Quora Launches Blogging Platform | Hacker News Reader

Quora Launches Blogging Platform

techcrunch.com

64 pointsmarbemac40 comments

Suprised to find I can access blogs without signing in. I used to enjoy Quora. I would browse, then sign in and comment when I felt I had something relevant to add. Unfortunately the forced login to view content and Quora automatically posting recently read articles onto Facebook made me stop visiting.

These blogs won't draw me back. Many topics have aggregators you can submit you blog to. I would imagine building a readership on Quora will be no easier than running a self hosted blog.

This. Quora is probably the single most invasive site I have ever visited, short of something engineered with literally malicious intent. I will probably never significantly engage with it for this very reason.

I am incredibly wary of even clicking a Quora link, and when I do it's typically from within the context of an incognito browsing session.

edited : It's a shame, because the content itself can be quite good. I have simply lost confidence in the site, as I do not believe they respect my privacy one iota.

Really don't get all the Quora hate on HN. I usually agree with HN on things but on this I'm the polar opposite. I love Quora (and HN).

"Really don't get all the Quora hate on HN."

I'm not sure what's hard to get exactly. How would you like it if Google forced you to sign in to search and then one day told the whole world what you were searching for? Yes they backtracked on the latter but it's fucking ridiculous that it would have even went live in the first place. It makes me never want to sign in to Quora again. And since you can't even browse the site effectively without signing in, the whole thing is useless.

Google doesn't need you to sign in because they already know exactly who you are, that should bother you a little more if you ask me.

Every platform has things about it which are not perfect and every startup makes mistakes. Many on HN seem to be either completely unaware of or purposely ignore all of the other amazing things about Quora, and that's a shame.

I'm ignorant of a lot of things. I liked Quora a lot and I agree everyone makes mistakes. Unfortunately they made the kind of mistake that isn't easily forgiven or recovered from so it's going to take a extraordinary effort on their part to earn that trust back.

The founders are ex-Facebook, they know what kinds of features they're making before they launch them. I wouldn't be so quick to allow them the garage-startup space to make these kinds of mistakes. Consider the source, fruit of the tree, and all that.

Agreed.

Like Facebook, it's a great product created by people who have made some questionable privacy decisions. However whenever Facebook is discussed on HN 95% of the comments are not negative.

I'm not saying Quora is perfect and above criticism, but there are a lot of great things about it and its not so bad as to warrant the extreme and near-absolute criticism it gets on HN.

Quora is great, but in my mind, it was the next Wikipedia-like site that is focused on Q&A, rather than a Facebook-like site that is focused on Q&A.

The fact that they have to monetize hurts their user experience because they push features such as requiring you to sign to view answers.

Do you remember Experts-Exchange ? It was one of the best resources but they did what Quora does now, gained hate of geeks and they lost their competitive advantage.

As long as Quaora continues to hide content, in long term, there is no way but bankruptcy.

>they did what Quora does now, gained hate of geeks and they lost their competitive advantage.

Which opened the field wide for StackOverflow to come in and succeed.

Is there any reason why a similar replacement for Quora can't take off?

The active Quora userbase loves the product and are not at all looking for somebody to build something better - that is usually a prerequisite to an incumbent getting beat.

Quora is a tiny speck in the market compared to the number of Internet users who want informative answers to questions. Quora's user interface is a giant fail, as it has already convinced many of the most knowledgeable people in whole disciplines not to post content there, and not even to look for other people's content there.

Forced sign in is hardly a worry at all. Every time somebody has forced a sign in on me, its almost certain to be a fake account.

I've never understood the whole logic behind forcing this on people. If your site has interesting content people are going to come to you anyway, if it hasn't then just having an account is going to do little to retain your users back.

As long as there is a infinite supply of free email accounts, I consider this as just another ritual I have to perform to gain passage to a site.

1. Install NoScript

2. De-select every checkbox on Embedding ... and Advanced > Trusted

3. Select: General > Scripts Globally Allowed (Dangerous)

4. Visit quora.com and using the NoScript context menu, mark as Untrusted

5. Or instead of #4, (at least in Firefox) you can access the untrusted list from: about:config > noscript.untrusted ... and then just add quora.com. I also added every news site I visit. Excepting wsj.com is removes every news site's paywall.

>Quora’s new blogging tools will appeal to two demographics. The first are people without any web celebrity already. Quora’s Kah Keng Tay writes that Quora blogs suit people who “(1) don’t have a big, established online presence already and (2) don’t want to do the time-intensive, heavy lifting of marketing their blog and slowly building an audience.

It's a double edged sword, since (1) might accelerate your path to internet stardom by a little bit, but by taking (2), you lose the control and a large part of the benefit that comes from achieving internet stardom (if that's you thing) in the first place.

If you are looking for marketing enhancers for your online blogging, you're usually at least partly considering some ends beyond increasing eyeballs (affiliate ads, consulting leads, ebook sales, etc.) [1]. Using Quora as your primary platform puts a damper on the output of these 'ends', and using it as a secondary "Crosspost" location fragments your audience and increases your labor overhead anyways.

Addendum: Benefit (2) is largely moot since its upfront cost reduction for a blogger is not going to be significantly larger than Tumblr, if at all.

[1] If you weren't at least considering these things, then you'd probably be happy staying on your own domain.

I saw quite a few consultants or e.g. lawyers already post on quora to establish themselves as experts in their field. I could imagine that this is interesting for them.

Oh great, will I have to log in to read blog entries beyond the first one?

No, but soon enough you'll have to download their app to see the other entries.

Not until they build enough traction.

Quora really needs to fix this.

I just launched my blog at http://ececconi.quora.com and then opened up an incognito window on Chrome. Navigating to the site took me to the Quora signup homepage. I have to enter in the address again into the bar and press enter to navigate to the blog.

One of the things I dislike most about Quora is how the website obscures the content in attempt to get more people to sign up for it.

this is a bug. https://twitter.com/artypapers/status/294217868097228801

It bothers me the sidebar doesn't follow me as I scroll, so in order to sort/organize your posts once I realize how many there are (which, because of endless scrolling, I don't), I have to go back up to the top.

http://ghost.quora.com/Why-we-ask-people-to-sign-in

As an early user, I started contributing less when I realized this was happening. Why should I contribute to something that's not going to be accessible by non-users?

Wikipedia didn't need to wall off content to grow. Nor did stackoverflow, everything2, urbandictionary, and basically every user-generated content site since expert sexchange.

This shouldn't be happening, I double checked and I can access it from incognito now.

Were you able to get to your blog without signing up? I can't seem to manage to.

Quora hate aside, given the supposed reasoning behind this,

The Internet is full of experts with no one reading their insights. It takes a lot of work to build a following. So today Quora launches a blogging platform that automatically distributes posts to its Q&A site users who follow related topics. Thanks to its upvote system, home page feed, and a new mobile text editor, anyone with something brilliant to blog, even first-timers, can find a readership.

I guess it's too bad Quora didn't pickup Posterous.

So, how do I create my blog on Quora? Or is it invite only?

Edit: Create your blog here: http://www.quora.com/blog/add

Edit 2: Won't be using this. I can't write code snippets using a monospace font. What gives?

http://sergiotapia.quora.com/adsf

You can click on "Create Blog" at the bottom of the "Write" menu at the top right of your home page.

You can write code blocks using the [code] tag.

E.g.

[code]

Multiline

code

[/code]

This is some inline code: [code] /usr/bin/xyz [/code]

Also, it supports syntax highlighting using [code=language]

I am kind of disappointed that you cannot use LaTeX math in the entries. On quora it JUSTWORKED so I was hoping that it would work on their blogging platform but nope: $\sin\theta$ just sits there in its dollar signs...

Feature request: math support.

Have you tried using:

[math] \sin \theta [/math]

(instead of $)

Thx. It works, though the line height seems kind of weird.

http://topicmodels.quora.com/Test-post

Still kind of cool to create a blog in two clicks ;)

This seems like quite an interesting development. Isn't this method of 'blogging' something similar to whatMedium is doing? I wonder if they'll start allowing anyone to post ahead of schedule.

The blog layout didn't have to exactly copy the default Wordpress layout. But the ease of use is awesome in terms of selecting topics to write about, showing the count of people following that topic. Quora would be a much more frequented place with blogs being visible without signing up.

http://wordpress.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com