Why Not to Use Quora • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#71

Post by zenexer » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 4:44 AM UTC

NoPicklez wrote: post #59

zenexer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't actually have the right to be forgotten, even within GDPR. That provision was heavily modified before GDPR passed, and the final phrasing doesn't really grant you the ability to erase all of your content from the internet. (If I recall correctly, the term "right to be forgotten" was also largely replaced with "right to erasure" in the actual text of the law, with the intent of indicating that you had the ri…

Of course, let's not get too wrapped up in the GDPR's actual text. It is "Right to erasure" but is still known and referenced as "Right to be forgotten" as well. My intent was to put forth what it is describing, which is to allow the user to request the erasure of their information and subsequently that provider should then take reasonable steps to do so. If that provider, chooses to keep content creators information…

GDPR is almost exclusively for personal content (as in: name, email address), whereas most of the content on Quora isn't personal. GDPR makes no effort to allow you erase that.

You can certainly take efforts to restrict its movement, as Quora has done here. It's mostly futile, though, especially in this case. Archive.org might not be willing to save it, but I guarantee plenty of comparable services are.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#72

Post by baroffoos » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 4:44 AM UTC

NoPicklez wrote: post #23

One part of the article that I really disagree with is the part about the Wayback machine. As much as I believe it's important we retain the information we put on the internet, I fully support that if I put something on the internet and I am the creator of such content, I should be allowed to remove that content I created if I wish. This is closely aligned with the GDPR's "Right to be forgotten", yes this is in relat…

I think in the vast majority of cases people don't actually care about deleting their content, they care mostly about disassociating something from their identity. Maybe they asked something dumb or controversial years ago and they don't want it to show up with their name on it.

I think maybe there should be more of a trend of websites not showing usernames next to posts and just an identifier like "Purple" that changes when you post on a different thread/post so you can still follow the flow of a thread but not be able to link it to unrelated posts from that person.

I cant say that knowing the usernames of posters has ever helped me on stack overflow. Mods would still be able to see it but regular users and scrapers can not.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#73

Post by ryanmccullagh » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 4:46 AM UTC

system2 wrote: post #58

StavrosK wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Indians?

Well, in the tech world (especially online), they tend to provide low-quality service and bad codes. Quora is an free Indian-web-service-provider advertising platform. Nothing else. It is frustrating to see all off-shore "developers" coming up with a solution to your problems.

It's pretty ironic, that 2 of the top tech companies have Indian CEOs.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#74

Post by stickfigure » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 4:46 AM UTC

cdogl wrote: post #36

gurumeditations wrote: post #16

Quora was great years ago, but now it’s just a glorified Yahoo Answers full of Indians giving non-answers and fake stories in broken English.

This bizarre racism seems quite off-topic.

On one hand I feel the same reaction you have to the parent, phrased this way it sounds like he/she is denigrating a whole nation.

On the other hand, there was something that happened here that we should probably talk about.

A few years ago some of the topics (especially human-relationship subjects) experienced a sudden surge of content from people from India. I know many smart and erudite Indians, and these new users... weren't. I don't know what happened. Maybe Quora suddenly became a fad with the pre-teens in India? Kids online are generally insufferable from all cultures.

The platform didn't digest this well. Quite a few topics that used to be interesting suddenly became filled with garbage. I stopped watching many. Now I seem to just get bombarded with WW2 trivia, which is ok I guess, but I kinda miss "the old Quora".

It's an awkward subject but the parent's comment can't just be discounted as racism.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#75

Post by chillee » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 4:47 AM UTC

techsin101 wrote: post #66

gurumeditations wrote: post #16

Quora was great years ago, but now it’s just a glorified Yahoo Answers full of Indians giving non-answers and fake stories in broken English.

Exactly. Essays on essays being written on irrelevant, hell even if you decide to skip and scroll past any answers that look like ebook you can't scroll enough to skip to the precise and meaningful answers.

This is my go-to example of the type of hilariously terrible Quora answer that plagues the site: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-learn-competitive-programming...

90% of that "advice" could be copy pasted onto any "how do I learn something", and the remaining two sentences related to competitive programming are so vague that he links to the wikipedia page on "Algorithms" and the wikipedia page on "Programming Language"

And that gets you 460 upvotes, far above some of the better answers at the bottom of the thread.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#76

Post by breck » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 4:48 AM UTC

> Contrast that with Q&A competitors Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, which offers an API, a wealth of user-made tools and support community for it, a powerful Data Explorer for querying and exporting data, a liberal crawling policy, and doesn’t attempt to hide questions and answers behind authentication. They even proactively upload anonymized data dumps of all user-contributed content to the Internet Archive for posterity under a Creative Commons license.

I was unaware that Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange did this. I'm very happy that I deleted my Quora account a couple months ago and that I've been contributing more to the SE sites lately.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#77

Post by NoPicklez » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 4:50 AM UTC

zenexer wrote: post #71

NoPicklez wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, let's not get too wrapped up in the GDPR's actual text. It is "Right to erasure" but is still known and referenced as "Right to be forgotten" as well. My intent was to put forth what it is describing, which is to allow the user to request the erasure of their information and subsequently that provider should then take reasonable steps to do so. If that provider, chooses to keep content creators information…

GDPR is almost exclusively for personal content (as in: name, email address), whereas most of the content on Quora isn't personal. GDPR makes no effort to allow you erase that. You can certainly take efforts to restrict its movement, as Quora has done here. It's mostly futile, though, especially in this case. Archive.org might not be willing to save it, but I guarantee plenty of comparable services are.

Zenexer, again you fail to see what I'm trying to say.

I'm simply taking one of the GDPR principles and applying to them a wider variety of information outside of just PII.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#78

Post by system2 » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 5:04 AM UTC

ryanmccullagh wrote: post #73

system2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in the tech world (especially online), they tend to provide low-quality service and bad codes. Quora is an free Indian-web-service-provider advertising platform. Nothing else. It is frustrating to see all off-shore "developers" coming up with a solution to your problems.

It's pretty ironic, that 2 of the top tech companies have Indian CEOs.

Statistically, it is very insignificant.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#79

Post by stevebmark » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 5:09 AM UTC

What? Don't use Quora because it's Quora, not because of lack of APIs. Anyone can answer any question about anything. Like Reddit, Imgur, Wikipedia, this crowd sourcing of information leads to constant liquid garbage. People like to teach what they don't know and speak about nothing just to speak.

Re: Why Not to Use Quora

#80

Post by gnulinux » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 5:10 AM UTC

zenexer wrote: post #15

askafriend wrote: post #6

All philosophical views aside, there are some really core issues that got me to stop using Quora and unfortunately the case to stop using it is made by the site itself: * The content quality has deteriorated significantly since the site's inception. The content is far cheaper than before and far less interesting in very obvious ways. * Moderation systems have not done a good job of growing the site as a community. Th…

I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchange is a mystery to me; I suspect that most Quora users simply aren't aware that Stack Exchange exists, since SE traditionally catered primarily to a technical audience. Edit: One of my biggest gripes with the platform is that it's always solicited a large numbe…

SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question which is enforced in all communities except some (Interpersonal SE and "soft questions" come to mind). Even in those contexts, answers must be well cited and be credible in a certain way (e.g. in Interpersonal SE all answers must be grounded by personal experiences). This makes it a fundamentally different website than Quora. Quora is about expertise, opinion and anecdotes. SE is about facts and answers deemed credible enough by the community.