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This really makes my heart sink. It's not just that a top poster is leaving because they feel it hasn't been worth it in any real sense ("financial ... socially

This really makes my heart sink. It's not just that a top poster is leaving because they feel it hasn't been worth it in any real sense ("financial ... socially ... acclaim ... personal growth") but also because all that knowledge is now effectively behind a gate that will almost surely be lost within a couple decades. The Quora terms of service forbid "automated tools" and have a system that provides at least some answers that explicitly forbid reproduction [0]. Contrast this with Stack Overflow, where a condition of posting your content is that you put it under a libre/free license (CC-BY-SA) [1]. The author spent ten years of their life creating quality content and now the most likely scenario is that it fades into obscurity without even the hope of it being reproduced or retained for someone in the future to benefit from it. [0] https://www.quora.com/about/tos https://www.quora.com/about/tos [1] https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service#licensing https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service#licensing

chubot 5y ago
Yeah it seems like a waste, although he said he combined all his answers into a book and said it wasn't good? If the answers are good, then I feel like the e-book should be worthwhile. I'd be interested in seeing it, but he didn't link it? Why not? Personally I've enjoyed several books that are just non-linear collections of essays or excerpts from other material. It's fun to flip through even if you read the whole thing. I recall one prolific HN commenter did that (but I wasn't in the target audience so I can't judge either way)
- abetusk 5y ago
  I saw that they said they collected their Computer Science questions into a book (and "it was less than the sum of its parts") but maybe I missed that they collected all their answers? It's good that the poster retains copyright and can do whatever they want with it but it's still not by default given to the community. Also, the answer sits in a certain context with the question, comments and other answers, which could give a lot of different perspectives on the same issue (as often happens for SO Q/As). Picking out only one answer will lose something and chasing down every participant in every question and answer to get them to consent to a libre/free license is untenable. Sadly, HN has the same exact problem [0]. They provide their dataset in an easily downloadable fashion but the licensing terms are just as bad and so it's only a matter of time before this site and all of it's content slowly fade into irrelevance. [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou
vintermann 5y ago
I don't know about the author, but Quora at least had a takeout feature when I left it.
- rolandog 5y ago
  In the article, the author mentioned that that feature didn't include contextual links (like what was the URL of the question), and all inside a huge HTML page.
Hnrobert42 5y ago
How do we know it was quality content? This whole article confuses me. I’ve got nearly a thousand comments on this site. If I deleted all of them, no one would care and rightly so. I get that a Quora answer and HN comment are different, but my point is that he may be just some dude who likes to pontificate. Despite saying he wanted to grow out of his comfort zone, he’s back at the same thing, now pontificating on YouTube.

chubot 5y ago

Yeah it seems like a waste, although he said he combined all his answers into a book and said it wasn't good? If the answers are good, then I feel like the e-book should be worthwhile. I'd be interested in seeing it, but he didn't link it? Why not? Personally I've enjoyed several books that are just non-linear collections of essays or excerpts from other material. It's fun to flip through even if you read the whole thing. I recall one prolific HN commenter did that (but I wasn't in the target audience so I can't judge either way)

abetusk 5y ago
I saw that they said they collected their Computer Science questions into a book (and "it was less than the sum of its parts") but maybe I missed that they collected all their answers? It's good that the poster retains copyright and can do whatever they want with it but it's still not by default given to the community. Also, the answer sits in a certain context with the question, comments and other answers, which could give a lot of different perspectives on the same issue (as often happens for SO Q/As). Picking out only one answer will lose something and chasing down every participant in every question and answer to get them to consent to a libre/free license is untenable. Sadly, HN has the same exact problem [0]. They provide their dataset in an easily downloadable fashion but the licensing terms are just as bad and so it's only a matter of time before this site and all of it's content slowly fade into irrelevance. [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou

vintermann 5y ago

I don't know about the author, but Quora at least had a takeout feature when I left it.

rolandog 5y ago
In the article, the author mentioned that that feature didn't include contextual links (like what was the URL of the question), and all inside a huge HTML page.

Hnrobert42 5y ago

How do we know it was quality content? This whole article confuses me. I’ve got nearly a thousand comments on this site. If I deleted all of them, no one would care and rightly so. I get that a Quora answer and HN comment are different, but my point is that he may be just some dude who likes to pontificate. Despite saying he wanted to grow out of his comfort zone, he’s back at the same thing, now pontificating on YouTube.