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Comment by kylec | Hacker News Reader

This is by far my largest complaint with Quora.

Agreed. I've lost track of how many times I've gone to a Quora answer, thought 'I must take a closer look at Quora', gone to the root domain, realised you need a Facebook login, then just navigated away.

I even have a Facebook account somewhere - just don't like logging into another site like this for some reason.

Same here.

The inconvenience of finding/creating a Facebook account to use in joining Quora is, imo, completely worth the value offered by Quora. You have to choose your battles. At a certain point I would rather have access than have my way.

The problem is, in order to know that Quora is good enough to force you to use FB Connect even though you don't want to, you have to use FB Connect... I'm certain this slows their growth.

Or maybe it makes sure that the only people who go the length to sign up are aware of the benefit of Quora, and therefore likely to be quality users contributing the the quality of Quora. In a sense, Quora uses Facebook as a filter to get great users.

Yea, because Facebook is the test if someone is a great user or not.

I never bothered to sign up at stackoverflow because of OpenID. Not necessarily because I have some philosophical issue with it, but because I already have a system to maintain this stuff and OpenID is just another hoop to jump through. Adding an optional user/password signup is hardly difficult.

Honestly, I'd rather not give Jeff my password. So +1 on OpenID.

What's stopping you from setting your password to jeff_sucks? It's pretty memorable too.

Nothing is stopping me from setting my password to something different for every site I don't want to set a good password for, I'd just very very much rather just enter a URL and have everything work. OpenID is the most useful thing online in ages.

The difference with Stack Overflow is that you can, and may people do, use it without an OpenID. Just go ahead and post a question or answer, and you'll be assigned a cookie-based account. And if you put in an email address, you can download a new cookie for that account at any time.

You can't vote without a login.

This ie exactly what I do each time... look at a question then think, hmm I wonder whats popular on Quora right night but the homepage is totally locked down...

And perhaps the main reason why they are so successful.

People post with their real names instead of arcane nicknames from the 90ies.

With all the psychological and social results that follow.

Great point. I hope there's another way of getting rid of anonymity than having us all have Facebook accounts, because that is a great value. Having your real name and ties which connect back to your social life can hopefully be achieved somehow else... albeit probably through other sorts of centralized profile stores which might have the same stigmas as Facebook with some people. I think the key is in having many options for where you can have your profile kept and what level of data is there. As long as a profile provider's minimum level of profile data is sufficient to do away with the amount of anonymity that is necessary for a service (say Quora), it becomes a matter of how accurate the profile data is, i.e., how easy is it to create a fake account on the profile service?

I signed up using twitter oauth recently. This may be new since you looked at Quora.

You can register for Quora with a Twitter account. You can also disconnect your FB or Twitter account after registration.

It's interesting, I registered Quora last week and it was optional to use your Facebook or Twitter account to register. It was a bit tricky because it looked like you need it, but you could make progress without it.

But I rechecked a minute ago, and it really required it. It seems that they changed the policy this week.

Quora is one of the first sites that I've allowed to connect via Facebook, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it's worked so far. They haven't spammed my wall at all (like most other things), and the site itself became much more interesting as soon as I was connected to all of my friends & interests.

Quora no longer forces you to log in with Facebook, nor do you need to log in at all to browse the site.

I registered as well and fired of an email to their feedback contact. The Twitter OAuth process is especially painful on an iPhone. You have to log in to Twitter and approve, then come back to Quora to enter username, password, and email.

Does Quora not provide a "Sign Up With Email" option (you need js!) right under the Facebook connect button? Granted, I don't understand the big deal about Quora, but I know an email signup when I see it.

I sucked it up and registered anyway, but I still hate it and it makes me loathe to use the site.

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