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 sign-ins; and
- showing what you view to other people.
come across to me as a company coming off hype and approaching a crunch point. I believe now, more than ever, than Quora will end up an acquisition for Google or Facebook or will simply slide into irrelevance.
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 public. When a question was asked it was answered by people who mattered or were in the industry. The answers weren't nessessarily better but they felt like they mattered more because of who they came from.
They used celebrity status to promote the site, then opened it to the public. Before they had something special. Now it's just another Q&A site. Looking back in hindsight, it might have been better to keep the exclusive gated community feel where only people with credentials (startups) are allowed in.
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.
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 same topic up in Encyclopedia Britannica.
That hardly seems necessary. Any generalized discussion site can answer Q&A, since that's just a discussion format. That isn't true the other way around, hence the StackOverflow nazis.
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 in "uora".)
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.
>Actually Quora is better than that (for me) in that it's a double hit on the hype on both Q&A and social.
well said. fuck Quora, as the OP suggested.
The best place to ask questions from the article like "What is the best way to hide an affair"--as if Quora could ever manage an honest discussion like that--is reddit.
Of course, you couldn't ask the question just like that. It'd have to be more genuine, a post on /r/AskReddit like:
"People who have had affairs: How did they happen?"
Reddit has the kind of simultaneous anonymity and validity to look at things in [1] a very accurate way.
That rapist thread in /r/AskReddit was, next to the time a poor girl was harassed due to a user thinking she faked her assault story, the worst thing I've ever seen on reddit. The direct responses were exactly what the OP had asked, but the comment replies by users were flooded with rape apology and victim blaming. In one instance, a rapist had to tell people to stop apologizing for him because he knew he was an actual rapist.
I would never, ever point someone to reddit as a place to have an honest discussion. You might as well make a thread on 4chan and only ask for the worst possible answers.
So you take the replies to replies from a single thread, and conclude that the site itself is useless? I suppose I should discount Stack Exchange, as there undoubtedly questions for which all of the answers are unhelpful or incorrect.
Your comment reeks of the typical reddit hate on HN, without anything to back it up.
I wouldn't say the entire site is useless, but the good communities are few and far between due to the reddit's culture abhorring any sort of moderation.
Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to /r/AskReddit? Certainly if you have a scientific question, /r/askscience is great, and /r/philosophy tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion on reddit, especially in the default subreddits, is uncommon.
While you acknowledge it's not the case, you're still making the mistake of thinking of reddit as a single community that is run in a homogeneous way. But subreddits have successfully and neatly separated the wheat from the chaff.
Dig a little and you can find some great niche communities that don't exist outside of more archaic forum-style sites (communities that sites like quora would love to capture).
I know well of the niche communities in reddit. I frequent most of them to hide myself from the default subs. However, the same problems still exist.
For instance, I enjoy the show Adventure Time, so I subscribed to the /r/adventuretime subreddit. It was fine for a while, but then a submission popped up on my front page. It was a photograph of a group of kids cosplaying as Adventure Time characters at a local convention, and a few of the kids either had a "poorly done" costume or were heavier than the characters they were cosplaying. The top comments in this thread were saying hurtful things about their weight and attractiveness. Not fluffed up "jokes"; these were crude and would warrant a punch in the face in any real life situation. When I made a comment about how it was rude for them to say such things, and that cosplaying is about the person cosplaying, not the people viewing, I was met with hostility and downvotes. I even messaged the moderators asking them to remove the comments since they offered nothing but vitriol, but the only moderator to respond said, "I'm not their mother. This is the internet."
You can try to escape it by going into smaller and smaller subreddits, but you'll never outrun it. This is what I mean by it being pervasive.* It's in everything on the site. You can argue "reddit isn't a single community" and all, but there are some characteristics that permeate through almost all sections (or maybe eventually show up due to how the site is designed.)
* edit: I realize after I posted that this was a different comment chain. The comment to which I'm referring is this one, last paragraph: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4378485
If people acting like jerks offends you that much, you are going to have a bad time on the internet. Although if you know of anywhere besides HN that is mostly reasonable, please PM me :)
nitpick: just as you are offended by rude comments, I am offended by advocating violence as a response to rudeness. I don't think you were serious, but I have to say there's nothing you can say or write that actually warrants a punch in the face.
Defending poor behavior perpetuates it. Stop tolerating crappy behavior from users, and move to platforms where such childishness is met with disciplinary action.
Use your imagination. It's possible to have reasonable discussions on the Internet. It's just very rare, and everyone's too scared to a) not be the 'best site with all users' and b) have a reputation for 'censoring' content.
"I wouldn't say the entire internet is useless, but the good websites are few and far between due to the internet's culture abhorring any sort of regulation.
"Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to [Facebook, YouTube, pick a popular site]? Certainly if you have a scientific question, [insert science website] is great, and [other website you like] tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion on the internet, especially in the popular websites, is uncommon."
While you seem to acknowledge that Reddit is several communities, not one, many of the things you say still make it seem like you're lumping Reddit into one community and one culture.
The trick to reddit is to stay the hell away from the default subs.
The fact that something is frontpaged greatly decreases the signal to noise ratio, the moderators are IMHO asshats.
Do some searching to find topics that interest you, and then unsubscribe from every single front page subreddit. You'll have a much better experience as a result.
Much, much better support on Ask Metafilter. You have to pay a whole $5 for eternal access, but that's apparently enough to reduce the level of trolls by 9000%.
It's a wonderful community with a lot of different interests, and if you e-mail the admins to ask them a question they reply. Matt's built a good culture. I recommend it.
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.
Ceol is right. I know Reddit is HUGE and is comprised of many different subreddits and today's Reddit is astronomically different from what it was 3 years ago when I left. But many male Redditors have deep seeded misogyny and they're in denial. Because of their aggressiveness their attitude used to affect a lot of site, NOT just their subreddit. I've seen female OPs ridiculed and downvoted off the front page while male OPs with the same conversation & stance would get upvoted. This is especially true for cheat stories, relationship problems, and male POV vs female POV style posts.
Remember when Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler got ganged up on by internet users and threatened with death and rape, called on her home phone and harassed, because of something she said about games 5 years earlier? That was Reddit's gaming forum. They ganged up on her because they felt Mass Effect 2 was apparently written wrong and she was the plague and scum that did it. That's just a tiny little fraction of the sexist shit Redditors can conjure up.
Back when I was a Reddit addict I'd see so many sexist posts. Not questionably sexist. Evidently sexist. When men would post "my girlfriend cheated on me" stories the Redditors would upvote and comfort the guy, give him their complete emotional support. They'd upvote the cheat stories to the front page when it was a man being cheated on. When it was a woman.... Naturally, Redditors would sympathize with the cheating boyfriend and ask the female OP if she did anything wrong. Revenge stories about men getting back at women were loved and would spend DAYS being on the front page from all the upvotes. Male Redditors would chime in with instructions on how to get the best revenge.
Anytime a woman would ask about what to do about her cheating boyfriend, they'd reply with "talk to him about it" and "maybe its something that you did". So sympathizing with rapists and blaming the victim is just up their alley.
And don't get me started on the Mens Rights subreddit whose posts would spill over onto the front page every other day. Those guys were drowning in their own testosterone. It's like they were angry that they're slaves to pussy, but rather than blame nature or themselves (their balls) they just blamed women for their problems. Don't know if it got better or worst, I'd rather not visit the subreddit at all.
After achieving mainstream popularity a few years ago the front page is now all memes and cats and all that sexist nonsense is isolated to it's subreddit. I would consider the memes the lesser of two evils.
I'm not writing from a position of fear. The thought process of rapists is an interesting— albeit chilling— subject to study.
My problem was with the responses to the rapists by what appeared to be normal, well-adjusted people: Heavily upvoted comments excusing what was textbook rape because alcohol was involved, or she said she wanted it at one point (or maybe she didn't and they assumed she said it), or because she "got a little slutty [and did something stupid]." There is nothing of benefit in those replies. All they serve to do is make actual rapists feel better about the fact they raped someone and make it harder for rape victims to come forward due to fear of similar reactions by friends, family, and law enforcement.
Certainly there's a benefit to anonymity in a discussion, and I'm in no way advocating for your identity to be attached to everything you post a la South Korea. My issue isn't with anonymity in general; it's with reddit. The mask of anonymity, the pervasive anti-moderation sentiment, the inexplicably held notion that they belong to some elite club of Internet-goers, and the karma system make for an at times vicious amount of groupthink and close-mindedness.
Do you mean that the victim-blaming is what these people actually believe and therefore it's a form of "truth"? That we can say victim-blaming is wrong but the truth is, there's a lot of people out there who blame the victim for rape and that's something that should be acknowledged?
That's something I think I can agree with. Clearly, victim-blaming is a bigger problem than people might like to admit and while reddit represents a relatively small niche of society at large, there's clearly a lot of people sympathising with rapists and to just dismiss such comments as unproductive or unhelpful is ignoring a large problem in society.
>Do you mean that the victim-blaming is what these people actually believe and therefore it's a form of "truth"
That's obvious to the point of uselessness. I think we're on the same page re: victim-blaming being a big problem. I don't dismiss any of the comments that talk about victim-blaming.
The only thing I'm really pushing for is: this conversation should happen. And it is, between you and me.
You haven't said anything concrete enough to attack. Just a bunch of stuff about "the telling of the truth", whatever that's supposed to mean.
I hold that when you consider both subject matter and the community together, there are things which should not be discussed and analyzed. The reddit thread in question is an example. The community clearly demonstrated it was not equipped with the tools to handle that discussion.
Are you saying you can't comprehend what I was trying to mean?
Your second paragraph is exactly the attitude that I despise. I don't care what your intent is: the effect is you want to hide what people really think.
There are no tools to handle that discussion. And that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. And that means we'll find the tools for it.
Clueless.
edit: I feel like I'm in the midst of the argument that HN doesn't want. And I both don't want it and do want it in the same breath.
HN doesn't have the self-examination reddit does. It just doesn't. HN manages it by careful changes to its ruleset.
Reddit manages it by having an incredibly uncontrolled diverse ecosystem of recursively examinative subreddits.
And while I admire HN's adherence to quality, I will endure downvote after downvote unto hellban in order to defy our stodginess.
So, I suppose you would describe yourself as being absolutely in favor of unrestricted free speech. Nothing is off-limits. All shall be discussed.
Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system? There will be no moderation at all. Every and any topic is able to be discussed by anyone. The fringe opinions mobilize and are given a powerful soapbox, and so horrible becomes the new normal. You can see this in nearly every thread on reddit dealing with sexism and (especially) race relations.
You can't say that the average internet citizen, wandering into any of the sickeningly racist discussions found weekly on r/videos, won't see the hundreds of upvotes on vile opinions without also seeing an illusion of consensus, the normalization of disgusting prejudice. And you can't say that won't have an effect on their thought process next time they interact with a person of colour. That is the price paid for unrestricted discussion of the worst crap people can dedicate themselves to typing on the internet.
That was just a particularly salient example. Everywhere else you see normalization of mysogyny, normalization of pedophilia (seriously, nearly any discussion of gymnasts during the olympics was disgusting). All this on a website with tens of millions of users, claiming itself as the front page of the internet.
You go on to say reddit has self-examination. Reddit is not a single organism; the self-examination you refer to comprises many disgusted users, yelling at the people spouting crap who carry along regardless. "Self-examination" in this fashion is not a substitute for actual moderation. SRS has started linking to the odd HN comment, by the way.
The crux is that tolerating and analyzing horrible opinions only serves to normalize them. There are some ideas that quite simply don't deserve to see a soapbox. You'll probably play the slippery slope card here. I don't care. We have many excellent moral frameworks with which to analyze ideas, and they are more than adequate for sorting out the grey area of what should and should not be allowed.
> "I will endure downvote after downvote unto hellban in order to defy our stodginess."
You made some good points in the "nobody wants to read your shit" thread. You should apply those insights to your own posts here.
We signal, with downvotes and hellbans, the kind of shit we don't want to read. Some of your earlier posts in this thread were merely disagreeable, but you've descended into full-on trolling. Please don't do that.
No, discussions which lead to more rape should not happen. This, I feel, is an unambiguous truth.
(I'm not saying that the particular reddit thread encouraged rape, though a psychologist much more well-versed than myself did -- but I don't think its a logical leap to see why victim-blaming would encourage self-rationalization of rape.)
The psychologist you cite I myself cited. The point of discussing anything is that no discussions lead to more rape.
Unless you're afraid.
If you're afraid that real discussion will cause more rape, and that the sacrifice of real understanding is worth pretending that that more rape doesn't exist.
Because that's the guarantee.
That's what that meh-ish psychologist proved.
We will not forget. Because there's nothing we're not afraid to know.
"The point of discussing anything is that no discussions lead to more rape."
"If you're afraid that real discussion will cause more rape, and that the sacrifice of real understanding is worth pretending that that more rape doesn't exist."
Please qualify these statements and explain why your argument is superior to that of a psychologist?
Victim-blaming, like all blaming, is a matter of opinion. There is no objective truth in who's to blame -- not because the facts can't be established, but because blame is by its nature about meaning, not about whether events happened.
You're saying it's a necessary reaction to the telling of truth. He's saying it's not about truth, it's about opinion.
And it's ineffective. If you have to say it's about opinion, you've already lost. I know that there are opinions that state that victim-blaming is a terrible thing.
I even believe it.
But we couldn't have this conversation unless this, _this itself_ was a reaction to the telling of truth.
The worst things are often a truth that needs to be heard.
You are writing from a position of fear. That people can express something that shouldn't be heard.
You can't fight the truth. And you can't fight the open expression of it. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.
I'm sorry but this whole branch of this thread needs to be downvoted straight into the abyss. It's a massive distraction from the actual topic at hand. No thank you.
The new "social" web is really creepy. Browsing in an incognito browser and logged into nothing has sortof become my default.
I don't want google chrome saving my search history, or to accidentally read an article on some news website that then broadcasts that fact to all of my facebook friends.
I'm still confused how that gets by Google. The full text shows up in search results, but is blurred by CSS for humans. Isn't that not allowed? Even experts-exchange includes the readable plaintext answers way at the bottom if you scroll down, for that reason.
edit: removed discussion of googleoff/googleon directives in the HTML source. Seemed suspicious, but apparently it's something to do with Google Search Appliance.
Yeah Google better kick them to the curb on this one. Man, for all the quibbling over Google latest activity being evil or not, they still do a much better job with basic ethics than Facebook and their ilk. The non-stop attempt to actively change privacy norms by constantly defaulting existing users into more and more revealing new preferences is starting to get really irritating. Facebook I sort of have to put up with because of friends and family, but Quora I'm done with until they reverse this braindead decision. Seriously I don't know who they think they are.
They don't think they are anybody special. What they think is that it is acceptable, normal behavior. This is not even irrational, considering the precedent set by Facebook - not only doing the same kind of awful stuff over and over again, but actually maintaining that nobody should have privacy. And Facebook has thousands of full-time defenders.
Apparently you (like a lot of savvy people otherwise concerned with privacy) will tolerate it from Facebook but not from Quora. So I guess what Quora should do is just get bought by Facebook; then you will not (be able to?) complain about their sketchy behavior.
(If anybody has a counterexample I'd be interested to see it, but try to make sure it's not just an old result that hasn't been re-indexed since the change.)
Google allows this if you show the first page's content for visitors that came from Google. If Quora does this, it's fine - it's Google's concession to old-world media.
Just get rid of the css style for .blurred_answer_wrapper span.blurred_answer and add display: none to .blurred_answer_wrapper .signup_cta_on_answer. Not that I've had more than one Quora result pop up since that began, but css is easy ;-)
I think actions like this give everyone a bad name. I'm not sure if it's the "social web" being creepy - it's Quora being really creepy, and destroying their own goodwill.
I think this is a very bad move from Quora. My guess is that they have goals on user growth and had to resort to this tactics in order to achieve that.
If you want to grow your user base, provide more value to registered users. Here are a couple of bullet points you can start with:
1. Grow the community with real content. Do that by first focusing on a specific domain/topic that has a natural draw of users. Stack Exchange draws the programmers crowd and nailed that community. Once you got to a critical mass, other communities will follow. E.g., when you have enough programmers in the same place, some of them will share some common interests like photographs, salsa dancing, etc ... Looks like Quora's base supporters are Bay Area's start up community. This is probably too small a support base for sustainable growth. Either Quora needs to expand this support base quickly or it's the END ...
2. Better relevance/recommendations. I am reasonably active on Quora. I follow 82 topics and got 8 answers. However I don't see any good question in the main page even though I scrolled at 10 page lengths.
Unfortunately with supercookies, IP address-based identification (maybe even machine signature based id-ing?) and such, I think incognito mode is practically a placebo.
I'm aware of that link and here's my result in Chrome on Incognito.
Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 1,172,808 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.
Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 20.16 bits of identifying information.
Then you'd be a British IP with a US user agent, which is probably a ton of bits. I just used User Agent Switcher & changed it to firefox 5.0 under XP.
You may be unique, but within a very small pool. For example, my current user agent string alone narrows me down to within one in ~2-3 million users/browsers. When taken with the intersection of all those other bits, it's very easy to get an incredibly high-resolution snapshot of an individual...
I'm looking at this from a different direction. I don't want my fingerprint to be unique, unless it is truly random on every request. I don't want any server to be able to tie any two requests of mine together without my permission (in the form of headers/cookies). That's the whole cookie/tracking argument right there. If you are isolated from a crowd, unique, then you can be tracked and analyzed.
I used Panopticlick, and no one else who has used Panopticlick had the same fingerprint. The meat of the uniqueness was in Browser Plugins and System Fonts. Think about that... If you've installed a few random fonts you found online, you're probably sending a unique font signature. If you've grabbed a few plugins, messed around with extensions, then you're probably sending a unique plugin signature.
Ack, typo. What I meant to say was that, even if you're not completely uniquely identified by your information, if you're so rare that only a few people on earth have your information, it's just as bad.
I ran across this comment of yours - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377315 - and certainly appreciate your privacy concerns. A healthy private life is undoubtedly everyone's personal choice.
At the same time, HackerNews is YCombinator's tech blog, and highly visible. Frankly, your opinion comes off as somewhat paranoid. It's not that it isn't justified, I'm not saying that one way or another, but I would strongly consider the impact statements like this have on your image in the social space.
I heard back from Kenneth. He actually said that your social strategy is a "shambles", which is excusable, and also that you "had 0 interest in improving this" -- which is not.
He said that you were more interested in getting to the moon than in building a social network around the project.
blhack, the money we entrusted you with not appropriate to spend idly dreaming up conspiracy theories.
The world is social. People chirp, tweedle, and most recently iMessage those they care about and feel a community with.
This community is now your top priority. I want to be able to show Ken that you have put together at least 10,000 likes and 30,000 followers by the end of the year. Consider this "stage one" of your rocketry design phase.
While we are not saying that failure to meet this metric means the board will necessarily replace you, consider it a part of your job description.
We are also denying your proposed budget. Please work on your social program.
Hey guys! Just wanted to give an update! We hired my cousin, who has a lot of experince building model rockets, and have begun exploring launch sites! The meatball sandwiches that those of you are getting at the $6 level should be coming out soon. Pick them up at subway with a $5 shipping fee.
Also, we are going to need a little bit more money for our new office in downtown San Francisco. See attached picture of our espresso machine.
You should know that we are disrupting the moon industry right now. Android.
You miss all the moonshots you don't take. Remember that.
Sir, I read about your CTO position you posted on Craigslist. Since we both read on Quora that the future of computing is Cobol then we are like brothers already. I know a guy who installed PHP and he has a friend on Facebook(my other friend even saw it). I'll give you his username on ExpertSexChange but I need a corner office and vesting in 6 months.
P.S. Everyone will have forgotten the lawsuit against Charbucks by now. We can sell some of the extra coffee beans from the leftovers burned on the "launchpad." Ebay?...I have 91% satisfaction account. I await your Linked-In Connection so we can start the next part to hire me. I am ready to live in a valley.
P.P.S You still on my _ ? Sir, Your photo looks different now than the one on your Instagram.
That was quick (going through the first seed), but justified. In view of your momentum and execution we are approving another seed of $2mil for the next twelve months in San Francisco as detailed under separate cover. The name is fantastic. Please run the final logo by us before putting it up, otherwise keep up the great work and we look forward to more.
This is great, bordering on brilliant satire. I don't even want to think of how much effort was required to create this comment - but, there is at least one person, who really appreciated it.
It appears to be a satirical, role-playing meta-comment about the new social web being creepy. The post seems to contain a bunch of quasi-personal info mined from the web.
What? I'm not sure what's going on here. If you want to send blhack an email, do that. This personal letter is not an appropriate use of HN comments. And sending private messages in public is quite non-cool.
They should have provided clear notification on the next login with a link to the details of the implementation. I recall no such action occurring in anyway.
This is my post. I didn't expect this on HN, but I shouldn't be too surprised I guess.
I just want to stress that I really do love using Quora. It has some of the most unique content on the internet. It is because of this that I even care about my activity syndication there.
I upvoted your post for the same reason that you posted it - in hopes that Quora will decide not to kill privacy on the site. Now I kind of wish I hadn't since the sentiment on this thread is so anti-Quora.
I love Quora, too. The amount of knowledge you gain from even a few minutes there is truly incredible. If HN'ers could get over the fact that Quora is a social site started by Facebookers, I truly believe they would love it too. Quora (and the world) would benefit from more answers from the HN community.
I don't have much to add other than "yeah, that", and the fact that the breathless cry of "zOMG PRIVACY!" and the sanctimonious hand wringing about "Well what about people who don't want (some dangerous person) to know what they're doing" is starting to get irritatingly old.
There are a few people for various reasons who should stay the hell away from social media in all its forms. Okay, granted. For me, I don't see the point of privacy for privacy's sake. Oh no! An advertiser might know what I like! Oh no! The government might know what I like! Oh no! An ex might know what I like! And I care.... why?
Put another way, I can become some sort of privacy super-advocate which means hamstringing myself socially and professionally, making my online life more difficult in just about every fashion, (No social networking, no hosted anything.. have fun with that!), or I can pick my battles and realize that I'm not a spy and more likely than not have no reason to worry about targeted ads.
Rant off - I've needed to unpack this for a while. Quora is a great resource, and I'm sick and tired of seeing people slag on it for a feature they can turn off.
And I'd like to respectfully ask that any downvoters at least bother to explain themselves before clicking. I realize this is probably a highly controversial stance, but the least you could do is contribute to the discussion.
Agreed 100%. HNers belly-ache about Quora all day, but there is an incredible amount of information on there. If you doubt me, just go look at the best answers under the Machine Learning topic.
Part of Quora's value comes from identifying answerers' identities. HNers see this as a plight on the social web, yet they can (a) still turn off views in their settings at any time, and (b) use other forums with relaxed views on privacy if they wish.
"HNers belly-ache about Quora all day, but there is an incredible amount of information on there"
That's an exceptionally strange dichotomy, people are annoyed BECAUSE there is useful information there, and the company is enforcing mostly unnecessary "social" aspects to access the data. If the data was useless, why would anyone care when they change their policy to something aggressively anti-privacy?
" the breathless cry of "zOMG PRIVACY!" and the sanctimonious hand wringing about "Well what about people who don't want (some dangerous person) to know what they're doing" is starting to get irritatingly old."
Who are you to tell any person that they're misprioritizing their personal information and the value of privacy?
YOU can do whatever you want, publish it to the ends of the earth, however we want this to be a choice. Not decided for us.
You can't wrap your head around why someone would not wish to share these things and offer an argument from ignorance, you do not understand why, nor are you sincerely interested in knowing why.
>Who are you to tell any person that they're misprioritizing their personal information and the value of privacy?
As soon as someone puts their thoughts out on the internet for everyone to read, they become valid targets for critical discussion. So in short, "I am" just like any other commenter on any other blog. Who are you to, with such righteous indignation, tell me what I can and cannot talk about?
>You can't wrap your head around why someone would not wish to share these things and offer an argument from ignorance
Ah, stop. I said it was getting old. Nothing more. There was no "argument" here. Exasperation, not an attempt to convince anyone. Besides, usually you don't convince people of anything by telling them you're sick of hearing their opinion.
I am quite willing to be convinced though - I just haven't had anyone tell me why I should care that advertisers target me. At least, not in any way that wasn't based squarely on a slippery slope fallacy straight into a dystopian future that wouldn't look out of place in a Stephenson novel.
So please, enlighten me. I am genuinely curious why this seems to bug so many people so deeply.
And just like that, I no longer have a Quora account.
This is a "dark pattern", and it's sleazy any way you slice it. They could have easily fixed it by popping up a dialog when I first sign in that says "Hey, do you want to share the things you read in your feed? Yes/No", and I could select "No" and be on my merry way. Instead, they decided that they would make a decision about my privacy for me, and they've lost me as a user in the process.
You'll have to send an email to privacy@quora.com to delete your account. I did, and they deleted my account. I also told them politely that broadcasting what every user reads to the entire world is very creepy. It is a shame, as the quality of answers at quora is much higher than in other places.
See my earlier posts about this. I deleted my account and asked for confirmation this was done, they stated it was - but all my info, comments, edits etc are all still there just simply no longer under my name!!
Just checked, you are right, my questions are still there. Their email said (exact words)
you should find yourself completely removed from the site
So in effect, our "info" is removed, but not our discussions/answers/questions?
Sorry, I should've checked before posting my above comment. It didn't even occur to me, that they might simply "de-link" my name, but keep the data as is.
I did this a little bit earlier, very politely asking them to delete my account and why I wasn't happy with the direction they went with the site. I haven't yet heard back from them yet, but it's probably a slow process.
I don't like that they'd automatically opt me into displaying what I read. That ruins any sense of privacy I have to browse the site (ignoring the cynical and probably accurate view that I had no privacy there to start). Were I curious about something but didn't want it shared with the world, Quora is a dead end. I can opt out, but if this is their idea of the future, they may remove the option.
In the meantime, I tried deleting most of my answers, though Quora doesn't really do so. Instead, changes are kept in a list of edits, which allows you to revert the change. I like that, it's handy, but I can't remove my edit history. My hope is that the changes are lost once the account is deleted, though I doubt they will.
I also dislike that deleting my account, including all data associated with it, requires I e-mail them. It seems absurd to do all this work for your users and provide them no way to easily walk out if they're unhappy with site changes (as I am). If I own the content I publish on Quora, as they claim, then I should be able to completely delete it.
At best, it's a way to prevent accidental account loss. At worst, it's a slimy method of ensuring the service holds onto user-provided data. Sadly, the only site to allow me to delete my account without sending an email thus far was Facebook[1] -- though I'm sure they've held onto a great deal of my junk nonetheless. At least they provided the option, I guess.
[1]: I believe Google also allows this, though I haven't quite gotten to the point of deleting my Google account.
Indeed the problem - as with Facebook - is that these settings are constantly "opt-out". This is perhaps as bad as the Beacon program in that as the author correctly originally notes - some personal items might be "viewed" which subsequently detail their actions to other users which they never intended to be public.
Classic examples of mistakes in the past are like "How to propose?" or "What's a good engagement ring size?" and so on. All these problems were exposed with Facebook Beacon and purchasing decisions and after much revolt they shut it.
I honestly can't understand why Quora would implemented "User X viewed User Y" - I think that's taking the privacy perspective to a whole new level. Indeed, even on Facebook if they started listing things like "User A viewed your profile 55 times today" - it would essentially kill the service in it's tracks as would "User B viewed this photo 33 times" and so on. People have always used Facebook to stalk their friends - but that doesn't mean it should be detailed publicly for all the world to see.
This should be "opt-in" if not removed all together in my mind. As part of internal metric tracking - it's obvious that this occurs - but it shouldn't be public or should be entirely opt-in.
Even with opt-out, it can make you wonder if Quora is still keeping this data. What stops them from disabling the opt-out portion of the feature and "outing" everybody?
I get the impression that Quora is in a tough spot because of the perceived implosion of the "social bubble" after the FB IPO. They have $61M in funding [1], which means that their investors must be demanding bold moves. I don't personally know anyone who works there, so it's pure speculation.
I think Quora would have been great as a “lifestyle business” [insert appropriate sneering as necessary.] Put ads on it for logged-out users, have good SEO and high-quality Q & A, and it'll make a living for a small number of people to keep the site up. This is how Ask Metafilter[1] works, and it is among the best Q & A sites. Metafilter (which includes metafilter.com proper) seems to provide a comfortable living for about 4-ish people (I'm guessing a bit here, I think you could find more info if you looked.)
The problem comes when the company gets funding, and suddenly it's not good enough to become a high-quality, community-driven Q & A site. Suddenly you need to generate some kind of huge exit for your VC owners, and then their recent action start to make sense.
Space for 160 employees doesn't mean they'll have 160.. They just have room to grow a bit. 40 is a lot of employees, but with their funding they can afford it, and it may just be essential, we can't really know from the outside looking in.
The blowback from stupid share-everything policies is what will eventually collapse this social media bubble. I disabled Spotify-to-Facebook sharing completely, even though I wouldn't mind if the controls were more granular and the notifications were less obtrusive. Right now people put a lot of faith and trust in their social media providers, and the more said services violate that trust, the less users will share by default and the less valuable the services will be as a result.
The forced login stuff really enraged me. This is the rant I posted to Quora on the topic in hopes of getting them to change their minds:
For a long time I've been meaning to write personal stuff about my mom's death last year from a brain tumor. The question "Death and Dying: What does it feels like when doctor says you'll just live X days / months?" popped up in my feed. So I answered it. In detail. Crying as I went. At some point I realized I was hyperventilating from the sobs, but I knew if I stopped I wouldn't finish. So I wrote and wrote and clicked "Add Answer".
Since I was sharing it with the world, I decided to man up and share it with my loved ones. I copied the link and posted it to Facebook, so that my friends and family could read it. Like you'd do with any other link in the world.
And then began the fucking tech support circus. Within an hour, somebody said:
I'd like to read this but I'm unable to without giving them my FB login info. Am I missing something?
I immediately checked, and I wasn't bothered when I clicked through, even when signed out of Quora. No idea what was going on. I thought it might be some referrer sniffing plus cookies; I suggested they copy-paste the link. Another friend made other suggestions. But that didn't solve it for everybody; another person just now commented:
I wanted to read, but I got this thing saying I need to approve an app called Quora - an app which "may post on my behalf" - which seems like a rather large presumption for an app to take. Or am I misunderstanding something which is actually quite benign? Sorry to interject a facebook question into this thread, but I do want to read what you wrote....
And they're right. It's a fucking giant presumption to ask for that just so my friends can read something I wrote and wanted to share with them. So I just gave up and copy-pasted the text into the little Facebook comment box, arguing meanwhile with Facebook about what the goddamn enter key means. (It means new line, motherfuckers.)
The end result: what I was hoping would be a solemn remembrance of my dead mom is now cluttered up with people trying to defend themselves against Quora's quest for better user numbers at their next fucking board meeting.
So thanks, Quora, for strip-mining my personal tragedy to up your AARRR metrics. I hope it was worth it, because you've lost a lot of my trust.
Quora was founded by facebookers. People who actually have the worst fucking view online about what should be private and what should be public.
People who have no digital-cultural compass because the only reference point they have is from working at Facebook, thus they think that "this is how it was thought of and done at Facebook - and Facebook is the most overly hyped company in history, so I must be a fucking genius!"
I get your perspective, but I think Facebook is basically correct in the long term. Privacy is basically a historical accident belonging to the few hundred years in the west where transportation tech got ahead of information technology.
An excellent read on the topic is David Brin's "The Transparent Hand". He basically makes the argument that we face one of two futures: either all of us know everybody's business or a small elite controls the flow of information. Basically, our choice is a surveillance democracy vs a surveillance state.
I think he's right that there's no way to put the genie back in the bottle. That's not to say that Quora's moves aren't fucking annoying, but I do think just refusing to participate won't make a long-term difference in how things turn out.
> Privacy is basically a historical accident belonging to the few hundred years in the west where transportation tech got ahead of information technology.
I don't think privacy should be dictated by whatever is possible with technology, it should be explicitly decided by people. Whichever way they decide.
Sure, but the way it was historically decided by most people was a position of little or no privacy. In a small town, everybody knows everybody's business.
It's only urbanization, which only works because of good transportation, that made that untenable. So those of us who like privacy finally had some.
But information technology is making it possible for people to keep track of basically everybody they care to again. So we're going to go right back to what most people like, which is life as soap opera.
More likely it'll be the small elite (who stay private) maximizing profits using the info that the vast majority made public. Those who make their "private" info public will likely on average pay higher interest & insurance rates, have smaller salaries after taking longer to find jobs, etc.
Honestly, that's one of the better outcomes. Imagine an oligarchy where the elite knows your genetic profile, your social activity, your daily habits, and your deviations from normal behavior. They may know before you do when you're starting to get restive, and will certainly be able to defuse or destroy any resistance.
A fun novel relating to this is Daniel Suarez's "Kill Decision".
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 "we own your identity and can screw with you at will" approach Facebook has taken.
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.
Quora clearly announced this change of policy. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".
We need dramatic examples of companies' valuations being hit for making such privacy violations on a whim. Google and Facebook can mostly get away with similar violations since the large majority of users simply don't care and/or don't understand the privacy concerns, but maybe it's not too late to lash back at relatively insignificant companies like Quora for blatant disregard of privacy...
>We need dramatic examples of companies' valuations being hit for making such privacy violations on a whim.
They don't exist. Only a small subset of users even care and investors and stakeholders just want their site to succeed any way it can. While not expressly privacy-related, take a look at charts of LinkedIn stock after their massive security breach where it was revealed they weren't salting password hashes. Not only did it not dip, it rose on the news and held those gains until after the story was out of the news.
"Quora launched with all kinds of "Former Facebooker!" hype that it hasn't really lived up to."
With all of these privacy issues popping up with them the past couple of weeks I'd venture to say their "Former Facebooker!" hype is being lived up to quite well.
I just can't tolerate a site where people upvote you based on where you work and not based on the content of your answer. A recent thread on using "bullets" to separate text elements on a single line wherein a Facebook employee responded by saying "I stole it from Flickr" had more upvotes by far when it was put in the newsletter than a post below it highlighting (with images and historical references) that we've been using dots-as-spaces since we were writing on stone tablets really drove this home for me.
Anyone remember Belkin's fiasco of selling a router which would randomly replace webpage requests with ads for their products? Some do, and still won't buy Belkin anything due to trust destroyed. Same here: Quora may survive this, but many users will never go there for permanent lack of trust.
Legislating this sort of thing is killing a cockroach with a shotgun. I'm of the opinion that they should be free to be sleazy with their users, as long as I'm free to not be a user (and I no longer am).
Quora is committing good-will suicide with this move, and them's the breaks, but a legal requirement preventing it is overkill.
"Legislating this sort of thing is killing a cockroach with a shotgun. I'm of the opinion that they should be free to be sleazy with their users"
Sounds like you have a high tolerance for living with cockroaches if you can just move from one apartment to another instead of rooting out the infestation.
This is completely crossing the line. Showing others what you have searched without notifying me about this is just offensive to me. I love quora and what they are doing, but this is completely below the belt.
I personally agree - I would be annoyed if I discovered this (I haven't logged on to Quora in a long long time). They seem to have most recently updated their Privacy Policy (http://www.quora.com/about/privacy/) on August 1. Quoting "Specifically, you consent to Quora's disclosure of information related to the ways in which you interact with the Service, such as: landing pages, pages viewed".
On the counter-side, I would have been okay if they sent a mass-mailer saying "We have introduced a new feature on Quora - now you know how your peers are doing with Quora!" - making it sound marketing-like, but in reality, percolating the information to their users in the most seemingly-harmless way possible. This could have won them actual fans for this feature.
Why don't they show something like "4 of your friends" read this answer without identifying the friend? They would need a lower threshold were you would need a minimum number of friends before this feature would kick in to keep the data anonymous. They could also just say something like "4 people within your network" read this and use the network effect of 2nd and 3rd degree connections.
I'm surprised that no adult websites implement a social sharing feature like that. No one is clicking on the facebook / google+ buttons on purpose, but it might be interesting to see what videos people in your network are watching if it was anonymous.
Equally f'd up is the fact that you cannot delete your Quora account. Seriously. Try searching for any such option in your settings page. They only have a "deactivate" option, and once you deactivate, you can reactivate anytime by just logging in again :)
I don't know what "deactivating" does, but the account is reactivated if you log in. I tried it and it didn't appear to do anything except log me out. I also sent an email to privacy@quora.com to have the account deleted, but it hasn't happened yet...
No. You have to send a mail to privacy@quora.com and they might take mercy on your asocial soul and delete your account for good (no guarantees though).
It seems that almost every week I read about yet another "social" company breaching longstanding societal norms regarding privacy. Quora is just the latest example.
What happens next has become rather predictable: a few voices criticize the company in question, the company (maybe) issues some kind of public apology, and then... nothing seems to change.
Maybe our society doesn't really care that much about privacy.
I honestly think having accounts on social networks is now becoming a huge liability. They start of as quite private and then morph into being open and you are left holding the bag. It just means the more networks you sign up for the more networks you have to main and the more networks you have to cancel later.
There is nothing certain in life but death, taxes, and monetization. It's Quora's time to start making money. It's reaching the social site late stage end of life phase. The internet's natural order.
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.
It seems to me there is only one good response to this type of corporate behavior: remove yourself from the equation. ou are free to quit and have them remove your data from the system. I did this last week and I feel much better now. To Quora's credit it only took 24 hours to be removed from the system. If you consider it abuse, staying in an abusive relationship is just plain stupid :)
The views feature isn't enabled until you read the announcement which is forced into the view on top of the page when you view the web site, you have to specifically click Hide to remove it and acknowledge the new option.
If you turn it off, it will retroactively remove any of your views, you can turn it off here http://www.quora.com/settings
Question is, will it turn out to be "News Feed" feature of FB or FB Beacon?
Their founding team were present when FB introduced News Feed and Beacon. I'm sure they've given lot of thought to it.
Common sense dictates, it is screwed up move. I had the same thought when I saw news feed feature. But it turned out to be pretty rad and successful. Not sure what Quora team are envisioning here.
I understand people's outrage at this invasion of privacy - but honestly why do people think that anything they have ever done online hasn't already been tracked and recorded (not being paranoid or anything - just being realistic).
There is a lot of value in figuring out who someone is, what they like and don't like and what they are likely to buy (ad networks/trackers etc.).
Hence you MUST assume that everything you have done, and ever will do, is, for all intents and purposes, PUBLIC FOREVERMORE.
Not "whisper public" but shared across YouTube public with 100 MILLION PEOPLE.
Once you assume that situation you attempt to mitigate possible pitfalls and these things don't bother you so much (they still will - but the sting isn't nearly as strong).
And no - the web isn't going in the opposite direction - privacy is dead - long live privacy!
You can try and shame or regulate it away - but seeing the web as it is today and where it's going - there is no turning back.
> why do people think that anything they have ever done online hasn't already been tracked and recorded
Because their friends, family, and coworkers don't get to see those records, and it is difficult (important, but difficult) to care about the unseen omnisciency of Google/Facebook data junkies.
With a security background, I'm painfully aware of how very little is private these days. But this is just a disgrace. I deleted my account. I hope others get the message.
There's a huge difference between sharing what people have explicitly interacted with (making a comment, clicking "like") and sharing what people have passively viewed with no explicit action on their part.
With Facebook's f'ed up app ecosystem I've seen friends Like some pretty embarrassing stuff without realizing they had done so. And besides, the change has been recent, there has been a training period as people realized their Likes and comments were shared. I can't imagine how many millions of awkward embarrassing conversations have happened because these vampire companies don't care about their user's privacy.
I see the author's point, and users should be aware Quora does this and have the facility to disable this but ... is this not an over reaction? Viewing a question titled “Should I come out to my parents?” or “What is the best way to hide an affair?” doesn't in any way imply you are gay or hiding an affair... just that you showed some interesting the question and possible answers. I'd be interesting in both those topics just to see the variety of responses. I don't think i would need to hide the fact that i viewed those threads.
If they were providing complete Quora browsing history of a user, which you could see a general trend towards topics a person reads over time, I would see a serious breach of privacy. But a single one off "so and so just read this" is hardly damning.
Sure, viewing a question with those titles doesn't imply (in the logical sense) that you are gay or hiding an affair but to some it may imply (in the looser English sense) them all the same. More importantly, if you're cis hetero you feel no reason to hide reading a question titled "Should I come out to my parents?" because you don't feel any implicit threat. If you're a 15-year-old gay kid in the deep south with fundamentalist parents who will totally freak out if they learn they have a gay child then that threat is there. Even if you can claim "no, I'm not gay, I was just reading an interesting thread" that doesn't eliminate that threat.
Now, in this particular example, that child will almost certainly be 100% decided not to tell their parents and not need to read such a question, but work with me here. It's easy to fill in with scenarios that almost certainly do occur and could be legitimately dangerous in a number of ways. I mean, hell, a physically abusive spouse noticing you reading "How should I deal with my spouse abusing me?" is NOT GOING TO END WELL. Even if you try to explain "No, I just thought it was interesting. Of course I don't think you're abusive."
I'll freely admit these cases are sufficiently rare among the general population but they are also cases worth protecting to the point where we're still far from overreacting.
Yes, it does imply. Extrapolated conclusions may not be correct, but it does imply. Sure there may be a sensible rational explanation proving the implication is wrong, but until reason is provided to analyze that motivation, it does imply. For many such allegedly misunderstandable implications, odds are high the implication is correct.
heyitsnick posted on Hacker News. Looking at just one post, and even noting that the post has absolutely no technical or business relevance, is a VERY strong indicator that heyitsnick has a strong interest in technology and business.
The fact that Quora publishes, by default, every user's every viewing will, in practice, pretty much demolish the "but it was just once" claim by making public whether such viewings (whatever the subject) were, in fact, just once.
+1. In fact our brains are wired/evolved to do so. Debating should vs. should not is ultimately philosophical at best. We should look at things like this from a framework of reality. Reality dictates people (including smart folks like us) will indeed jump to those conclusions and form opinions about others.
If all of these vague insinuations were so valueless, then why are all of these privacy-raping sociopathic websites trying so goddamned hard to expose them all, whether publicly or to their "marketing partners"?
NB: to better under stand "social networking", wordsub "sociopathic" and you'll be far closer to the truth.
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 sign-ins; and
- showing what you view to other people.
come across to me as a company coming off hype and approaching a crunch point. I believe now, more than ever, than Quora will end up an acquisition for Google or Facebook or will simply slide into irrelevance.
[1]: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/08/23/the-power-of-q...