Quora is in the same boat as FB (and to a certain extent, Twitter)
They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary.
A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history.
I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me.
Deactivated!
Edit:
I followed up with an email to FEEDBACK@QUORA.COM asking them to delete my account and data.. will see what happens. I dont like the idea of a limbo account that can be reactivated/mined.
I have to take the minority position and stand up for Quora here. I'm a huge fan of the service, and though I agree this latest move was a mis-step, I remain a loyal Quora user.
Unlike you, I've gained a ton of value from it. Unlike the trivial discussions or content spam posted on Facebook or Twitter, Quora features tons of interesting conversations. The closest comparison to it might actually be Wikipedia, at least in terms of general scale of ambition.
It's the one online community I've found that I think is better than Hacker News (though admittedly the quality of discussing has slid as the audience has grown wider). There's few other places where a question about politics might be answered by a Washington insider, or a question about startups might be answered by a top name Valley VC, or a question about snipers answered by an actual sniper.
Their real name policy has generally been fairly sensibly and sensitively implemented (http://www.quora.com/Why-has-there-been-an-outcry-against-re...) - they've always allowed anonymous posting, and they've been more flexible on the definition of "real name", than, say, G+. For example, danah boyd is able to post with the legal, lowercase form of her name.
Whether they'll begin bowing to advertisers once they need to monetise of course remains an open question -- but I'm hoping they can find alternative revenue streams. For example, a lot of consultants post answers on there to gain clients -- that's an example of the concrete monetary value Quora creates, and if they can capture some of that value they can build a great company without stooping to Facebook-style data mining controversies.
One of the most appealing things about Quora is the extent to which it creates a pleasant community. When I saw this, I thought, "Hey, neat! I'll have a better idea who's reading my answers." But I understand why people are upset.
On the other hand, I almost murdered them when they started forcing people inbound from Facebook to log in with Facebook:
So I've got my eye on them. The extent to which they can square the community vibe and their relatively high moral standards with the expectations of their investors is still unclear.
apparently you have to e-mail privacy@quora.com to get your account deleted completely. That in itself is reason to delete your account btw. It speaks volumes of their regard for users and their privacy.
First I'm manually deleting all of my answers, then I'll ask Quora to delete the rest. I've had bad experience with deleting accounts in the past, where my content would remain on the website even though my account was gone. And not having an account, there's nothing I can do about that data afterwards. I want to be pretty sure that all my Quora content is gone.
Fun fact: There's no way to get a list of your anonymous answers on Quora. They don't show up on your profile at all. All you can really do is browse through your list of followed questions and manually check each one to see if you responded anonymously.
Wow. I'm certainly asking for a deletion now, too. I haven't used it in a while, but I hate these tactics of not allowing the user to delete the account when he wants to.
As far as I understand it, this /etc/hosts entry is not so much about you accessing Quora, but more about other sites that want your browser to connect to Quora (e.g. via embedded content or JavaScript).
Of course you could trust them not to track you. But for the same reason you prefer your account to be deleted (not just inactivated), you might want to make sure on your side that they can't track you (not just taking their word for it).
I believe the age thing is more about them not having an accrued history of personally-attributed content on the internet and how that weighed into making this decision.
Whether or not that's related to their age is debatable, but one would assume that people who have been publishing on the web for awhile -- bylined or anonymously -- would understand the negative impact this would have on their community or at least would have learned from previous companies' mistakes that just isn't something you do (both the deploying a global change that opts users into something they didn't initially sign up for and the very concept of making previously private things public). There are separate services out there that one can use if they want others on the web to know where they are and what they're doing. I'll use those if I want to be transparent.
Absolutely. Their policy to force your true_full_name is an absolute no-go for many users. A friend of mine from south India has a very lengthy name. Few parts of his name are direct reference to his ancestors and the villages they come from. Sort of like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._D._Deve_Gowda where H. D. parts of his name are references to ancestry, places etc.
My friend was denied permission to use Quora, rather insultingly blocked, for not revealing his ancestor name. We thought it was plain stupid on part of Quora to behave this way, so didn't bother to follow up with them either. What's amazing here is that even Government passports don't force revealing names of ancestors like they do.
My friend was denied permission to use Quora for not revealing his ancestor name.
Could you explain how it happened in this specific case, since it sounds like the name that your friend gave appeared to be real. That it, it wasn't something like "Fake Name" or "Bite Me", so how did Quora know?
And, in general, could someone explain how the likes of Quora and Facebook decide that a name isn't "real"? Does someone at Quora or Facebook manually scan new account names? Do they wait for complaints from other users? Is it something algorithmic like noting that you receive messages such as "Hi Mike" but where you registered as "Fred Flintstone"?
>Does someone at Quora or Facebook manually scan new account names?
At facebook they certainly do. When you change your name you have to wait for some period of time before it gets approved by a human. The person doing it doesn't seem to give a shit though. It is the fashion amongst a certain sector of the youth to use utterly ludicrous pseudonyms on FB - most of my friends do. I would love to quote some of them here because they're very funny but I don't want to jeopardise anyones privacy.
Personally I have changed my name several times on FB over the years and never had a problem. For a long time it was 15 letters with no vowels. That was fun at parties - "What are you called on facebook?" "I literally can't remember. Guess I'm going to have to add you."
I've noticed the same phenomenon (knowing tons of people on Facebook--to be clear, just "normal people" I knew from college--with ludicrous handles on Facebook). It thereby really bugs me when people hold up Facebook as an example of why real name policies are good, or claim that forcing real names is ok because Facebook set a precedent, when it is fairly clear that Facebook doesn't really care.
I was contacted by Quora 2 days after creating an account. They thought "Ring" was a joke.
OT: my favorite "delete your account" is at buy dot com. At least couple months ago, there was no option to do so, so I called them and someone told me: just add "DELETE" in front of your account; this way you wont be able to login to it anymore.
I suspect in this case, he just used initials for the last name instead of expanding it. It's a common style followed in India. For example He use Deve G. or Fred F.
I didn't mind their real full-name policy until now, since you could still answer questions anonymously. Allowing other members to see the questions I'm viewing by default, however, crosses the line.
They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary.
A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history. I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me.
Deactivated!
Edit:
I followed up with an email to FEEDBACK@QUORA.COM asking them to delete my account and data.. will see what happens. I dont like the idea of a limbo account that can be reactivated/mined.
I'd prefer to have it deleted.