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I'd like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora
- astrodust 14y agoOnce Quora started blurring answers like Experts Exchange, I had no use for it. You're holding user-contributed content hostage? Go away. Complaining about usability on Quora is like complaining about not having privacy on Facebook.
- slmt 14y agoIt's not the same as Experts Exchange which would make you pay for content unless you happened to notice you could just keep scrolling. Quora isn't making users pay for the app. They're just pushing the app because they seem to be more invested in it (perhaps sentimentally) than the mobile web experience.
- RockyMcNuts 14y agoYeah... pretty much have to start banning them from my Google search... definitely makes me rage if I search for something, click on what looks like a good answer in Google, and then get a nonresponsive page like that. Rage both at Quora and at Google. A page like that shouldn't show up in a Google search.
- chaqke 14y agoyea, isn't this blatant "ghosting", punishable by delisting?
- MBlume 14y agoIs there a way to ask google to permanently blacklist a domain while I'm logged in?
- RockyMcNuts 14y agoyes, you can do it from your options http://www.google.com/reviews/t http://www.google.com/reviews/t and there's a Chrome extension http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-block-sites-from.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-...
- paulgb 14y agoJust like expert sex change, Quora has a way to see the answers without signing in (remember scrolling to the bottom?). Click the datestamp at the bottom of a blurred answer to see it. As a long-time Quora user, it disappoints me that the content I donate is held ransom in an attempt at "growth hacking".
- wilfra 14y agoAs a long-time Quora user I actually like this and it is one of the main reasons I share so freely on Quora. If I knew anybody could read anything I write via a Google search, I would be much more guarded - and if they suddenly stopped this practice I would put serious thought to deleting all of my answers. But the way they do it preserves a good deal of anonymity. I don't know if that is their intent, but it's the result.
- paulgb 14y agoIt doesn't work like that though. Quora still wants Google to see the content for SEO. Google still indexes your answers: https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Awww.quora.com%2FWilliam-Franceschine%2Fanswers https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Awww.quora.com%2FWillia... (Quora does have a setting to hide your name from search engines for this reason though)
- wilfra 14y agoI don't care if the Google bots can read what I write, I care about clients, family members etc who Google me. If they REALLY want to read my answers, they can create an account. Most people wont bother though.
- paulgb 14y agoQuora seems to only whiteout searches that land on an answer page. When I search for a user's name in incognito, I can see their whole answer history unobscured. You can disallow search engine indexing from your settings under Settings -> Account -> Allow Indexing (disallow) if you're worried about it.
- kintamanimatt 14y agoI forgot about Experts Exchange! I used to love them, but when they broke their shit all I had was a medley of frustration and rage every time I bumped into their site until they went away. Shame they screwed up so badly. On a side note, what does Quora achieve by forcing people to view the data using a native app rather than through the browser? It seems a little ... pointless, or perhaps I'm being unduly myopic with regards to their strategy.
- greglindahl 14y agoQuora is an iPhone-only app. Too bad for all those retina iPad users, you paid for all those pixels in vain.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- eropple 14y agoAgreed. My favorite trick? I was going to sign up for a Quora account today, finally knuckling under to the stupid ExpertsExchange fuzzing crap. So I click "Sign Up With Google" (because the register page on the answer page doesn't show Twitter). They demand permission to "manage my contacts". This is a throwaway email, so I say sure, okay. They go back to the registration screen and still want an email and password just for their special snowflake site. I am forced to believe that the only reason for the misleading and, frankly, fucking dishonest path through my social media connections is to have more names to potentially spam in the future. Fortunately they won't get such from Dick Wickerson, Completely Fake Account.
- beaumartinez 14y agoI think it's in case Google's auth (or even Google itself!) goes down—Facebook's was down the other day, and if you don't provide alternative sign-in mechanisms, users can't sign in.
- dilap 14y agoSure, but as a site you should either depend on 3rd-party auth and deal with the possibility of downtime, or be up-front about wanting your own credentials. To pretend like FB or Google login will work and then demanding a user/pass is deceptive and really, really annoying.
- tomjen3 14y agoThe reason you I on those sign in with x is because I am either too lazy to type an email or because I don't trust the site.
- eropple 14y agoExcept that's not what they do: you never log in with Google, it always asks you for the email/password pair. It's manifestly dishonest.
- RoboTeddy 14y agoI used to happily contribute answers where I could, as a public service. When Quora gated my pro-bono work for their short-sighted purposes, I turned elsewhere.
- andymcsherry 14y agoI'm hoping that Google will penalize them someday. They download all the content in the page so that they'll get indexed for it, but they don't offer it up without an account to the user.
- niggler 14y agoHow would google determine that the content being served to other users differ from what the crawlers see?
- baddox 14y agoMost likely by someone at Google hearing about it if it gets negative coverage like this.
- jsnk 14y agoJust penalize any content from Quora.com in page rank.
- niggler 14y agoI was referring to automated processes, not a manual intervention
- artursapek 14y agoIf it's simply divs masking the content there must be a way to load the page on an iOS emulation, screencap the entire length of the page, and compare the amount of "content" in the source to what shows up in the screencap. I'm not saying it's worth the trouble for Google. Quora is probably the worst example of this bullshit. But it's certainly possible to automatically catch devilry like this, isn't it?
- niggler 14y agoYour proposal actually addresses quite a few sites that put lots of phrases in small font to boost pagerank rating
- chazandchaz 14y agoImportant expression of opinion
- spankalee 14y agoI hit this on Android the other day and quickly closed the page and put Quora out of my mind. I'll never use it again.
- bengillies 14y agoIt's funny because (on Chrome at least) you can select the "request desktop version" option from the menu and this goes away completely (although you do still have to login).
- niggler 14y agoQuora does the same thing in chrome when you aren't logged in ... PS: I can't think of ExpertsExchange without being reminded of the url fail.
- nwh 14y agoIt's one sucky business model. Force people to sign up in the hopes that they'll stick around. It sounds fun, but the existence of services like BugMeNot says otherwise.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoI don't think that's the plan at all. This is so user hostile that they must be at the point where they don't feel they need to grow any more (I find it very hard to believe they are still growing with these moves).
- ceejayoz 14y ago> Force people to sign up in the hopes that they'll stick around. Not just that. It's also done knowing that they default you into a half dozen different types of notification e-mail.
- kawsper 14y agoI am on Quora, but I can't for the life of me remember how I signed up. One day I got an e-mail saying that somebody was following me. There seem to be some interesting debates going on there, but I haven't used it that much.
- Osmium 14y agoQuora is irritating in this respect; they're always so pushy. They keep sending me weekly digest emails even after I asked them not to and repeatedly tried to unsubscribe. As it happens, I then started reading them and found them quite interesting, so I guess it worked -- but I still resent the tactics used.
- im3w1l 14y agoI always mark such messages as spam.
- lmm 14y agoYou've made those tactics succeed. It is your fault that sites keep using them.
- Osmium 14y agoI thought there was a legal requirement to have unsubscribe links that work? I was charitably assuming the unsubscribe function was broken by accident rather than by design. Furthermore, this tactic only works if the site has content interesting enough to overcome the extreme irritation that ignoring my attempts to unsubscribe: this is not only rare, but the site is shooting itself in the foot. There's no way I'd ever let a Quora app have access to my phone after pulling that kind of stunt.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoI just can't understand why Quora continues ... in an existential sense (why does it exist). I also find it odd when anyone in this sort of community has anything but derision for it. They want to play this identity game and control their users like little children. It's just too much. At least Experts Exchange, in the old days at least, didn't basically ask me for my social security number to figure out why my winmodem wasn't working or whatever.
- Helianthus 14y agoWho would have thought we'd be nostalgic for Experts Exchange.
- rdtsc 14y agoAt least EE had the funny mis-pronunciation -- "expert sex change" going for it.
- Simucal 14y agoI have the same frustrations as other people regarding the choices Quora has made regarding its platform. However, I have also found a lot of high quality answers to some very interesting questions on the site. It has some really good content once you get inside.
- smegel 14y agoSeeing things like this makes me want to punch a hole in the wall.
- Buzaga 14y agoJust opened Quora to see if my user was still there: User name: Alsfkj Alskfjaslkfj E-mail Quora probably sends weekly e-mails: alsfkj@x.com (sorry if any of you owns x.com)
- rbn 14y agoeBay owns x.com
- rurounijones 14y agoThis is a good place to use alsfkj@example.com With example.com (which cannot be registered) you know you are not potentially smacking around the domain of a poor company
- devicenull 14y agoeBay is not exactly a poor company (current owners of x.com for some completely bizarre reason)
- unboring 14y agox.com was originally PayPal, so eBay owns the domain once they acquired them.
- marshray 14y agoSomewhere in Nigeria there's a legitimate Pfizer sales rep who's having a heck of a time getting his emails delivered.
- rurounijones 14y agoI did say potentially In this case no it is not a small company, but I have seen people sign up to things with random email addresses that did map to small-time company domains. Just be a nice guy, avoid the risk and use example.com is what I am trying to say.
- rdl 14y ago
- gallerytungsten 14y agoHow much money does Quora have left, and what is their burn rate? Are they making any revenue? It seems not.
- jrochkind1 14y ago> [nytimes paywall measures] These techniques are wide and varied. They appear to look at your IP, use cookies, use HTTP_Referer, use URL querystrings. "Appear" what now how? Nope, it's just cookies. Very easy to defeat for anyone who cares on the desktop -- somewhat harder on apple walled garden mobile. But apparently good enough for their revenue, so.
- venomsnake 14y agoNytimes paywall depends on inducing different feelings. They just use it to remind you that "Hey we are doing great work here, show us some support" ... so they don't mind it being porous.
- shanselman 14y agoHm, I looked into this, and as of recently you could get around it just by changing the QueryString: http://twitchy.com/2013/02/12/paywalls-are-hard-new-york-times-attempts-to-plug-paywall-leak-fails-miserably/ http://twitchy.com/2013/02/12/paywalls-are-hard-new-york-tim... The cookies are for the number of times viewed, yes. The HTTP Referer header is used to tell if you came from google or twitter: http://www.labspaces.net/blog/1258/Thwart_the_NYtimes_paywall http://www.labspaces.net/blog/1258/Thwart_the_NYtimes_paywal... They definitely look at IP address for geographic reasons: http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2011/03/on-the-new-york-times-paywall.html http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2011/03/on-the-new-york-times-pa... but you are correct, they don't appear to use it for the paywall. Thanks!
- shurcooL 14y agoI completely agree with the article. Apps are just fancy web bookmarks with some advanced abilities (interruptions, native code, state). I prefer to have as little apps as I can get away, so anything that can be viewed in a browser, I view in a browser. I just want to know if you can get around this forced solution by picking "Request Desktop Site" in Chrome for iOS?
- aaaqw 14y agoyou give them too many rights when you install their app
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoThis was posted an hour ago and still no one has released a bookmarklet to circumvent? Come on HN!
- logn 14y agoI recommend Noscript browser plugin. I've added Quora and a whole slew of news sites to my block list. The trick is to globally trust all sites in your prefs and then access the blacklist through about:config or manually add each one through the context menu.
- walkon 14y agoThat's not a bad idea. Here is some bookmarklet code that retrieves and displays the actual answers when hovering over the blurred out answers. The downside is, it cannot do anything about the answers that do not have a permalink (clickable datestamp). javascript:(function($) { var $answerTextDivs = $("div.answer_text:has(.blurred_answer)"); function heal() { $answerTextDiv = $(this); $answerLink = $answerTextDiv.find("a.answer_permalink"); if ($answerLink.length === 0) { showError($answerTextDiv, "could not find answer - no permalink."); return; } $.get($answerLink.attr("href"), function(d) { var $permaAnswerDiv = $(d).find(".answer_text"); $answerTextDiv.empty(); $answerTextDiv.append($permaAnswerDiv.first()); }).fail(function(e) { showError($answerTextDiv, "ajax call failed - " + e); }); } function showError($container, message) { var $errorDiv = $("<div>"); $errorDiv.text(message); $errorDiv.css({ 'background-color': 'red', 'color': 'white', 'padding': '2px 6px', 'position': 'absolute', 'margin-top': '38px', 'z-index': 2000 }); $container.prepend($errorDiv); } $answerTextDivs.one('mouseenter', heal); $.ajaxPrefilter(function(options, originalOptions, jqXHR) { /* this is to prevent annoying UIX usage tracking POSTs to Quora */ if (options.type === 'POST') { jqXHR.abort(); } }); }(jQuery));
- NamTaf 14y agoI have a bookmark on my iPhone that scrolls to the bottom of the page using Java. Is it not possible to hack something together that takes the hidden data (since the OP says it loads the actual info behind the white blocking screen) and reveal it instead of the white? It's another couple of button presses but if it fucks them over for this scummy tactic I'm all for it.
- d0m 14y agoI hate when they say "Log in to read the answers".
- dylangs1030 14y agoYep. In the past month or so, I've been conditioned not to click on Quora links for disappointment-avoidance. "Oh, look at that, someone had my exact problem on Quora!" ... "Fuck this nonsense, I'm going back to Stack Exchange/Google." ...Which then prompts this response: http://xkcd.com/979/ http://xkcd.com/979/ The answer might as well be that far away. This drives me up a wall. I hate it when websites try to restrict their readership so brazenly. On the one hand, I respect that the website has the authority and right to control its own information. On the other hand, it was submitted by a collective pool of users, and I just don't have the time to bother with side-stepping the shitty blurring mechanism. I just learned not to click on Quora links anymore.
- codeka 14y agoWorse than http://xkcd.com/979/ http://xkcd.com/979/ is when the only answer is the OP saying "never mind, I figured it out."
- sgdesign 14y agoMaybe I'm the exception but I really like the new "download this app" banners. Much less intrusive than the standard splash screens and integrating them with the OS makes sense.
- spc476 14y agoHmm ... it seems like it's a replay of the web circa the late 90s. http://boston.conman.org/2013/02/07.1 http://boston.conman.org/2013/02/07.1
- aaaqw 14y agoscrape quora's content and share
- pg 14y agoI think Adam's mistake here is to go too much by the numbers. He presumably has numbers that show that Quora ends up net ahead if they force people to create accounts to read answers. He grew Facebook very effectively by following the numbers. But he may not realize how different this case is from Facebook's. It may well be that for a site like Quora, at this stage in its life, users are not all equal. It may be a mistake to alienate the sort of people Quora has been alienating by doing this, even if they end up numerically ahead in the short term. I'm one of them. Quora has now spent several years training me to be bummed out every time I click on a link to their site. Every time it happens, I dislike them more, and become more resistant to creating an account. I now think of it as a site for other people, who are willing to put up with the stuff they do. I'm pleased to find there are others like me. I like Adam, but I wish he'd stop doing this.
- rdl 14y agoI'm a pretty heavy user of Quora, and I have been "trained" the same way, at least on mobile. When I click on a Quora link inside FB app or whatever, it takes me to iTunes to re-download the Quora app. Or, I click in Twitter, and it doesn't have my credentials, so same problem as you. It also keeps me from posting links to Quora content anywhere else.
- binarycrusader 14y agoIt's so utterly broken. At the beginning I was just annoyed because you could select the blurred text and still read it, but now (for the desktop site) they actually substitute the text with dynamically generated images that are a blurred version. I became so enraged over this that I decided to install the "Personal Blocklist (by Google)" Chrome plugin and then added quora.com to the blocklist just so that I wouldn't see them in results when I searched for things on Google. Like you, they've trained me to never want to contribute to their site, and to never, ever want to consume the content they provide.
- davidandgoliath 14y agoSame. It takes a lot to get on my blocklist and the only site that now populates it is quora.
- jamesmcn 14y agoThe day this happened was the day I stopped contributing to Quora. I did not delete all my contributions, but almost did.
- eliben 14y agoInteresting. Such tricks is exactly why Stack Overflow originally went against Expert Exchange, promising never to hide user-contributed content, and explicitly licensing it as Creative Commons. Quora is its content. Its content is user contributed. Hiding such content from other users is just plain evil.
- martinced 14y agoStackOverflow does modify user-contributed content and have very serious moderators issues. Which is why I'm sure there's going to be something new coming along one of these days: something where users are in control of what they post (e.g. not a wiki unless the user who did post does accept himself others' edits). Collaborating to answer questions is fine. But modifying and closing questions artificially (due to very serious moderators issues) isn't acceptable either. So I'm waiting for the next big thing and I'm sure it shall come.
- damian2000 14y agoThe difference is that SO mods are actually trying to improve the quality of the site, or at least that's their purpose. Whether people perceive them as doing that in all cases, that's another issue. Quora is hiding answers to make you sign up.
- Apocryphon 14y agoThe mod vs. unmodded issue is a classical problem on the internet, and may never be solved fully. I don't think SO's modding is any worse than Wikipedia's. As such, both are good enough.
- SquareWheel 14y agoMy only experience with Quora has been Googling for a question, seeing they "blurred" the answer, and immediately closing the tab. Was I really expected to make an account? I don't have time for that, there's a dozen other search results I could be checking instead. My first and only experience with them, and I assumed they were just another scummy ExpertSexChange type of site. We have open platforms, no need for this nonsense.
- ehc 14y agoTotally agree with the article also. I've run into this in the past when getting there from search results, and it makes me really hate Quora.
- xefer 14y agoI've never understood how anyone thinks they can be successful by making the web worse.
- T-hawk 14y agoBecause "successful" is defined as baiting users into yielding their personal information in order to force-feed them ads and other marketing junk. Success isn't defined as users finding what they want or otherwise having an informative or pleasurable experience. The ur-example: Zynga and their addiction-center manipulators that masquerade as games. Zynga succeeds if they pay, not if they enjoy it.
- lukejduncan 14y agoEven worse are mobile sites that ALWAYS display a full "download our app!" page. The New York Times handles this rather gracefully I think. Go to a mobile page and they have a swipable banner that says "hey we have an app, but you can easily ignore me." I wish more sites would do this. I understand you want conversion to your app. I get it. But stop undermining your mobile experience. Sometimes it's what I need / want.
- r00fus 14y agoThe worst part of the "We have an app" div/interstitial is that sometimes I have that app - and I'd love for the page to redirect me. Instead, that's too hard, and they can't detect installed apps on my phone, so I get the spam every time.
- damian2000 14y agoAnother thing I dislike from Quora are their annoying "Kumar asked you to answer this question" style emails that come in addressed to you. Its probably their way to increase the answer rate. I think I did actually contribute an answer on the first one of these I received.
- ozataman 14y agoI close the tab immediately and without a second thought every time I get their "you must be a registered..." page after following a link there. This is like forcing a girl to say "I love you".
- joshualastdon 14y agoLook, I love Quora and what they are doing. You like quality answers and want to get access to the community of users providing it? Then, at the least make the tiniest contribution back to that community by creating an account. Simple!
- pg 14y agoHow does someone merely creating an account contribute to the community?
- Robin_Message 14y agoIf you create an account, they have another user which makes it easier for them to raise money and/or figure out a way to monetise in the future, which means they are less likely to die, which means you have contributed life to the community. Of course, actually having a business model might be a better plan for them, but there have been plenty of QA sites that have not found a model that works, so that sounds harder than just getting more users.
- pg 14y agoWhat investors care about is how many people used the site last week, not how many people have accounts.
- vegashacker 14y agoNitpick on the NY times stuff: In my experience at least, they do not paywall you for links that come from an email, as the author claims. It's only links that originate from clicking to articles when you are already on the site that count against your monthly limit of 10. Links from Google, Twitter, email, etc all take you straight to a paywall-free article.
- shanselman 14y agoAh, good nit, I'll double check. Maybe I've met my limit on all my browsers.
- vegashacker 14y agoNope, I'm wrong. I think actually nytimes has been changing stuff recently, but I just reproduced a case where I was blocked even by emailing myself the link. Pasting the link into Google still works tho.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- diziet 14y agoWhen viewing a site's content that shows up high on google's search requires me to break out the inspector and hide divisions, or to spoof being a different user agent, something is wrong... very wrong.
- eranki 14y agoI used to like Quora a lot but always hoped it would grow out of its Silicon Valley cliqueyness... I think a lot of these recent changes ensure that it's going to continue only serving that niche.
- dmor 14y agoI also noticed they force you to login on the desktop version in order to read answers. Maybe this works, but the friction was seriously annoying and as a really active social media they probably missed out on a Facebook post or tweet I would have made about what I found. I feel like it is a bait-and-switch, because as an early user I LOVED LOVED LOVED Quora and contributed a ton. Now I'm just annoyed by them all the time.
- intellegacy 14y agoIf you could redesign Quora, what would you come up with?
- volandovengo 14y agoI really don't understand why people are so up in arms. First everyone was in love with Quora, now everyone hates them? What changed? Yes - they want you to join their community because their ecosystem depends on people signing up. I signed up for Quora once and since then it's never forced me to sign in again.
- d0gsbody 14y agoI, too, signed up for Quora once. But I don't want to sign in every time I want to browse the site. The ironic thing is that, if they'd just let people browse, they'd sign in on their own.
- venomsnake 14y agoBecause people hate being coerced to do something. Stackoverflow didn't need to force people to do so. A Q&A site only purpose is to give you the best possible answer. FAST. Anything else degrades your experience. If quora breaks me out of the flow to register to their site ... they have cost me way more productivity than they could possibly bring back.
- Cryode 14y agoI had a similar thought when reading the article and these comments. I've been a member of Quora for a long time, and I can't remember the last time I had to log in again in my desktop browser. Any time I've navigated to a Quora page, I've seen all the answers no problem. So a lot of these complaints are news to me. I completely agree with the mobile blocking through Safari & others, though, especially if the whole page is being downloaded.
- marshray 14y agoI put thought and care into putting a few answers on Quora. I regret it now. I never would have done so had I known they were going to go Full Retard like the reviled ExpertSexChange. I hope this pattern of bootstrapping with domain experts and later ditching them for leveraging volume users doesn't portend the future. Or maybe I'm just a little slow to catch on.
- halfninety 14y ago
- brador 14y agoWho owns the content on Quora? Could someone just scrape all the user contributed stuff and start a new site? Even if it was just all flat text I'd use it. Would this be legal?
- skymt 14y agoQuora's terms of service allow for republishing[0] of any amount of content posted after April 22, 2010, so long as the user didn't mark it as not to be republished. There are a few caveats around attribution and a requirement to update content on request if Quora's copy changes, but it's actually fairly liberal. 0: https://www.quora.com/about/tos https://www.quora.com/about/tos (search for "Quora's Licenses to You")
- dreamdu5t 14y agoTry telling the manager that.
- orangethirty 14y agoSo do you think I should black list them on Nuuton? I'd rather not waste my time with a site that does this.
- greenranger 14y agoQuora is such a piece of crap, a blight on internet.
- fabian2k 14y agoA second "feature" of Quora that is an absolute deal-breaker for me is that they require real names for the accounts. And I imagine that I'm not the only one who doesn't want to use their real name on just any site on the internet. And am I the only one who finds the whole interface totally confusing? Navigating the site is anything but intuitive, and I never even found a list of topics/tags.
- cncool 14y agoQuora is a horrible site.
- shirov_39 14y agohttp://blog.intercom.io/if-its-important-dont-hack-it/ http://blog.intercom.io/if-its-important-dont-hack-it/
- xy0l0x 14y agoDoes anyone else think there might be a correlation between the amount of anti-user stuff at Quora and Charlie getting kicked out?
- timc3 14y agoThis reminds me to get around to removing my account
- tiramisu 14y agoGood luck. They don't allow you to delete your account unless you write them an email, which they don't seem to answer.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- eshvk 14y agoI don't agree with the author's opinion on the New York times's block being inherently evil. I am unsure of how else they could make money. The block is not hard to circumvent if you know enough to clear cookies. It is designed to give you just enough discomfort that you will probably cough up and pay for the articles (which are incredibly well written) than the Quora style which makes me want to rage and delete my account.
- zem 14y agothe "evil" bit is not that they have a paywall, it's that they both want to have a paywall and use the organic google search results for free advertising.
- someuser99 14y agohttp://neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/2013/02/growth-hacking.html http://neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/2013/02/growth-...
- return0 14y agoI don't understand how it is comparable to the NYTimes at all. Times pays people to write articles, not appropriating random people's free content.
- joelthelion 14y agoThere is still a need for a good general-purpose Q&A website, that doesn't do this stuff or close half of the good questions like SE does.
- jamiequint 14y agoTo steal a quote from Chris Dixon (http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/ http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/): "1. If you are loved first by techies and then by normals you get free marketing and also scale. Google, Skype and YouTube all followed this chronology. It is startup nirvana. 2. The next best scenario is to be loved by normals but not by the techies. The vast majority of successful consumer businesses fall into this category..." This is a case of #2. I know many "normals" who really don't care and just sign up or download the app. It is probable that Quora alienates some percentage of its content writers by doing this but probably not enough to account for the absolutely massive increase in lift it is seeing as a result (I would guess 3x minimum conversion improvement to account creation from just this one change.) If they don't break out of the tech minority the company is not going to be valuable anyway so it does not seem to make sense to optimize for that audience. All comparisons to Experts Exchange (where you had to pay to sign up) are totally overblown, signing up for Quora takes less than one minute and its free. It's just not that difficult to even be worth complaining about. You are not entitled to the Internet your way as the user of a free product. As the saying goes "if you are not the customer, you are the product".
- arocks 14y agoThat's an oversimplification of the situation. A Q&A based site like Quora can be compared to it's predecessors like Experts Exchange or Stack Overflow because the content is simply enhanced by greater participation of experts. The early adopters could be techies or otherwise, but they will notice the increase in friction for sharing and using content. Also the problem is not really "signing up". As the article points out, downloading another app just to read content on the web feels like a overkill to most people (even non techies). Especially when the most common means of searching for answers remains Google which is usually found in the browser.
- kamaal 14y agoFrankly speaking I don't see the problem at all. If you are a rare user/reader at Quora not installing the App won't hurt you or Quora. If you are a regular user you will install anyway! Besides these days who worries about login's when there is unlimited supply of free email accounts.
- alanho 14y agoI am fine with iOS smart app banner. Real problem to me is "view in app" never deep link to the content I originally intended to read
- ardacinar 14y agoThe desktop version basically begs you to login with facebook or google account. Sign up with email is a much smaller link. Basically, the site screams "We need your data so much! We're begging for your data! It's our only monetization scheme" and if someone is that desperate for your personal data, chances are they're not going to do good things with it.
- edem 14y agoI concur. The first time I saw that "you need to register" sign I laughed and noted to myself "these guys will never reach the popularity of stack exchange with that dumb restriction". I never opened Quora again.
- halfninety 14y agoI have been hating Quora all along for this, and wondered whether this constitutes cloaking (because they serve different content to Googlebot and the user), which is against Google's TOS. The following are excerpts from Google's First Click Free (FCF) program page[1]: If you offer subscription-based access to your website content, or if users must register to access your content, then search engines cannot access some of your site's most relevant, valuable content. Implementing Google's First Click Free (FCF) for your content allows you to include your restricted content in Google's main search index. Apparently Quora's answer to this is: "Wrong! We don't need to implement FCF to get our restricted content into Google, we simply cloak!" To implement First Click Free, you need to allow all users who find a document on your site via Google search to see the full text of that document, even if they have not registered or subscribed to see that content. The user's first click to your content area is free. So clearly the program applies in Quora's situation, yet Quora doesn't follow the program's guidelines to show "the full text of that document". I see this as strong evidence that Quora's actions violate Google's TOS, because otherwise what's the point of the FCF program? [1]: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
- ishansharma 14y agoI've landed many times on Quora but then left site because they allow me to read only one answer without siging in. This has been something that really irritates me. They are doing same thing on phones now. I don't know about others but from me, they are not getting any visits now. Remocing Quora from my Google search results in 3..2..1..
- cwharland 14y agoThe mobile quora experience is pretty horrible. The site has some gems of information but at the same time a vast amount of questions go unanswered and there is a not insignificant troll ish community growing. Hopefully they can find a way to turn it around.
- mark_l_watson 14y agoI will admit my bias: paying NYT subscriber, here. The article has two main issues: Nagging to install an app: yes, I hate this also. Quota, Techcrunch, etc. have been pretty bad about this. NYT trying to pay for 300+ staff: reasonable. I sometimes use their app and sometime just use the email news summary they send me every morning. Works well for me.
- jheriko 14y agobth, i have no idea how Quora achieves anything. The service is kind of okay I guess, but I was thoroughly turned off by my first visit. I got to read one answer 'for free'... I cant remember what the price was I had to pay but 'far too much' is how I remember it.
- jimzvz 14y agoI have no issue with quora wanting you to sign up to use their site but to allow their pages to be indexed by search engines and then hide content on those pages to humans unless they sign up (with their "real name') is ridiculous. With $61 million, you would think that they could hire someone to tell them that this is a bad idea. I too have been trained to avoid quora search results.
- jpd750 14y agoAmen to this post! This is SPOT ON!
- jscheel 14y agoI've generally written off Quora because of their poor growth hacking techniques. What struck me about this article is the the data usage. I didn't realize they load the entire answer onto your phone, only to cover it up with the "use our app" junk. I know it's not a lot of data, but this still appears like a pretty big lack of respect for users.
- oscargrouch 14y agoThis is not just about Quora, its more about Apple.. Apple is funny, cause its innovation creates the technology of the 2010-20, but with the old-fashion corporate mentality of the 80's.. it wins in the short-term because of its innovation quality, but lost in the long-term because of its yuppie/greedy pig style management: "Im a shark, i want all the market for myself and i will crush the competition trying to bite my cake" This is also why Google in the long-term are winning, and this is also something to worry about, because its becoming more and more a monopoly colossus of technology; and as Andreessen use to say; "software will eat the world" Quora are just replicating the bad/wrong side of Apple.. like a lot of old-mentality companies are doing.. trying to surf in the Apple's vacuum Just bad for them. Just another company to be forgoten because of bad(greedy) decisions
- abalone 14y agoIt's even a little worse than loading the whole page. Quora has some sort of poorly implemented background process constantly polling the server for updates. Look at the page load indicator -- it never stops. This drains battery like hell, even if you just have a quora tab open in the background. For a page that can't even be updated.
- seanp2k2 14y agoYou know what happens when I'm clicking through a SERP link and you give me a pop-up asking me if I want to download your crappy app? I hit the back button in mobile safari and find an alternate source of information. No one wants your crappy forum reader app. Stop bugging me about it every single time I visit your damn site.
- seanp2k2 14y agoStack Exchange > Quora in every way possible. Also, what quora is doing here REALLY seems like a black-hat SEO technique. They're baiting you with the link and then switching on you to download their app. If I were Google, I would blacklist their whole domain for this crap and explain again what cloaking is if I were pressed on for an answer: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- baali 14y agoSomething in same lines, recent xkcd strip, http://xkcd.com/1174/ http://xkcd.com/1174/
- svckr 14y agoHahaha: http://xkcd.com/1174/ http://xkcd.com/1174/
- nasmorn 14y agoThe real problem is Google not throwing them out of the index
- lttlrck 14y agoDownload our app!! http://xkcd.com/1174/ http://xkcd.com/1174/
- raintrees 14y agoThe amount of sites I have to use View Source to get to the content is slowly, slowly creeping up... But then I also get to paste it in vim or gedit and don't have to deal with all the visual spam...