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Quora Feeds Will No Longer Show Data On What Other Users Have Viewed
- RonWeasley 14y agoBut this feature is still partially turned on. Thanks for misleading us TechCrunch and Quora. Stop compromising our privacy.
- alexqgb 14y agoWorth noting: they won't let you get rid of your account. All you can do is "deactivate" it, meaning other users can't interact with you. Oh, and you won't get email updates. But as soon as you log in again, your account is "reactivated". It's very Hotel California.
- codezero 14y agoYou can have your account deleted by emailing in to privacy@quora.com see: http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-account http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- joe_bloggs 14y agoIs this common practise, to not provide an option to delete your account except by contacting customer service? Personally I'm not aware of any other product being so sneaky in making it hard for users to quit. Facebook was one of the first companies that started this trend of burying the "delete account" feature deep inside and making it hard to find. But by removing the option altogether, Quora seems to have raised the sneakiness bar much higher.
- Volpe 14y agoYou can delete your account in facebook? I can only find "Deactivate"?
- bossfo 14y agohttps://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
- bhrgunatha 14y agohttps://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_a...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- petitmiam 14y agoFacebook scared me the other day with payment details. Once you add them, there is no way to remove them. You can only replace them with different details. It's worrying if this becomes the norm.
- parfe 14y agoSee a delete link anywhere on news.yc?
- alexqgb 14y agoJust tried that. Here's the auto-response I got. From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailerdaemon@googlemail.com> Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) Date: August 14, 2012 7:20:01 PM PDT We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (privacy) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group. A few more details on why you weren't able to post: * You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly. * The owner of the group may have removed this group. * You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post. * This group may not be open to posting. If you have questions related to this or any other Google Group, visit the Help Center at http://support.google.com/a/quora.com/bin/topic.py?hl=en_US&topic=25838 http://support.google.com/a/quora.com/bin/topic.py?hl=en_US&.... Thanks, quora.com admins
- codezero 14y agoJust sent you an email with some info on how to get in touch with me so we can help sort out your account. Sorry for the trouble!
- djtriptych 14y agoI believe Quora is taking the Facebookian view of going overboard with privacy issues, then pulling back iff users revolt. It is, technically, the best way to push social interactions as far as possible, especially if you are not punished for temporary lapses in judgement. Users WILL NOT actually punish Quora for stunts like this, so, from the company's perspective, it's a good bet, temporary bad press notwithstanding. I remember successfully arguing down a similar bad privacy decision at another well-known company I once worked for. It took a treatise on social software, including multiple citations of other social snafus, the painstaking gathering of stakeholder acceptance, and a near-fanatical perseverance to stymie a feature that was absolute poison to our privacy model. The guys at the top were happy to launch-and-see. I suspect that's what's going on here. tl;dr - For this to get out at all, either Quora's process is broken, or their strategy is to overshare and pull back only when necessary.
- mhp 14y agoWhy do you say "WILL NOT" in such a definitive way? It doesn't seem like a good bet as a company to rely on your users and the public to forgive you when you step too far, especially if you do it repeatedly.
- djtriptych 14y agoCan you point to a company that actually got bitten by this strategy? I can point to several for whom it's working well.
- chefsurfing 14y agoIn my opinion it's more of a bad sign that they are so desperate and not focused on generating passionate users who are gaining some inherent value within the system itself. I don't have any hard evidence but anecdotally I can say I know perhaps 100 people in my life who love Stack Overflow but I know nobody who really loves Quora. Personally I think they are blowing it due to impatience.
- mhp 14y ago
- slaven 14y ago"In some ways, this could be seen as a failure of communication more than anything." What communication? If they had let people opt-in, or even asked them to opt-out then that would have been communicating.
- rdl 14y agoIt was opt-in. The opt-in message wasn't at all clear (even to me, and I'm a top-100 Quora user), and was presented on first use, not in a settings pane, when you first tried to view a view list -- it wasn't really clear that it reciprocally opened your own views to tracking. The feature itself isn't horrible (followers on questions and topics are already public, and this is well understood and IMO worthwhile -- you CAN follow anon too, but it at least increments the counter), but was badly presented to users. I think just out of incompetence, not malice.
- sanxiyn 14y agoIt definitely was not opt-in at the beginning. http://www.quora.com/blog/Introducing-Views-on-Quora http://www.quora.com/blog/Introducing-Views-on-Quora states "All Quora users participate in Views by default, but you can delete any individual view from the content's views page, or you can turn off Views anytime on your settings page."
- minouye 14y agoI don't think TechCrunch really understands what's going on here. Views are still being tracked and shared, albeit not as broadly. http://www.quora.com/blog/Removing-Feed-Stories-about-Views http://www.quora.com/blog/Removing-Feed-Stories-about-Views http://www.quora.com/Views-on-Quora-feature/Which-of-my-views-will-and-which-views-wont-be-shared-through-Quoras-Views-feature http://www.quora.com/Views-on-Quora-feature/Which-of-my-view...
- suduke 14y agoLet us know when they stop blurring answers. I hope google bans them - will destroy their prospects overnight.
- juddlyon 14y agoReminds me of the "oh shit" SOPA backtracking GoDaddy did. Too late, you creeped a lot of folks out.
- diego 14y agoQuora's latest investment round (May) valued the company at $400M [1]. According to Alexa, Quora has perhaps 1% of the traffic of Wikipedia. It seems to me that Quora has two options: 1) Be acquired by Facebook or Google. The problem is that it's no Instagram, so today it could not command a significant premium over the valuation of the latest round. 2) Find a way to make money. Just like Facebook or Twitter, ads seem to be the only way. Only, it does not have the traffic; no growth at all in the past year [2]. Therefore, the management must be doing everything they possibly can to improve their metrics. It's do or die, goodwill be damned. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#cite_note-15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#cite_note-15 [2] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quora.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quora.com
- JumpCrisscross 14y agoI always wanted an internal Quora at my company - I figured that was a possible product for them in the future.
- diego 14y agoIt's possible, but run the numbers. Companies that would pay for that * monthly price = ? Very hard to justify a Twitter-like valuation with that.
- true_religion 14y agoYes its true, they can't be twitter but they have a fine product which can be monetized without taking away from their shoot for the stars plans. I always believe in having a profit, so when you fail in shooting-for-the-stars you fail into profitability, stability, and the dolldroms of merely having six figures in your salary instead of eight in your stock portfolio.
- true_religion 14y agoDitto, I'd like it if they would offer it out as a whitelabel solution. It's much better away of dealing with somethings than an FAQ or endless forums.
- samstave 14y agoI deleted my account. There was a fair bit of a debacle in doing so, which appears to have been rectified. Honestly, I really liked Quora for some of its content, but the UI/UX is just simply atrocious (I have said ad nausea here on HN and other places that Quora suffers from the Digg Effect; trying to wrap their idea of UI/UX around the content too much and thus preventing users from fast, mass consumption of its content.) I deleted my account on principle: Facebook is simply the wrong model to follow on privacy issues, and the founders of Quora, being ex-facebook have no fucking clue what is an acceptable level of privacy. And before HNers like Wpeitri and people like Brin/Schmidt can chime in; NO you're fucking wrong. 100% transparency in every little aspect of life is NOT the future, because fuck you, that's why. I estimate about ~500K active users on quora (pure guess) which puts the user account value quite high (which would put the account value at $800) -- and personally, if my account is that valuable, then fuck them screwing with the privacy settings on the account I make there. I refuse to be a part of this BS, and will not go back to quora.
- nodemaker 14y agoAlthough I agree with some of your points about transparency, I'm not a fan of the tone. Hence downvoted.
- samstave 14y agoNP. I am pretty emotionally tied to my view of quora in this regard. So, I accept your downvote and will take it as constructive criticism to look at my tone in the future. I LOVE getting a comment explaining a downvote. Frankly, I have said before here on HN, that I think that downvotes should require a comment explaining why the downvote. So, Again, i appreciate the feedback. Upvote.
- mindcrime 14y agoSo, I accept your downvote and will take it as constructive criticism to look at my tone in the future. OTOH, I upvoted you as much for your tone as for the content of the message. Sometimes showing a little emotion to make a point, is the right thing to do.
- pbreit 14y agoMerely hiding Views is even worse since the data is still public but people are now less likely to find out. Stupid Quora.
- kamaal 14y agoI don't what people are even doing on quora. I hadn't even heard about it. It was only a incidence that a colleague tweeted a link, and only one answer was displayed it required login to proceed further and read more answers. At that moment I lost interest and closed the browser tab. I can understand the need to demand login to answer or ask questions. But asking people to login to read answers is just too much for today's internet environment. This is just a re incarnation of expertsexchange all over again.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoToo little too late. Honestly, I have a lot of other problems besides this recent dust up but I think it was a last straw for a lot of people. They have just as arrogant a view about privacy as Facebook, just far less users. I think StackExchange is far superior with a few notable issues, such as the lack of breadth and long road to go from the Area 51 or whatever it is to actually being a full site. I think StackExchange.com should have an easier of finding subject sites. If nothing else, SE shows you don't need to surrender your identity or privacy at the door just to ask and answer questions, which for many people is the time they'd raher not surrender their identity.
- hkmurakami 14y agoIt is truly an era of "do it, then apologize later if it blows up in my face." I see this kind of new feature -> public outrage / privacy breach -> apology / retraction progression far too many times over the past 6 months. How have we come to this? :(
- coldpie 14y agoCan you name a time in history when it was not like this?
- manaskarekar 14y ago"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." - Grace Hopper