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.
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.
The fact that they have to monetize hurts their user experience because they push features such as requiring you to sign to view answers.
As long as Quaora continues to hide content, in long term, there is no way but bankruptcy.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.