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Comment by MarcBodnick | Hacker News Reader

The reason we opt of the wayback machine is because this decision lets writers change their mind whether to have an answer published, or change their mind whether to use their name in authoring an answer (i.e., vs. making it anonymous).

People share a lot of sensitive material on Quora - controversial political views, workplace gossip and compensation, and negative opinions held of companies. Over many years, as they change jobs or change their views, it is important that they can delete or anonymize their previously-written answers.

I know from first-hand experience that Quora writers sometimes decide to go anonymous after they've shared something sensitive. I do this myself from time to time, and I appreciate the option to make that change; this option gives me more comfort in sharing what I know about sensitive topics.

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Maybe use the same solution as Hacker News: Allow users for a limited time to make changes, even delete their answers. Once that time expires make the question accessible to the wayback machine crawlers.

Other than that if users don't want to be associated with something they said in the past to an audience, maybe they shouldn't be saying it at all.

"maybe they shouldn't be saying it at all."

I agree with you in the general case (as a 41 year old). But as someone who was once a stupid teenager, I sure am glad that while I used the Internet back then most of the stupid things I said on it were/are pseudo-anonymized behind "handles", which is something that is far more difficult to do these days.

(Not sure how much this applies to Quora, though).

I know someone whose Quora account was disabled a while back because he refused to use his "real name".

No idea if they still have that policy; my own account is evidence that they don't enforce it across the board (and really how could they?), but if it's still nominally in place then that leaves active users forced to choose between using a pseudonym (and living in fear that access to their account will be stripped from them) or using a name that can potentially be used to identify them in other contexts (and living in fear that being candid will come back to bite them later in life).

Not a particularly good decision to force on someone, IMHO - even if you do promise them an "out" by letting them retroactively self-censor.

They still have that policy. There have certainly been issues with it because there are international users (Quora still struggles to cater for users outside US/UK/Australia, though their recent efforts to connect with Indian users are going well) who might have a 'western name' and 'transliterated' name, and the policy sort of breaks down.

I suppose Quora thinks that anonymity will be good enough, but pseudonyms might prove to better in 90% of cases. I think that probably 9 out of 10 uses of anonymity that I've seen on Quora weren't really necessary.

Personally, I have been always using my real name and has been for years, even when I was making mistakes years ago, and will still do so in the future. I believe these problems needs to be fixed properly.

HN policy is as worse it gets among discussion sites. If you didn't deleted it within 24 hrs, everything you wrote here is stuck forever with no recourse for taking it down. I always wondered why this is the case. Is implementing delete is that hard? After all this is hacker news.

From my point of view, that sounds like pretty weak reasoning. I'm all for anonymity and the freedom to change your mind but you make it sound like this is one of the defining features of using Quora (& a reason why people use it). I'm not really convinced by that - but I accept that I may be wrong.

I do actually answer questions on Quora on occasion; I haven't paid much attention to the "historical record" issues in the past.

But my quick thought here is that any time a company claims to be doing something detrimental to the outside world "on behalf of our users", it's worth checking if they've consulted their users about this, and if the users can opt out.

I can see the value in keeping control over what permanent, external caches are allowed to archive Quora content, for some users in particular. That said -- I don't care if my answers are archived, and I do care about contributing to a knowledge store that won't be lost in X years when Quora's business model doesn't quite line up with the vagaries of the economy.

What about supporting two views of the site -- one (with a "/pub/" added to the base URL, perhaps) that's archivable and displays only answers from users that have granted that permission in their profile, and the standard URL that shows all responses and blocks archiving in robots.txt.

That's not technically difficult at all, but I haven't seen any discussion of this sort of option.

Even if there was an opt-out system for answers being archived, that'd be better than no third-party archiving at all as far as I'm concerned.

I have occasionally kept content I wanted archived on a blog and then just deleted the blog, and then undelete it to see the content again.

@MarcBodnick - I do understand this perspective. But I strongly disagree with its tradeoffs.

Quora should find other ways to protect its users, and/or make users aware of their own rights to get their old contributions taken down. The Archive respects takedown requests.

why not archive the information after "anonymizing" it by removing all usernames?

So if you can't monetize all that knowledge goes into a black hole one day because occasionally it's handy for users to retroactively go anonymous? Yet another reason to avoid Quora imo.

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