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Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

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Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#71

Post by Auguste »

monsterix wrote: post #21
samstave wrote: post #9

Quora is in the same boat as FB (and to a certain extent, Twitter) They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary. A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history. I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me. Deactivated! Edit: I followed…

Absolutely. Their policy to force your true_full_name is an absolute no-go for many users. A friend of mine from south India has a very lengthy name. Few parts of his name are direct reference to his ancestors and the villages they come from. Sort of like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._D._Deve_Gowda where H. D. parts of his name are references to ancestry, places etc. My friend was denied permission to use Quo…

I didn't mind their real full-name policy until now, since you could still answer questions anonymously. Allowing other members to see the questions I'm viewing by default, however, crosses the line.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#72

Post by elq »

cantrevealname wrote: post #62
0x0 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like what they are doing are obfuscating with CSS. See for example: http://www.quora.com/Bayesian-Inference/How-do-Bayesian-algo... The answers are in a span with class "blurred_answer", which has css styles: "color: transparent; text-shadow: 0 0 7px #777". Which in effect makes the text completely unreadable to humans. This is just one step above "color: #fff; background-color: #fff". Scummy.

I don't see missing or blurred text in your example, http://www.quora.com/Bayesian-Inference/How-do-Bayesian-algo... I checked with two different browsers (Opera and Firefox under Windows). Could this mean that the Quora PR machine is up in full swing trying to undo damage (at least in the case of specific links that people cite)?

It looks like they've changed it. I added quora to my list of blocked domains in google immediately after noticing the blurred responses... I don't think I'll remove them.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#73

Post by tronronin »

Well, I don't think its about the money. Its a desperate move. Heres my theory on what happened:

Quora was started by an elitist group. They made content policies that were very elitist (similar to HN in a way) emphasizing quality and trained their early adopters to vote only the VERY BEST of content.

They then moved away from the gated status and allowed others to enter their community. The new-comers were however not as qualified to write as the old user base and obviously most of them never got any upvotes for the content they created. So the new users got programmed to believe that up votes are scarce on quora and therefore they themselves stopped up voting on quora.

Well the only problem with this was, up voting also meant sharing. So by training users to not up vote in a way, they cut off their sharing. So now old content stopped circulating and that explains why most people think quora is dead.

To solve the problem of content circulation slowing down, which would heavily impact the discovery of content, Quora first launched a feature called 'Boards' some time back. (Even though this invited comments on how Quora is just copying pinterest). That probably got the engine up and running for some while.

However this still did not fix the problem. I think the most popular board on Quora has something like 5000 followers. Thats it! So the content is still not circulating well.

So then they came up with the Views feature - a feature turned on by default and which would convert every view into a vote and could turn on their content engine back up again.

What people don't get is - The guy who started eHow is an investor at Quora. It has always been about long tail content, getting traffic for long queries on google, content circulation etc...

Quora is not innovative at all, there is no great model there.

Its just eHow done more cleanly.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#74

Post by rm999 »

joelthelion wrote: post #61

There is space for competition in that area. StackExchange is pretty good, but since they don't allow questions with subjective answers, they basically exclude themselves from the vast majority of the market share. Then there is quora, yahoo answers, ... There is certainly enough space for a few good startups.

Reddit has some decent subreddits devoted to questions/answers, but the really good ones, like askscience, only allow objective answers. On second thought, that's probably why those ones are good.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#75

Post by kmfrk »

primigenus wrote: post #68
0x0 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like what they are doing are obfuscating with CSS. See for example: http://www.quora.com/Bayesian-Inference/How-do-Bayesian-algo... The answers are in a span with class "blurred_answer", which has css styles: "color: transparent; text-shadow: 0 0 7px #777". Which in effect makes the text completely unreadable to humans. This is just one step above "color: #fff; background-color: #fff". Scummy.

Unreadable to humans with sight. Screen readers don't care! :-)

Matt Cutts does, though. I'm sure he'll look into it, if we ask him. :)

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#77

Post by kmfrk »

I essentially deleted my account a long time ago, which involved unsubscribing from every single question, and anonymizing every single comment I had ever made. It was the only thing close to deleting my account, and yet I still see my content, follows, and upvotes there. Gaining a sense of privacy is an abstruse and opaque task. And I'm sure that's intended.

One of the things that really bothered me was that I could tell who had made a thread about a sensitive or taboo-ridden subject[1], although this was not at all obvious to the person who posted the question. The site creates the impression that you are - sort of - anonymous when asking a question, but have to explicitly choose to anonymize, when you post an answer.

To think that this company raised at a $400M valuation in April pisses me off.

The concept of privacy can quickly get very semantic, but I think Steve Jobs summed it up perfectly:

    Privacy means people know what they are signing up
    for.
    
    — Steve Jobs, D8 2010.
Anyone in their right mind will see that Quora don't give two shits about privacy - probably because the abolition of it helps their business model.

[1]: In the list of portraits of people following a question, the first of the portraits is the person who posted the question.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#78

Post by mmahemoff »

joelthelion wrote: post #61

There is space for competition in that area. StackExchange is pretty good, but since they don't allow questions with subjective answers, they basically exclude themselves from the vast majority of the market share. Then there is quora, yahoo answers, ... There is certainly enough space for a few good startups.

StackExchange leaves a lot of open opportunities even in the areas they focus on. The objectivity mantra means they'll ban "best programmer jokes", perhaps understandable, but oddly they'll block questions like "best database for X, best book on X" as being "Not Constructive". (I could understand "subjective", but I can't see how it's not useful data.)

So when I see things like this, it makes me think there's surely an opportunity and the opportunity falls squarely in Quora's lap. But depending how they execute on it, they might still be leaving the space wide open for others.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#79

Post by wilfra »

tronronin wrote: post #73

Well, I don't think its about the money. Its a desperate move. Heres my theory on what happened: Quora was started by an elitist group. They made content policies that were very elitist (similar to HN in a way) emphasizing quality and trained their early adopters to vote only the VERY BEST of content. They then moved away from the gated status and allowed others to enter their community. The new-comers were however n…

eHow is garbage content though. They might target search traffic in the same way but the answers on Quora are actually good. Perhaps thats what you meant by 'cleanly' but I took that to mean design only.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#80

Post by vlasta2 »

unimpressive wrote: post #45
vlasta2 wrote: post #41

I do not have a Quora account, but I understand their move and it may not be all bad. There are 3 ways how a company may handle user passive privacy: 1. Not collect any information (in this case who read what article) at all. Obviously that company would be at a big disadvantage, having no access to a useful set of signals. 2. Collect the information and use it for their own goals. 3. Collect the information and make…

> Also, the company cannot sell the private info, because it is publicly available. Uh. Maybe you don't understand why people don't like it when companies sell their data. It's because it ends up in the hands of every shady marketing agency and intelligence organization on earth. Making it public just means that these parties can get it with no barrier to entry. See: Usenet, where any email address that's ever touche…

Maybe I have expressed myself not clearly enough, so once more: I prefer the collected information to be public because then it is clear to everyone that it is being collected and many more people are aware of the implications. I think it is better than when the same kind of information is being secretly sold while users have a false feeling of privacy.
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