Quora To Oddly-Named Users: Papers Please
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So I've left.
Oh no - wait - I did.
But no, I didn't try to register with RiderOfGiraffes. That would just be silly.
I have to wonder about a mother who names her kid "Quora" anyway, and I would like to point out that Quora isn't giving us her last name, yet she demands that we give her ours?
I learned my lesson with facebook, which promised privacy and then years later made the data public. That is the last site that got my real name. I've changed my name on facebook several times to completely obviously fake names, and while they claim that you have to use your real name and they claim to review them, no repercussions. I'm only keeping the account while I go back, and delete old status updates a few months at a time anyway.
And really, no website actually needs it. Trying to fight it is silly, as there is no mechanism whereby you can authenticate identity online. Faxing a passport doesn't even work, unless the business is tied into the government network, and if it is, then other businesses are as well and fake passports become easier.
This is why their real name policy is flawed. A real name that sounds fake gets flagged as fake. A fake name that sounds real does not get flagged. The process is completely subjective as to what sounds real. Requiring ID is one way to prove/disprove it, but checking scanned IDs does not scale well.
Handling fake names or other identifiers is like handling software piracy. You can't prevent it and technology can't prevent it. The pathological cases will do their thing anyway. The best you can do is make it sufficiently inconvenient that the bulk of users will simply go the legit route and the bulk of clowns will go away. Incurring some false positives is a cost, which Quora has chosen to bear.
This is what government itself does for issuing its own IDs. They just have the power for "sufficiently inconvenient" to include criminal charges.
> Incurring some false positives is a cost, which Quora
> has chosen to bear.
On top of that Quora doesn't seem to even have a consistent policy, or so it appears from their communications. The first 'your name appears to be fake' communication implies that the user just needs to say, "Yup, that's my real name," and all will be well. The further communications relay the message that once you've been determined to be 'fake' you need to provide a government id.
I'm curious why this issue triggers a knee-jerk response of "that's discrimination".
Seems to me that Quora may just perceive that it's not a worthwhile use of customer-service time and resources to deal with edge cases in output from their name approval algorithm. "Fax in your ID" allows a remedy with a standardized procedure and minimal resources spent on their part.
Keep in mind what a small population this really is. You need the intersection of three sets: "rejected name", "bona fide applicant not a scammer/clown", and "unable or unwilling to access a scanner like by getting oneself to a Kinko's". It's quite plausible that this set of corner cases is sufficiently small as to simply not be worth Quora's time to handle. Quora is not a government with an obligation to serve everybody. Of course it sucks for those who happen to fall into that set, but the overall perspective is that those are small points in a large sea of data.
Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice. This includes incompetence by willful neglect in favor of other priorities.
> I'm curious why this issue triggers a
> knee-jerk response of "that's discrimination".
When you decide that two things are different you are discriminating between them, political correctness aside.
Whatever the case, it makes them come across as jackasses.
It's not like "real sounding names" is going to prevent trolls. Trolls have the time and patience to pick a credible-sounding fake name. People who want to use the site for it's proper purpose will just feel insulted.
If they want real names, they could do it just by creating social pressure to provide a real name, and doing the Facebook trick of using user-submitted data to build your user name. If a few hold-outs don't want to play along with it, what's the big problem?
The level of decorum here appears to have dropped significantly in the last few days with a lot of this sort of personal attack.
If they unwittingly discriminated against someone because of an unintentional consequence of an action taken in good faith and believed to be benevolent (preventing trolling, spamming and such on Quora) then how does that make the programmers "jackasses" (ie contemptibly foolish/stupid)?
Why not just say that it's a flawed filter, why the need for this sort of talk?
It's just that asking somebody to show some ID just because their name seems strange seems a bit ... strange. It's a website, not a home loan.
But people probably wouldn't be too keen to give their credit card info to a free site just for "name verification".
What prevents someone from signing up in your name and posting something that would certainly prevent you from getting hired in the future?
Also, what if someone "internet famous" or even worse "real life famous" wants to contribute something?
There has to be a better way to control trolls.
If Quora is going to demand ID, they need to ask ID from EVERYONE before their account is active to prevent fake Steve Jobs, etc. not selectively.
Otherwise I recommend you sign up using your dog's first name or your elderly neighbor's name.
(I do think that people might just pick 'real sounding' names though. They should try to make this the exception though...)
I think what those pushing real names for their site don't get is that the closer the site gets to appearing to only use real names, the more dangerous and potentially damaging it becomes for the real name users.
A random site where anyone can post as anyone else has some plausible deniability. A site where everyone is really themselves has less deniability. A fake facebook account claiming to be X thus is more damaging to X than a totally random website talking about X. And that's not even getting to the dumb stuff you say on your own...
Strangely enough, the small town bank that I do business with has been absurdly solicitous about this, and when a similar string comparison caused a bill payment to fail, the manager added a note to the file saying that dishonoring any bill directed to a foreign client at our branch office would henceforth require his written approval. It's just the gigantic megacorp bank in Tokyo which hasn't figured out that foreigners exist yet.
Speaking of fakes, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake has had all kinds of problems due to her (real) last name: http://caterina.net/archive/001011.html At worst, I've been asked if I was "one of them foreigners" by a landlord years back.
They are not fake, they are simply anonymous.
Further, by having some anonymity, I can say things that I otherwise would not be comfortable saying. This is important on a site where the purpose is to answer questions.
Is it better to get a vague question or to have an answer that fails to reveal critical information because this information might make a business associate look bad? Or would it be better to be able to say X attempted to do Y because they believed Z, and I thought Z true, but Z turned out to be W and so Y caused a Q. X is a good entity, they just made a mistake here, so beware of this kind of error if you do business with X.
http://www.quora.com/How-anonymous-are-anonymous-questions-i...
It's a very false-anonymity, even by internet standards.
http://www.quora.com/Have-Quora-admins-ever-unanonymized-a-q...
I try to say "legal name" rather than "real name" when interacting with people. While this is not perfectly correct (according to Wikipedia, in common law a "true name" is any name used non-fraudulently), it does help to remind people that assumed names aren't less real than given names.
To me, Quora is almost the ultimate non-story. There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform.
The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.
Another way to put this is that it's a bubble story: journalists and Valleywags think it's much bigger than it is because all the other people in the same bubble talk about it. Outside of SV/SF, nobody really knows nor cares.
It's a bit like the AT&T-iPhone story. Sure it sucks in SF/NY (it really does) but journalists and bloggers seem incapable or uninterested in considering that these two cities are representative of the whole country.
Last year Quora got funding at a staggering $86M [1] (this sounds like post-money). It's Yahoo Answers meets Facebook, which just so happens to have an insider audience that won't necessarily translate more broadly. Frankly, I'd sell before people catch on.
[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchma...
Don't quite agree, I think their real-time update system excellent and sets them apart. It definitely (IMO) makes the site more addicting. Not that it couldn't be written by competitors of course
I don't disagree that Quora is overhyped though, they seem be Techcrunch's pet company of 2011.
The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.
Replace "Quora" with "Hacker News" and you'll see how valuable getting Valley insiders to use it can be. It's the community.
Obligatory wikipedia background:
"WELL membership is available to almost anyone, but requires a paid subscription and use of one's real name."
"The WELL was frequently mentioned in the media in the 1980s and 1990s, probably disproportionately to the number of users it had relative to other online systems. [...] This early visibility was largely the result of the early policy of providing free — comped — accounts for interesting journalists and other select members of the media. As a result, for many journalists it was their first experience of online systems and, later, the Internet, even though other systems existed."
Not much happened with them, either.
For example the discussions of many business models on Quora are unsurpassed in quality anywhere else on the web.
One of our top managers' name is Herman Herman. 10 years ago or so, he was working next to a guy, whose name was Martin Martin. Of course, Martin Herman was lurking nearby as well.
Grew up somewhere in Indonesia (I think) and never got a last name. So they just duplicated his first name.
All I do to check whether someone appears to be real is to use Rapportive in Gmail and see whether they appear on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
I don't force users to use real names, I think there's a real benefit in allowing people to use aliases. Rapportive allows me to really quickly grok whether the alias has an underlying real ID in terms of fighting spam and trolls.
It's hardly a fool proof technique, but it answers the questions 9 times out of 10 which removes any need for me to create obstacles for my users to jump through.
PS: Interesting aside: I really loathe Facebook due to a personal incident in my life that occurred on there. Rapportive were kind enough to understand this and then to write an exception into their codebase such that it never prompts me to connect with Facebook. Talk about customer service.
Or people like me who use a different email address for every site?
Spammers, things done by scripts... They give themselves away really easily. All I want is an obstacle enough that I know people aren't spamming and that if they troll they understand that it will reflect on their reputation.
Do I need a real id? Nope. And clearly Quora don't either as they don't require over 99% of users verify their real id. It's just a spam prevention policy and helps cut down on trolls as it will (or has risk that it will) reflect on you.
It's really not a good thing to start applying onerous terms and your users.
No doubt, real names would be an effective aspect to quality content, but if the system of verification is flawed, it's meaningless.
Lessons for me: things might be very different on the other side of the globe. Don't try to arrogantly believe you can judge wether things can be true or not from your limited experience and imagination.
People that don't have family names often use patronyms and the "[W]estern world" seems to cope just fine.
Harrison ben Harry, Harrison Harrinpoika, Harrison Fitzharry¹ or what have you.
---
1 - all mean "Harrison son of Harry"
It's a pretty sad troll that can't figure out they need to make "real-sounding" names. Basically you're filtering out the twelve year olds that will try to write 'fuck' and 'shitcock' everywhere. That can be accomplished more effectively with some simple analysis on post content.
Instead, you're really only making life hard on legitimate users that don't match your dramatically underinformed notion of a "proper" name.
But that's an awfully big rathole to crawl into.
See also: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
Perhaps it is useful to examine the reason for identifying people. If it is, as you say, to maintain high quality, I would ask upon what causal basis that that conclusion rests; I submit StackOverflow and HN as examples of entities that show real names not to be a requirement for high quality discourse.
If Quora wants people to use their real names, they should require them to link their facebook account -- and these days, even that is a poor guarantee of real names. Let's face it, people are striking back at the "real names" thing by altering their names on facebook, because you never know what they're going to make public by default next.
Would Quora have allowed _why?
The assumption is that some people will contribute lower quality content if using a pseudonym than if using their real name. Yes there are people who will contribute high quality content only under pseudonym, and losing them is the price Quora will have to pay.
You can of course contribute anonymously to Quora.
And this article takes other political potshots for no good reason... "birtherist"? I think birtherism is silly too, but what's that potshot doing in the middle of this article?
I found 0 instances of "Nazi" or "bitherist" in the TC article linked.
Have I missed something?
With regards the "birther-ist" comment, the article does say:
"I think Quora’s ridiculous, birther-ist requirements
for a “government-issued ID” are a little bit rough,
... "
Also, historical truth is of dubious value here anyhow, the point I'm making is the word picture being painted, not the veracity of the words being used for the painting.
Hey, for me this is probably closer to Orwell than to historical reference. I do have to admit that the picture is provocative and stupid though.
I've been on the Internet long enough to know that getting accused of being a totalitarian is almost a rite of passage more than anything else, but every once in a while something like this still manages to stick out despite my general desensitization to the accusation.
Further, watching my original post bounce up and down, I'm impressed at how people either can't see it either because they are desensitized far more than I am, or are somehow offended at the idea that it's wrong to use this imagery or something? Or are ignorant of the provenance of the phrasing being used? I'm at a bit of a loss to explain the number of people who seem to think that not only is this just peachy, it's not acceptable to have a problem with it or something.
Do people really think it's that bad? I really like Quora for the most part and think it's way more useful than Yahoo! Answers.
Her name is currently set as Sushii to compensate.
It gives me a chance to experiment and explore different facets of my life and personality that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing if that exploration were tied to my real name.
Maybe Quora isn't the place for experimenting with identity.
The Internet used to be a place where we were able to freely express ourselves. Increasingly it seems that we can only express ourselves if it's congruent with our IRL selves.
You can find him on LinkedIn (along with other similarly named folks): http://www.linkedin.com/in/danieldaniel
I understand their tired reasoning, but don't agree with arbitrarily forcing your users to do anything.
I've messaged them and am awaiting a reply.
All you have to do is make a new Facebook account with a real sounding name, and noone would be the wiser.
So whats the point of wasting valuable resources enforcing something this stupid?
Then they can go to advertisers or just blatantly sell the data if it doesn't work out.
Regardless if their intentions are good or bad, this data in the wrong hands can cause nuisance.
These are their accounts to loose and I don't see why this is even news, or a blog post. So what if you can't come up with a name that sounds real.
For a q&a site these guys certainly get a lot of HN attention.
Obviously you can't predict all cultural phenomenons (for instance, if you named your child "Ken Ryu" before Street Fighter hit the shelves) and you shouldn't do it just to please ignorant folks or know where your child will be living in the future ("Kumar??? What is that, like 5 O's and 2 U's?"), but don't intentionally make life difficult on your children just to make yourself laugh or to fulfill some nerd agenda.
Weird names get you made fun of for maybe 8-10 years, but then the rest of your life is filled with compliments. Think of it as an investment.
Normal to whom?
Aside from cultural issues, and aside from the notion that people should name the children to make up for the lack of a proper personal identification system on the Internet, that ship has long sailed. Have a look at your local paper's birth announcements - there aren't many Dicks and Janes anymore. Even older names have "creative" spellings that render them practically unrecognisable.
Would you only buy your boy pink clothes or name him "Elizabeth"? You are choosing for your child, and they deserve a name which is as neutral of a canvas as you can provide for them.
If he needs to use it, he can go by a middle name. I go by my middle name, because I share my first name with my father. No TechCrunch drama required.