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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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