Quora Feeds Will No Longer Show Data On What Other Users Have Viewed
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
http://www.quora.com/blog/Removing-Feed-Stories-about-Views
http://www.quora.com/Views-on-Quora-feature/Which-of-my-view...
Users WILL NOT actually punish Quora for stunts like this, so, from the company's perspective, it's a good bet, temporary bad press notwithstanding.
I remember successfully arguing down a similar bad privacy decision at another well-known company I once worked for. It took a treatise on social software, including multiple citations of other social snafus, the painstaking gathering of stakeholder acceptance, and a near-fanatical perseverance to stymie a feature that was absolute poison to our privacy model. The guys at the top were happy to launch-and-see. I suspect that's what's going on here.
tl;dr - For this to get out at all, either Quora's process is broken, or their strategy is to overshare and pull back only when necessary.
I might not represent the majority, I am not sure. But I think that it is wrong to say that users will not punish them.
People are becoming more jaded with each incident (regardless of which company) and becoming less tolerant of these antics. Eventually people will reach their breaking point.
Or it just might be that I am getting old and crotchety. Get off my lawn!
I find companies' recent behavior of this kind (FB, Quora, and was it Path?) to be revolting, yet I feel powerless to stop them from partaking in this vulgar behavior.
1) Be acquired by Facebook or Google. The problem is that it's no Instagram, so today it could not command a significant premium over the valuation of the latest round.
2) Find a way to make money. Just like Facebook or Twitter, ads seem to be the only way. Only, it does not have the traffic; no growth at all in the past year [2]. Therefore, the management must be doing everything they possibly can to improve their metrics. It's do or die, goodwill be damned.
AnswerHub (formerly Qato) is a managed clone of Quora for orgs. They caused quite an uproar because they originally hewed much too closely to Quora's design.
[edit: I see that AnswerHub is now more like StackOverflow.]
I think Opzi was also potentially this at one point in the past, but just like everyone else doing "enterprise Q&A", pivoted away. I think there's no way to build something which makes money, is simple, is usable and worth using, and complies with stupid enterprise policies on Q&A.
It's much better away of dealing with somethings than an FAQ or endless forums.
Very hard to justify a Twitter-like valuation with that.
I always believe in having a profit, so when you fail in shooting-for-the-stars you fail into profitability, stability, and the dolldroms of merely having six figures in your salary instead of eight in your stock portfolio.
Honestly, I really liked Quora for some of its content, but the UI/UX is just simply atrocious (I have said ad nausea here on HN and other places that Quora suffers from the Digg Effect; trying to wrap their idea of UI/UX around the content too much and thus preventing users from fast, mass consumption of its content.)
I deleted my account on principle: Facebook is simply the wrong model to follow on privacy issues, and the founders of Quora, being ex-facebook have no fucking clue what is an acceptable level of privacy.
And before HNers like Wpeitri and people like Brin/Schmidt can chime in; NO you're fucking wrong. 100% transparency in every little aspect of life is NOT the future, because fuck you, that's why.
I estimate about ~500K active users on quora (pure guess) which puts the user account value quite high (which would put the account value at $800) -- and personally, if my account is that valuable, then fuck them screwing with the privacy settings on the account I make there.
I refuse to be a part of this BS, and will not go back to quora.
My reason for trying to delete it was also privacy related, although it will seem like a minor thing. It turns out that when you initially sign up, they turn any friend you have on facebook into someone you "follow" on Quora. My list of facebook friends is not public information. The list of people you follow on Quora is. Ergo, they turned a subset of my private friends list into a public list that anyone could see, and without warning.
Again, seems like a minor thing, but in principle it was a privacy violation, so as soon as I realized this I attempted to delete the account.
I also deleted my account when news of this nonsense non-feature hit. And their disabling it doesn't earn them back any points in my book.
There's no way to honestly make that move as a mistake. There's no way to 1. implement this feature as an opt-out and 2. do it without any notification to the userbase, as a mistake or as a "failure of communication".
This move can only happen, and only happen the way it did, because there is a core irreconcilable difference between my concept of privacy and theirs.
And as far as I'm concerned, their concept of 'privacy' can go get fucked with a rusty pitchfork.
With:
"Hi, Can you please delete my account and all data associated with it. I was originally impressed with Quora, but the main issue is that it is hard to navigate and its utility is limited. I do not want my information being passively shared on any service, especially one where I may be looking for answers to confidential questions.
After all, why else would I go to the Internet rather than just asking a friend?"
They deleted my account after about a day. The user experience is as much of a problem for me as the privacy. Navigating that site is probably the most fustrating experience on the web.
Quora ( among others ) seem to be taking advantage of our current naive attitudes about social networking, privacy and sharing. It might seem extreem to compare the email hack to these sharing hacks right now, but I think in time we will come to see that these two infringements have more in common than not.
Gratuitous plug for the Freedom Box Project: http://freedomboxfoundation.org/
Every time Facebook rolls out a new change, my feed is flooded with mock protest and boring complaint that aren't even backed up by any action, since people on the internet tend to be lazy (myself included.)
Deleting your account for a specific cause is, in my opinion, the best way to tell a site like Quora exactly how you feel.
There are probably <10k people actually contributing meaningfully to the site, and another 50k or so who are upvoting/etc. in a useful way. There are other users who come to Quora via SERP.
They screwed up communicating the impact of opt-in on this feature (by making it reciprocal to seeing the views of others), and didn't do a great job of explaining it after launch. Cautionary tale for other people rolling out features. Maybe rolling it out to a few hundred friendly to Quora users (i.e. not you, apparently) for feedback would have been smart.
Also, it's not like they killed your child or anything; I don't see why you care that much, or maybe you just like being offended about comparatively minor things. I'd be filled with furious anger if my previously-anon answers got un-anoned, but other than that, there's not much Quora could do to make me seriously angry. (un-Anoning users without court orders would bring out justified pitchforks and probably lawsuits, though)
re: your last paragraph, their actions have shown me that they dont give a shit about any user sentiment (unless major backlash, like this issue) and thus, I simply don't trust them with any information/content I produce/consume.
So, I deleted my account because I am so tired of not only companies like Quora, but where this general direction is taking us.
Hell, the NSA is archiving and data-mining every online transaction of everyone online and I think the acquiesence of the populous, even though seemingly small, through the actions of companies like Quora is simply unnacceptable.
Quora and Facebook are tools against freedom, not for it. If you have no safety in your sharing of information, you have no freedom.
Well, but no one is forced to share everything.
Sure there have been sneaky behaviors, unethical actions, etc
But most of the time your privacy is in your hands. A new "app" to read articles? No thanks.
So, I accept your downvote and will take it as constructive criticism to look at my tone in the future.
I LOVE getting a comment explaining a downvote. Frankly, I have said before here on HN, that I think that downvotes should require a comment explaining why the downvote.
So, Again, i appreciate the feedback. Upvote.
OTOH, I upvoted you as much for your tone as for the content of the message. Sometimes showing a little emotion to make a point, is the right thing to do.
PS: Fuck you is the best reason ever.
The problem with this desire is that it presumes competence. It is based upon the idea that everybody attempts to be a worthy contributor, and that every attempt is deserving of a proper critique.
This simply isn't the case. For many posts, a downvote is the best it deserves; an explanation of the root of its stupidity serves only to detract from the conversation at large.
It's very Hotel California.
Facebook was one of the first companies that started this trend of burying the "delete account" feature deep inside and making it hard to find. But by removing the option altogether, Quora seems to have raised the sneakiness bar much higher.
It's worrying if this becomes the norm.
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailerdaemon@googlemail.com> Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) Date: August 14, 2012 7:20:01 PM PDT
We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (privacy) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group. A few more details on why you weren't able to post:
* You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly. * The owner of the group may have removed this group. * You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post. * This group may not be open to posting.
If you have questions related to this or any other Google Group, visit the Help Center at http://support.google.com/a/quora.com/bin/topic.py?hl=en_US&....
Thanks,
quora.com admins
What communication? If they had let people opt-in, or even asked them to opt-out then that would have been communicating.
The feature itself isn't horrible (followers on questions and topics are already public, and this is well understood and IMO worthwhile -- you CAN follow anon too, but it at least increments the counter), but was badly presented to users. I think just out of incompetence, not malice.
http://www.quora.com/blog/Introducing-Views-on-Quora states "All Quora users participate in Views by default, but you can delete any individual view from the content's views page, or you can turn off Views anytime on your settings page."
I see this kind of new feature -> public outrage / privacy breach -> apology / retraction progression far too many times over the past 6 months.
How have we come to this? :(
- Grace Hopper
I can understand the need to demand login to answer or ask questions. But asking people to login to read answers is just too much for today's internet environment.
This is just a re incarnation of expertsexchange all over again.
I think StackExchange is far superior with a few notable issues, such as the lack of breadth and long road to go from the Area 51 or whatever it is to actually being a full site. I think StackExchange.com should have an easier of finding subject sites. If nothing else, SE shows you don't need to surrender your identity or privacy at the door just to ask and answer questions, which for many people is the time they'd raher not surrender their identity.