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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I'd love it if someone would make something that would let me see answers past the first without creating an account. Presumably it could be done with an extension plus a database of accounts a la (or even from) Bugmenot.

Incidentally, does anyone know why Quora wants to force me to create an account? They can already use cookies to tell which pageviews are from the same user. What difference does it make if there's a username and password associated with them?

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Maybe this has to do with the default for new accounts to be included in the "these people viewed this page" feature. Maybe because of that no one wants to log into their account in fear of sharing what they view, so this requirement is to reverse the trend of users logging out as a result of that fear?

Higher user count => more $$$

How do they make more money if my pageviews are associated with an account?

They can show more registered users. I imagine they will turn around and show investors the inflated count when they raise more money ...

I was thinking the same, but don't investors look into the companies they're investing in, investigate the statistics and information the company provides? I would think that investors would see the people have to sign up and realise the registration numbers are artificially inflated.

You would think, but I imagine some will be swayed by the numbers even if they do think about that.

I think getting you to sign up is the start of a process that culminates with you inviting all of your contacts. The username/password step is just the top of the funnel.

Ah yes, that could be it. I don't think I would advise a startup to do that though. If you have to be that heavy-handed to make it spread, what that really means is that the site isn't good enough.

Once you have an account, they can start contacting you, and increase the probability of you participating/contributing content/inviting your friends.

BugMeNot already has an official Firefox extension, FWIW: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bugmenot/

pg: did you mean auto-opening the other answers that were "collapsed"? -- b/c it looks like they allow us to see past the first now

normal example: http://www.quora.com/Asana/Why-does-Asana-host-its-DNS-with-...

example w/popup: http://www.quora.com/Asana/Why-does-Asana-host-its-DNS-with-...

need something to recursively open all comments too?

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