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Comment by webjprgm | Hacker News Reader

I just went to Quora.com and see nothing that would convince me to spend more than 30 sec. there. They need a better home page to engage potential users who are curious about what that site is. A one sentence blurb about solving all my problems doesn't make me believe it. I want to see examples so I can see exactly what kind of problems and how they will be solved. E.g. on Stack Overflow there is a list of questions and answers that are being asked.

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Yes, I fail to see what Quora is other than a cliquey silicon valley Stack Overflow Q&A site which actively doesn't want more users because it acts protective over content, demands signups and generally acts in a stupid manner rather than just giving me what I want. I don't see a single thing it does better than Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow is public without the sign-in stuff. Of the 30-40 times I've hit Quora from web searches it's had useful information for me only once. What a load of hype. It certainly seems to stroke some important egos though, so they can play with it for as long as they like while the rest of the world moves on.

Edit: grammar/typos

Quora's Expert's Exchange inspired blurring of text to hold content hostage is anything but encouraging.

It's user contributed content. Stop treating it with such disrespect.

Amusingly the hipster SV-startup is doing it even worse than the venerable expert-sexchange (on the latter you can at least scroll down to see the unblurred content).

And to add insult to injury quora-accounts are free anyway. Why do they strong-arm users into creating what will ultimately be 99,9% throwaway accounts?

They ask your FB account to "confirm" who you are if you want to interact (view is still free for throwaway email), not just e-mail. Of course the FB account can be a throwaway as well :).

I don't think that was always the case. I joined Quora very early, and I have never had an account on theFacebook.

I did, however, recently delete my Quora account after I didn't like what they were doing with privacy (Lack thereof)

I haven't been back, and while I thought there was some good conversations - the UX at Quora is atrocious. I had a hard time sort wheat from chaff in their feed, the visual differentiation between textual elements in the feed emphasized the wrong stuff. Their mobile view, desktop view and native mobile client view all had separate experiences ad visually didn't match.

There are a lot more things I can say about the UX/UI - but in the end, I am happy I deleted my account.

The blurring had previously been achieved with css rules (easily disabled). Interestingly, now they've escalated to serving blurred images of paragraphs. Unless there's some serious black-hat SEO going on, they're now letting each question's single unblurred answer provide the entirety of the page's indexable content. They're willing to sacrifice organic search result placement for the blur-wall.

I always thought of it as a marketing tool for the answer-givers. Of course, it's likely not as profitable to charge them money to answer questions :)

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