Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

I deleted my account. There was a fair bit of a debacle in doing so, which appears to have been rectified.

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.

Can I ask how precisely you deleted it? When I tried a few months back, they wouldn't allow a deletion, they would only allow it to be "disabled".

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.

You have to email privacy@quora.com

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.

I emailed this address: privacy@quora.com

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.

Does not seem like a minor thing to me and worthy wanting to leave the system. Emailing them worked for me last week. This behavior reminds me of an early ( now-defunct ) social network which upon a person's registration would attempt a login to their email ( hotmail etc ) using the password ( not encrypted ) that the person used to register on the social network. Upon gaining access to the person's email the system would copy all the email addresses from the archive and begin spamming those users with invitations to the social network. As many naive people do use the same password for many services this attack would often succeed.

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/

I don't really agree with your assessment, but I admire the fact that you put your money where your mouth is and deleted your account.

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 is no way there are 500k active users on Quora.

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)

I took my estimate from their non-logged-in frontpage which shows the number of followers per topic. It was <100K per topic, with the average, subjective guess, at around 50K per topic. I figured that not everyone would be a sub to each topic and then gave a generous guesstimate at users...

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.

Here's to principles and attention spans worth talking about :)

"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.

Login is through facebook so you can just check the appdata, which says 270k MAU : http://appdata.com/apps/facebook/136609459636-quora

I was trying to distinguish between "people who create content", "people who upvote", and "people who passively read"; probably 1-10k, 10-50k, 50-500k respectively.

Although I agree with some of your points about transparency, I'm not a fan of the tone. Hence downvoted.

NP. I am pretty emotionally tied to my view of quora in this regard.

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.

So, I accept your downvote and will take it as constructive criticism to look at my tone in the future.

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.

I believe that the people you are talking about can not be addressed in a milder tone. Of course you are not directly addressing them but I get the point. Hence upvoted.

PS: Fuck you is the best reason ever.

>I think that downvotes should require a comment explaining why the downvote.

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 would be possible to have an optional "reason"-field though. I don't think that's a bad idea really.

The "reason" field is the reply link. If the downvote deserves an explanation, then it should be public for the benefit of the reader.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com