This is a bit f'd, Quora
giantrobotlasers.com
giantrobotlasers.com
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...
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.
How would the community keep itself exclusive? I thought about that last year and came up with this: http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/invention-creating-and-...
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.
True, but both have Q&A 'modes', e.g. Ask HN and IAmA AMA.
http://www.technologyreview.com/graphiti/427964/is-facebook-...
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".)
Quora has pretty rich content and while they'll never have a userbase like facebook i don't see why the value per user number is wrong
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.
There do seem to be anon posts, though. Not sure why.
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.
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.
Your comment reeks of the typical reddit hate on HN, without anything to back it up.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
Quora.
"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 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.
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.
In some circumstances, that may be extremely relevant.
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.
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.
The really difficult part, which is what my post was trying to explain; the really difficult part is actually _creating_ the open expression of truth.
Because you have to have a mix between real identity and the mask of anonymous.
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.
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.
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.
Not to disparage reddit as a whole, but there's a lot of close-mindedness and misogyny in the more populated subreddits.
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.
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.
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.
Yup.
>Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system?
/r/AskScience
You can't make horrible opinions less horrible by making them invisible.
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.)
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.
"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?
I'm only fighting an argument from authority.
Hah. I actually don't have to say anything.
But while I'm here, .;'';.
It's a troll face.
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.
So yes, he is responding to your point.
I even believe it.
But we couldn't have this conversation unless this, _this itself_ was a reaction to the telling of truth.
Necessary means that it happens whether or not you want it to.
Necessary hurts.
Nahh ask it on 4chan- /s (of course). Be more fun. ;)
edit: ok well, to the point of expressing it. orthodoxy. he's the only one that was willing to fight orthodoxy.
because my thread had its bearings in the absurd and often wrong orthodoxy of reddit.
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.
edit: removed discussion of googleoff/googleon directives in the HTML source. Seemed suspicious, but apparently it's something to do with Google Search Appliance.
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.)
https://github.com/benvinegar/Spectacles/blob/master/README....
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.
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.Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 21.16 bits of identifying information.
Now I come to think about it, changing the GB to US in my user agent would probably make it less unique.
Running Firefox with no-script/ad-block/request policy + UA string set to IE 8. Sites I enable scripting on will surely get more info.
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.
Unique means "only one."
One in a billion.
Do you think those two are the same?
In short: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Supercookie
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.
Your board.
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.
-Blhack
CEO, coffeespace rocket lab
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.
Chair, Board of directors, coffeespace rocket lab
Exactly.
I have bumped into this on numerous occasions in MMO's.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
In any case, thank you for posting it here - at least people can take the precautions.
Edit: That yes/no button is not at all obvious! They need some form of green/red color coding.
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 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.
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.
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.
Like a business plan? Who knew that they'd be actually expected to offer a return on that money at some point?
I'd love to know where that money is going/has gone.
Edit: Oh.
http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-is-Quora-moving-to-Mo...
The obvious question: Why the HECK do they need 40, let alone 160 employees?!
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.
Edited to add links:
The rant on Quora: http://www.quora.com/rage-against-quora/Rage-forcing-Faceboo... And the answer I wrote: http://www.quora.com/Death-and-Dying-1/What-does-it-feels-li...
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!"
No thanks.
Done with quora forever.
I hope they fail, Facebook is a horrible example and everybody should realize that.
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.
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.
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.
A fun novel relating to this is Daniel Suarez's "Kill Decision".
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 hate that Facebook captured the social space.
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.
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.
http://hitchhikerguidetothegalaxy.blogspot.com/2006/04/bewar...
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...
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.
I've had some good reads on the site, but only from the cream of the crop threads that make it into the digest emails.
Searching out a general question on Quora seems more likely to lead directly to hordes of marketers linking back to their own sites.
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 expect the bubbling up of such things (stuff that is somehow "interesting", but not useful) is a problem for the majority of social sites.
I tend to think the like button / upvote concept is just busted and largely to blame, but I certainly don't know how to solve or supplant it.
Quora is committing good-will suicide with this move, and them's the breaks, but a legal requirement preventing it is overkill.
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.
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.
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.
Found this quora post:
http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-...
According to a Quora engineer, it seems you can delete your account by emailing privacy@quora.com
Wow! This certainly sounds like something EFF (https://www.eff.org/) should try and do something about.
http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-...
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...
FYI, to turn off this setting, go to Views -> Allow others to see what content I've viewed in feed
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.
This is quite upsetting.
http://www.quora.com/Personal-Finance/How-much-money-have-mo...
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.
If you turn it off, it will retroactively remove any of your views, you can turn it off here http://www.quora.com/settings
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.
http://www.quora.com/Quora-company/Why-is-Quora-moving-to-Mo...
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.
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.
Requiring login to view is their biggest problem. Requiring real names is their second problem.
This is just making things worse.
I encourage you all to do the same. (Or call them, if you know someone.)
Expert Sexchange 2.0
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.
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.
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.
NB: to better under stand "social networking", wordsub "sociopathic" and you'll be far closer to the truth.