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Show HN: Chrome Extension to automatically block the annoying Quora login prompt
- nickpresta 14y agoWhile I appreciate this extension, I think a better tactic would be to not visit Quora if you don't agree with the way the site is run. Between the blurred answers and the login prompt, I will never visit Quora, for any reason, ever.
- neurotech1 14y agoThe site is popular with established start-up founders and has some very good information. If you really don't want an account; http://bugmenot.com/view/quora.com http://bugmenot.com/view/quora.com
- nickpresta 14y agoI understand the alternatives, but it is more the principle of the matter. I regard Quora as a more technical focused Experts Exchange; Slimy, and not really worth the effort.
- yesimahuman 14y agoI'm curious what's going on there. Is it investor pressure? Why would they repeat the same tactics as EX that only prompted extreme user negativity?
- whichdan 14y agoThis is how I feel about people who religiously use AdBlock.
- lowboy 14y agoIf they didn't want to see ads on site X, they just shouldn't go on site X? How do you feel about people who change the TV channel when a commercial comes on? What about PVRs that automatically skip commercials on playback?
- whichdan 14y agoYeah. The website owner makes a conscious decision to fund their website using ads, and if the ads are so offensive that you literally need to block them, why go to the site? What sites are so crucial that you absolutely must use AdBlock? I also don't pay for cable TV partly for similar reasons - I buy shows I like directly on Amazon, and use Netflix as a filler. Do you disagree with nickpresta's comment? The less traffic Quora gets, the more likely it is that people will move to a more open platform. The solution isn't to just bypass their design choices.
- phildeschaine 14y agoThis mentality bothers me a bit. Not everything is all or nothing. Things can be made to be better, or worse. It's like if you had a jetski, but it was the wrong color. From your approach, you'd say "I'll never ride on that jetski! I'm perfectly fine not riding it." Yes, clearly you are. You totally, completely, without question have the right to go on living without it. No problem. But the real question isn't whether or not you'll be fine without it. The real question is: are you missing out on pleasure you could be experiencing?
- nwienert 14y agoBut if you were rented a free jetski for the day from someone who had painted some ads on the sides to cover his expenses would you go and tape over the ads before riding? Oh, you would?
- lowboy 14y agoTo make that comparison more fair, the ads need to be canvas that flapped in the wind, slowing you down occasionally (as ads on websites will do) and every once and a while one would lift up in front of the control panel so you had to clear it out of your view (popups).
- whichdan 14y ago
- wpietri 14y agoI see it as part of a negotiation process. There are certain ads I'm willing to put up with. There are plenty I'm not. If a publisher is going to force dancing monkeys and video bullshit on me and not give me an option to pay for the content in cash, I will happily block their ads until they get a clue. If this were a neighborhood business, I'd just have a pleasant discussion with the owner and we'd work something out. But since their publishing and customer service is automated out the wazoo, so is my approach to negotiating which ads show up on my screen.
- nuttendorfer 14y agoI don't look at ads or register them, why should I let them destroy the page layout? I was on a public computer recently and was shocked to see almost half the screen of a newspaper site was full with ads. I would very much like a pay-to-remove-ads business model on free sites.
- crawfordcomeaux 14y agoCould this be expanded to including UX fixes for other sites? To get the feature request going, I'd like those click-through slideshows to be replaced with a single (scrollable?) grid-based gallery.
- Trezoid 14y agoMake a list of the worst offenders (it would have to be done per site) and a userscript could easily be made for them.
- lowboy 14y agoHaving "UX fixes for various sites" is too generic and varied in description - it would be a hard sell. However, I could see it working if you were to drill down to one specific feature, like hiding the login prompt for a selection of sites.
- lmm 14y agoAdblock can fix arbitrary sites to a certain extent (only through removing elements, but it could have accomplished what this extension does). Select an element to hide, and if enough people do then it gets added to the blocklist.
- niftylettuce 14y agoSource: https://github.com/niftylettuce/block-quora-login-popup https://github.com/niftylettuce/block-quora-login-popup
- niftylettuce 14y agocould also redirect to window.location w/o ?ref=fb
- krichman 14y agoI'd prefer a plugin to block all links to Quora. I will not support a website that uses tactics to get ranked in Google for content they aren't going to show human browsers.
- tensor 14y agohttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbd...
- krichman 14y agoThis is a step in the right direction, thanks :)
- Devilboy 14y agoYou can add these lines: 0.0.0.0 www.quora.com 0.0.0.0 quora.com to your hosts file located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc
- krichman 14y agoThanks for the tip, but I'm in no actual danger of clicking a Quora link :) After accidentally reading a few articles from TC, I have acquired the habit of checking the domain of everything before I click through. I'd really like something to edit the DOM and just take links out or replace them with a black box.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoProtip: If people find your site's UI so irritating that they bother to write browser extensions to "fix" it (and said extensions become popular), you might want to rethink your site design.
- wpietri 14y agoI'm sure they're aware of the conflict. My guess is that they aren't growing fast enough to justify all the money they raised, so they're eager to get more people involved, and are willing to do that even at the expense of annoying some people. If they were smart about this (and they are very smart in general), this is something where they would have done some A/B tests with cohort analysis and discovered that they sufficiently larger growth with the dickish pages. Not that I still don't hate them for it. I still enjoy writing and reading answers there, but they've totally killed my willingness to share answers outside of Quora.
- pg 14y agoI'd love it if someone would make something that would let me see answers past the first without creating an account. Presumably it could be done with an extension plus a database of accounts a la (or even from) Bugmenot. Incidentally, does anyone know why Quora wants to force me to create an account? They can already use cookies to tell which pageviews are from the same user. What difference does it make if there's a username and password associated with them?
- pixelcort 14y agoMaybe this has to do with the default for new accounts to be included in the "these people viewed this page" feature. Maybe because of that no one wants to log into their account in fear of sharing what they view, so this requirement is to reverse the trend of users logging out as a result of that fear?
- jpeterson 14y agoHigher user count => more $$$
- pg 14y agoHow do they make more money if my pageviews are associated with an account?
- niggler 14y agoThey can show more registered users. I imagine they will turn around and show investors the inflated count when they raise more money ...
- citricsquid 14y agoI was thinking the same, but don't investors look into the companies they're investing in, investigate the statistics and information the company provides? I would think that investors would see the people have to sign up and realise the registration numbers are artificially inflated.