid and insensitive to users. Given that Quora has very good support for anonymous questions and answers, you'd expect them to be more savvy than this.

> This shit doesn't fly with Google.

Not only does this shit fly but Google are doing it on their own websites.

EDIT: I'm guessing you don't believe me. Try clicking on a Google Groups link.

This article has another example: http://www.seobook.com/googles-youtube-caught-cloaking-spam-...

Google repeatedly violates the "guidelines" they try to force on other webmasters.

Why Google doesn't penalize them for serving different content to google bot and to humans?! How can thy get away with it... I'm sure many people who work for Google and are part of team that has authority to make those changes have seen it..?-