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The interesting thing about Quora is that it has a lot of personal anecdotes directly from people involved. That's really unfortunate considering all the dark p

The interesting thing about Quora is that it has a lot of personal anecdotes directly from people involved. That's really unfortunate considering all the dark patterns and user hostile design the site utilizes. Along with their registration paywall, they also do other things to hoard all that user-contributed knowledge: https://konklone.com/post/quora-keeps-the-worlds-knowledge-for-itself https://konklone.com/post/quora-keeps-the-worlds-knowledge-f.... Really disappointing, imagine if Stack Overflow was run this way. I hope this rant is on-topic enough considering that the post is just quoting a Quora source and if Quora ever shuts down or fully hides itself, these kinds of posts will be all that we have of the knowledge shared by these experts.

alxmdev 10y ago
The robots.txt comment explaining that they disallow the Internet Archive crawler to protect users' privacy sounds so facetious given they require people register with their real names and in certain cases go as far as to ask for government ID scans: https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/quora-to-oddly-named-users-papers-please/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/quora-to-oddly-named-users...
- cooper12 10y ago
  Wow that's blatant discrimination. Hasan himself put it best in the email: > Your reason for querying the authenticity of my name seem arbitrary and unfair. Discriminating against non-familiar names begs the question: non-familiar to who? Would you have questioned me had I used a fake but common English name? If you intend to attract a global community of users you will have to reconsider this approach. And the protecting privacy bit is a huge cop-out because it's only really "protecting" them from honest actors who adhere to robots.txt. Not to mention that publishing something with your name on it is effectively making that association public; just like how you should assume that passwords committed to a public GitHub repository are no longer secure, you should exercise the same vigilance with your identity. Sure it's great that they let you change it, but someone out there probably already knows the association and wrote about it, and anyone persistent enough to use the Wayback Machine on an anonymous post will probably find out what they need anyway.
a3_nm 10y ago
I don't think it's so important that the Stack Exchange websites are included in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. What really matters to me is that, like Wikimedia websites (http://download.wikimedia.org/ http://download.wikimedia.org/), they offer downloadable dumps under a free license (https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange). This way, anyone who wants can mirror their contents.
jmnicolas 10y ago
It seems my problem is that I don't want to ask my questions on Quora (for the same dark patterns and user hostile design you mentioned) and can't ask my questions on Stackoverflow (because they're closed as non constructive or not a good fit etc).

alxmdev 10y ago

The robots.txt comment explaining that they disallow the Internet Archive crawler to protect users' privacy sounds so facetious given they require people register with their real names and in certain cases go as far as to ask for government ID scans: https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/quora-to-oddly-named-users-papers-please/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/quora-to-oddly-named-users...

cooper12 10y ago
Wow that's blatant discrimination. Hasan himself put it best in the email: > Your reason for querying the authenticity of my name seem arbitrary and unfair. Discriminating against non-familiar names begs the question: non-familiar to who? Would you have questioned me had I used a fake but common English name? If you intend to attract a global community of users you will have to reconsider this approach. And the protecting privacy bit is a huge cop-out because it's only really "protecting" them from honest actors who adhere to robots.txt. Not to mention that publishing something with your name on it is effectively making that association public; just like how you should assume that passwords committed to a public GitHub repository are no longer secure, you should exercise the same vigilance with your identity. Sure it's great that they let you change it, but someone out there probably already knows the association and wrote about it, and anyone persistent enough to use the Wayback Machine on an anonymous post will probably find out what they need anyway.

a3_nm 10y ago

I don't think it's so important that the Stack Exchange websites are included in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. What really matters to me is that, like Wikimedia websites (http://download.wikimedia.org/ http://download.wikimedia.org/), they offer downloadable dumps under a free license (https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange). This way, anyone who wants can mirror their contents.

jmnicolas 10y ago

It seems my problem is that I don't want to ask my questions on Quora (for the same dark patterns and user hostile design you mentioned) and can't ask my questions on Stackoverflow (because they're closed as non constructive or not a good fit etc).