
Quora goes permanently remote-first - swyx
https://twitter.com/adamdangelo/status/1276210618786168833
======
threeseed
There's an insightful series of comments from Sid, CEO of Gitlab about why
this is not likely to work over the long term:

[https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720](https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720)

It might be different for Quora given that their CEO and SLT will be remote.

But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a
community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are
working remotely.

~~~
dangelo
Sid explicitly says he expects we (Quora) avoided the pitfalls of hybrid
companies in this comment: [https://www.quora.com/q/quora/Remote-First-at-
Quora/comment/...](https://www.quora.com/q/quora/Remote-First-at-
Quora/comment/2841193)

~~~
sytse
Thanks for linking. I missed the 6 hour 'coordination time' when I made that
comment. I think that async as the default is very important to be remote
first [https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-
remote/asynchro...](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-
remote/asynchronous/)

~~~
sytse
Based on this I mentioned Quora as an example on
[https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-
remote/stages/#...](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-
remote/stages/#remote-first)

------
Leszek
One interesting aspect of this is that they still explicitly expect
"synchronous" work, timezones be damned:

> We have initially designated 9am to 3pm Pacific Time as “coordination hours”
> where most employees will be expected to be available for meetings and
> impromptu communication, regardless of where they are located. This maps to
> 6am to 12pm in Hawaii, 12pm to 6pm Eastern Time, 5pm to 11pm in the UK, and
> 6pm to 12am across most of Europe

I know that I wouldn't work for them from Europe if those were the conditions.

~~~
bambax
> _5pm to 11pm in the UK, and 6pm to 12am across most of Europe_

This is completely ridiculous and means abandoning any kind of family or
social life. It also means they probably only hire young, single people with
no kids. Based on this, they sound like a seriously insensitive and diversity-
hostile company.

~~~
marcinzm
The parents I know who could do flex-time liked to spend the morning/afternoon
with their kids and then work in the evenings. For younger kids that allows
you to split-shift with your partner while for older kids you get to be there
when they get ready/get home from school.

~~~
bambax
In France kids from 6 years old onward, get home from school between 5 and 6
pm and usually have extracurricular activities after that. Then they are
supposed to go to bed at around 10 pm.

So if you're working 5-11 pm you're only going to see your kids at breakfast
at best (if they don't skip it because they're late). You're also not going to
have dinner together as a family, which, to me, would be unacceptable.

------
rootusrootus
I expect there to be a momentary burst in attempts to go remote-first, or at
least hybrid. Senior executives will want to level the playing field between
expensive areas and cheaper ones, and use that to drive down salaries overall.

But then, there are plenty of managers who really see a lot of value in
spontaneous face-to-face interactions, or even planned ones, because so much
communication happens just in body language alone. So I expect to see a
rebound as the next generation of ambitious managers decide there is a
competitive edge in an all-local team.

~~~
waheoo
Im still waiting for the rebound back to a cubicle.

Fuck open plan.

I really wish people would get it through their damned thick skulls that their
heads are not the same as my head. And my head is not the same as her head.
And her head is not the same as their head.

We all need our own accomidations. Some people like open plan, some people
hate it. Some people thrive in an office environment, some people thrive at
home.

These things arent mutually exlcusive. Someone isnt wrong. You can have both
things be true.

Yes, in the real world you cant cater to everything everyone demands, but that
also doesnt follow that you should just give up and cater only to the lowest
common denominator - what some schlep in middle management thinks they know
about productivity and psychology.

~~~
colechristensen
How about actual offices? You know, rooms with walls and doors.

My yearly salary could build a comfortable home for a family of 4 every single
year in some of the cheaper places in this country, I'm pretty sure my company
laptop at several of my employers has retailed > $4000, yet 4 feet of desk
space and a chair that seemed to have lived a hard life on the streets has
been my most common accommodation. Surely an office and a parking space for
every employee isn't an impossibility. And if it _is_ then you can't afford to
be in the market you're trying to operate in.

I can guarantee that I would have been a happier more productive employee if I
were given a private space, near colleagues but by default separated from them
away from home.

Growing up on hundreds of acres where the nearest human was often more than a
mile away, having the experience of daily being obligated to board public
transit for 90 minutes and then spend 8 hours in an open office in the middle
of a downtown area was subtly but deeply unsettling. Being constantly so far
away from the ability to have any private space or space which was _mine_ in
any way, and worse the only way to get to a space which was was by being
jostled on a packed train for up to two hours was simply bad for my mental
health.

~~~
saiya-jin
Because you attract talent by high salaries, so try to save elsewhere
(especially when office rental prices are astronomical).

You yourself are yet another proof of this - you changed whatever rural
environment you had to go into cramped office with very high salary. Clearly,
the money was more important to you than vast open plains and remoteness. Most
folks work this way.

You ask for private space near colleagues - that's a premium anywhere. I
presume you don't mean tiny cubicle but actual quiet room. Almost nobody has
these in corporate environment for various reasons, certainly not regular
employees.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Aye, this. I need to fit 250 people in a single floor in a big city. One floor
is already expensive as hell, and I'm not going to pick up 2-3 more. Hell,
even my managers don't get offices.

~~~
Apofis
Ah, a fellow sardine fan!

------
baron816
I really hope we see some specialized remote worker residential communities in
the future. Actually, I’m sure there’ll be money in building them.

Imagine a small town with no cars or roads. The community has lots of events
to socialize you with your neighbors. Lots of traditions and festivals. Some
communities may look like Brooklyn—row houses, except just grass and trees
lining the blocks. Maybe another community would have a quirkier layout, with
maze-like walking paths between apartment buildings.

~~~
vechagup
And perhaps when enough of these like-minded remote workers are living near
each other, some of them will find that they enjoy working in the same
physical location at the same time. Then some of the space in the community
can be turned into hubs for in-person collaboration, or offices!

~~~
mb7733
Not sure if you're being dismissive, but that still sounds great. It would
lead to many small, livable communities with opportunity dotting the country.
As opposed to everyone living in suburbs and and making long commutes to a
small number of massive urban centers.

~~~
toyg
That’s basically the model IBM was actively pursuing in the 90s-00s (no idea
whether they still do). They ran a bunch of studies in the previous decades,
showing the various trade-offs involved into office locations; eventually they
decided the best overall policy was to prefer mid-size offices in suburban
settings, away from business districts and other high-density areas. At one
point I think they had an outright ban on new city-centre offices.

(Or at least this is what I was told when I was a contractor for them in the
mid-00s in Europe, wondering why they avoided getting a single building in
Manchester city centre and spread over two separate locations in the
surrounding suburbs instead.)

~~~
ghaff
HQ is in Armonk which is Westchester County. Somers (since sold) and
Poughkeepsie are there as well as is IBM Research at Yoktown Heights. Raleigh
is in an industrial park (RTP). I'm by no means familiar with all of IBM's
locations but, yes, many of them are suburban. IBM also sold their building in
Manhattan in the 90s though they may still have some space there; they did
when I last visited but that was quite a while ago. Most of the IBM people I
work with work remotely.

~~~
wjamesg
I’m not sure RTP qualifies as “an industrial park” but suburban, sure

------
Ozzie_osman
(Ex-Quora here) This is great to see. I left Quora over a year and a half ago,
and at the time, the company believed pretty strongly in an in-person culture
(in particular, having one office)—even though a bunch of employees and
managers were pushing for more flexible work/location policies. I know the
company had started experimenting with a little remote work pre-Covid, but it
really took a forcing function to demonstrate to everyone that remote can
work.

------
hbcondo714
Their careers web page is already updated to reflect this. They also state
remote employees need to be available 9am to 3pm PST and they will be keeping
their SV office open:

[https://www.quora.com/careers](https://www.quora.com/careers)

They are also hiring a Head of Remote role to manage all of this:

[https://boards.greenhouse.io/quora/jobs/4774947002](https://boards.greenhouse.io/quora/jobs/4774947002)

~~~
whalesalad
Blows my mind becuase I do not understand how Quora is still around or even
generating revenue at all.

My first thought when I saw the headline was this is really just about self-
preservation and runway extension. Most companies who pivot to a remote first
approach are not going to be doing it for altruistic reasons - like being good
for their employee health - they're gonna do it merely because it saves money.

~~~
MattGaiser
Advertising.

Maybe 1 in 3 of the answers you see are just paid ads. They read like utterly
normal answers, but work in a reference for why X is the best product to item
#4 on their top 5 travel hacks list.

------
tinyhouse
I predict many companies will have to follow the trend.

Remote companies have a significant hiring advantage. As long as the number of
remote options was small, competing on talent with remote companies wasn't an
issue. But things are clearly changing and non-remote companies will soon feel
the pressure and unless they can pay significantly above market (like FAANG
companies) they will have no choice but to allow fully remote work so they can
compete.

Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft will probably not move to fully remote
anytime soon (they all have amazing and very expensive campuses and some
business lines that cannot move remote). However, they can pay above market
rate and have offices in so many places so in a way they are already hybrid.
Not to mention, like all of tech, they are much more flexible about WFH than
used to be and I know a few people there who have been fully remote even
before covid.

~~~
ivan_gammel
At DrSmile we are switching to hybrid model now with German employees still
being able to visit the office, but shifting hiring focus to remote work on
engineering positions and designing special benefit and retention package for
them. It worked so well during corona, that it doesn’t make sense to pay
office expenses for the growing team.

------
iamwil
Has anyone tried using VR for work? What, if anything did you discover that
worked, and what didn't?

I know of some VR companies that do all their meetings in VR, whether its
their own, or in a game.

~~~
cj
No experience using it for work.

But I bought a Quest when it first came out, and used it for about a week
before shelving it.

Wearing it for longer than 10-15 minutes is physically difficult. Dizziness,
nausea, headache.

This is a common issue people have with VR. Also unsure if it’s a fixable
problem. Until then, I cant imagine it seriously used to facilitate remote
work.

~~~
tikhonj
From what I've heard, having a consistent high framerate helps with this a
lot. I've seen people who report feeling sick with older generation of
headsets, but feeling comfortable with the Valve Index.

~~~
wlll
The quest is ~72Hz. We (the VR community) moved on from 75 Hz many years ago
through 90Hz, and my Index currently does 120, with an experimental 144Hz
mode.

Research (mostly by Valve I think) has shown that the higher the framerate the
less the incidence of sickness. 72Hz just isn't enough.

------
arcticbull
What an awful idea; people go to work for the social connection. This feels
like another episode of ‘Silicon Valley reinvents management,’ and will likely
end in the same way.

~~~
datadem
I have ~5-6 years of remote work experience, started off as the only remote
employee of a company, then was partially remote at my next company, then
worked from an office for a local startup, and have been working for a fully
distributed company for the past 4 years.

While my 2 years working at a startup in my mid-20s where we would sleep at
the office and worked 24/7 did end up producing some of my closest friendships
and a relationship with the company and the CEO that is strong to this day, my
last few years working at a fully distributed company has also been really
social.

We build friendships, we gossip, we argue, we share interesting tidbits about
our lives - I don't feel like the social component is lost. It is usually not
as strong as when you have to see the other person every day but it is more
than enough for most purposes.

Our company also does meetups 3-4 times a year where we all fly to locations
like Bali, Mexico, Iceland, US..etc. and spend a week socializing and working
together. Remote work does not mean that you are basically a freelancer
contracting for a company, there are ways to build strong enough social
connections.

------
magneticnorth
An interesting sea change in knowledge work is happening.

Does anyone know if any other companies have made a permanent switch to remote
like this during the pandemic?

~~~
codezero
Quora is a pretty small company, and the sum total of all startups (not
including FAANGs) all going remote will be a small fraction of the population
of workers. I guess that’s why you specified knowledge workers.

I dunno. Here’s why I think it will and will not happen.

My company has been up to 50% remote in the past six years (way earlier when
we were smaller) and have gone fully remote since shelter-in-place.

We have a really well established remote culture, so it was pretty easy. We’ve
had people join in remote roles who found that they were not able to work well
in that way.

I think it takes a confluence of the company culture, the individual, and the
management’s willingness to do new and different work to accommodate a remote
work culture.

This will not be broad, and some who try it will fail miserably, others will
discover new inefficiencies and problems they’ll sink a lot of time into
trying to solve.

A bulk of the population will go back to their normal day-to-day, and as long
as the rest of the world isn’t adjusting, I think it’s unlikely for such a
dramatically different work style to take hold outside of a few niche areas.

I would love to be proven wrong though, as I really dislike living in the Bay
Area, and I’ve become a lot more comfortable working and managing fully
remotely over the past four months.

Related: My company is fully remote until 2021 - and we’re actively
considering what to do after that. I am pretty convinced I will be moving
forward with assuming my own team will be fully remote (support and services)
if they want to, and I plan to only visit the office for important
company/management meetings, but we’ll see what happens after the economy
crashes completely.

------
maxmeta
Even the Indian software service companies are going remote which suggests
remote work is going to be future [https://www.news18.com/news/business/tcs-
says-75-of-its-3-5-...](https://www.news18.com/news/business/tcs-says-75-of-
its-3-5-lakh-employees-will-work-from-home-even-post-coronavirus-2592291.html)

------
georgex7
Tracker for all companies remote work policies: remote.lifeshack.io

------
zoolander2
With so many companies going WFH permanently even after COVID, how will this
impact Uber/Lyft revenue?

~~~
dmurray
Positively, perhaps. If you don't need a car to commute, you're more likely
not to own one and use ridesharing when you do need to go somewhere by car.

Most people don't use Uber/Lyft for their daily commute (yes, no doubt some on
HN do). It can't make economic sense compared to driving yourself.

~~~
zoolander2
a ton of people I know who live in metro cities (sf, nyc, chicago, etc) used
rideshare daily for commute, it's slightly more expensive than public transit
and many employers either pay for or subsidize for it.

------
_hardwaregeek
Is it just me or does Quora straight up not work on Firefox? Whenever I click
the Continue Reading button, it fails to load more and gives me a generic
"Something Went Wrong" error. Do people just not test on Firefox anymore?

~~~
flocial
I had this and solved it by clearing the cache and cookies for Quora (and
maybe facebook) several times. If it works in private browser mode it's
definitely corrupt data.

------
unreal37
Did you know that Quora PAYS for most of the questions people ask on Quora?

Like, there are people making a full time living asking questions on Quora.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/alc5hy/i_am_a_quora_pa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/alc5hy/i_am_a_quora_partner_program_member_i_make_4000/)

~~~
solidasparagus
Is that bad?

~~~
jfengel
Yeah, it's pretty bad. Questions that they pay for are generally of poor
quality. When you pay for something, people rush in to produce as much
quantity as they can. Even if they are also attracting good ones, they can be
hard to find in the onslaught.

~~~
edw
My intuitive understanding of Quora, formed about five years ago, is that it’s
a WikiHow with VC mojo.

~~~
akajakaj
It's most accurately described as a yahoo answers with generally higher
quality answers and SEO.

~~~
edw
“Higher quality than Yahoo answers” is an extremely low bar.

~~~
jfengel
There is a lot of genuinely good content on Quora. They went out of their way
early to attract some high-level Silicon Valley talent, and that brought in a
fair number of good writers. It was really cool, for example, to have physics
professors explaining the Higgs Boson at the time of the CERN announcement.

It degrades over time, partly from simple reversion to the mean, partly
because a number of topics have simply been talked to death. That's why they
started paying people to ask questions. There's still good new content in a
lot of areas, such as history and language, that are very broad and deep. But
topics like physics and mathematics are largely moribund, because there's only
so much that can be talked about at the roughly high-school level that most
people can follow.

So it does look increasingly like Yahoo Answers, but there's still good
content if you know where to look. It earned a very good reputation early and
that high rep still has some carryover.

------
fortran77
How many employees are left at Quora?

------
layoutIfNeeded
Silicon Valley real estate crash when?

~~~
AdrianB1
As soon as protesters start to create an Autonomous Zone in the middle of each
city and town.

------
winrid
On somewhat related note, I've always wondered how come links from the Quora
digest email just have the URL "quara.com" with no direct link to the
question/answer?

I get that it links to a SPA. But this seems intentional.

------
bfrog
Is this that site that's always wanting my PI to sell off? Whenever I
mistakenly click a link to it to see the whole answer? Maybe this will be the
death knell.

------
mkagenius
> All existing employees can immediately relocate to anywhere we can legally
> employ them

Even to India? What about time zone differences, and will you pay the same
amount as in USD?

~~~
C1sc0cat
They'd pay the local salary of course - this move to remote is a
hr/accountings wet dream to reduce to amount spent on pay.

~~~
csunbird
I wonder if there is a way of projecting this as discrimination (e.g. accusing
the company to be a racist, because you pay less to your Indian/Non U.S.
employees) and get activists attention.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Its paid by location.

Having said that if you audited any of the FANGS US employees you would find
discrimination on grounds of Sex, Disability and Race (and I suspect Caste )

------
lorthemar
Well, good for them. I hope they'll hire more moderators now. Their auto-
moderation sucks. It lets spam run free and punished people who give actual
answers.

------
chippy
Would it be harder or easier to unionise or make employee actions if the
workforce is all online, compared to meeting in the same place?

~~~
kwhitefoot
That rather depends on which country one is in. In most European countries it
will make no difference at all as far as the law is concerned (everyone has
the right to belong to a union), in the US I imagine it will be complicated
and vary from state to state.

------
twirlock
Reminder that quora was part of a huge data breach, yet they still, to this
day, employ dark patterns that force you to make an account.

------
sixtram
Angelo says "I will not work out of the office and I will visit the office no
more than once a month.", isn't the opposiite of each other?

------
miked85
It really is amazing that Quora still exists. In the very early days it was
interesting, now it just seems like Yahoo Answers 2.0.

~~~
jjeaff
I'm not particularly prophetic when it comes to how businesses play out, but I
remember thinking that quora was a cool idea on a small scale but knew that it
would turn to garbage as soon as it got popular.

For the entrepreneurs out there: Everything doesn't have to be social.
Sometimes you can build a business around great, curated content and it can be
beautiful.

~~~
renewiltord
> _For the entrepreneurs out there: Everything doesn 't have to be social.
> Sometimes you can build a business around great, curated content and it can
> be beautiful._

Examples? I can't actually think of a curated content business that has no
social features. Social is textual gold. People love interacting with other
people.

Certainly not an information content business. Perhaps curated physical
products.

~~~
jjeaff
Quartz.com, Wired.com, NYTimes.com, (although it seems that nytimes does allow
comments on some articles).

------
dantheman
I can't believe this site still exists, who goes there?

~~~
hamandcheese
I actually have enjoyed a lot of the content there - it’s like Q&A with an
emphasis on the personal experience of the person answering. Tons of stuff
that would not be appropriate for Stack Overflow, but interesting nonetheless.

~~~
gnulinux
To me Q&A is not the interesting part; discussion, rhetoric, and bigger
context behind questions are. That's why I always found niche subreddits or
niche StackExchange websites _a lot_ more interesting than Quora. I don't
remember finding interesting content on Quora on something that's not already
on reddit or stackExchange. The only time Quora shines is when some celebrity
makes an interesting, historical comment. Like when Alan Kay himself defines
OOP, it's clearly some interesting shit. But reddit AMAs and StackExchange
celebrity accounts do scratch that itch as well. So, Quora is pretty meh imho.
I still read it (without an account) but I don't find it irreplaceable unlike
the other two.

------
halotrope
The following is slightly off topic and very subjective. I remember Quora when
it first launched. So many interesting answers from people that „have been
there, done that“. Like first hand experience from working on IE5 in the
browser wars or working at Nasa.

Quality was very high in general. Today it has become a shadow of itself with
generic questions and answer that are just marketing plugs.

It makes me a bit sad because it was unique and there still is nothing like it
in my opinion.

~~~
simonswords82
Reddit (so long as you subscribe to good quality sub reddits) is my go to for
long form information. Quora is garbage now unfortunately - I don't know how
but they completely lost their way.

~~~
halotrope
Agreed, really like Reddit. Only issue is their obnoxious push to use the app
all the time. I wish Reddit and Wikipedia had a child.

------
livecodestream
Awesome place to work for!

~~~
AdrianB1
Actually it is a miracle they still exist, their revenue is not so good.

~~~
swyx
citation needed?

~~~
AdrianB1
It is almost impossible to find clear data, but in 2017 they were still
raising funding and in 2018 they closed the Top Write program, the one that
was giving minor benefits. Since then, there is no reason to believe their
revenue grew significantly, while the quality of new content is horrible. I
followed the situation for the past ~ 4 years, this is what it looks like.

------
pleasantpeasant
I hate when Quora pops up from searching for something. I loathe Quora and
wish they never existed. They make searching for things a lot more annoying.

~~~
abraae
Many have made this observation, but I wish there was a way to blacklist sites
from my search results.

I literally never want to see results from Quora, ExpertsExchange and a bunch
of other grotty spam dens with low quality user generated content.

I don't get why Google is not doing this. If I could block these sites, I'd
get much more value out of Google, and it would be sticky value - because over
the years I would have added hundreds of sites to that list, and I wouldn't
want to transfer that over to some other search engine.

Some nice extras would include:

\- blocking sites for e.g. 12 months only

\- sharing black lists

\- being able to search without the blacklist applying

~~~
whywhywhywhy
Same deal with pintrest too, it spammed Google Image results so badly and
there was no way to actually get to the source of the image without signing up
for an account at one point.

Think they might have taken action because it's not been as bad lately and the
results haven't been as spammed but it rendered image search close to unusable
for almost a year.

Really think Google should invest more in being able to trace data back to
it's source. Pintrest is all just data scraped from elsewhere, point me to
where it's scraping from now the 400px wide image from Pintrests cache.

------
facethrowaway
Reminder to those who aren’t aware: Quora is a rich man’s hobby business. You
aren’t going to get practical knowledge from their decisions.

~~~
giantDinosaur
Why has it become such an SEO driven BS filled website if the owner doesn't
care about the financials? Why can't he pay people to curate the answers and
generally drive up the quality?

~~~
miked85
They have to at least pretend it is a real business.

------
preommr
I made an honest effort to read that and I just couldn't.

I actually can't imagine any kind of reading medium that's worse. There's
chunks of text interlaced with a bunch of visual noise, random images, links
to separate threads which are huge images and bigger than the surrounding
text.

~~~
allzeros
I really, truly wish HN would moderate and remove comments about a link's
medium. Every single post here has at least one person complaining about the
layout of the source. Every time. It's exhausting. I hate it. It contributes
absolutely nothing, and I don't know if anyone's noticed, but people keep
using Twitter! Gasp! If you hate Twitter so much, reach out to the tweet
author and ask them to publish elsewhere. If you hate Medium, e-mail the
author and ask them to switch platforms. But dear God, can we please stop
complaining about it in HN comments? Either read it or don't.

Please just stop.

~~~
Waterluvian
How on earth can this individual’s speech vex you to such an extent that you
need it silenced?

~~~
ardit33
It adds 0 to the conversation. It is very weird, almost borderline autistic
behaviour...

90% of links, have some kind of: "doesn't work on my mobile... format sucks, i
don't like the colors, etc... etc.." comment.

It is pure infantile/juvenile bikesheding and distracting from the point of
the conversation/link that has nothing to do with formatting.

~~~
dang
We could consider adding a guideline asking people not to post such things.
The problem is that sometimes such comments are helpful for the owner of a
site, who either shared their own work or happened to be on here when someone
else did.

~~~
tptacek
My guess is that's pretty unusual, and that if you looked at a sample of,
like, 20 of them, in at least 19 cases whatever was being complained about
would remain the case on the website in question, indicating that the site
owner did not get value from them. Meanwhile: those comments really are a pox
on the threads; it'd be better if users were in the habit of downvoting them
to keep the top of the thread clear, which a guideline would accomplish.

~~~
dang
Care to suggest a wording for it?

~~~
tptacek
Discuss substance, not presentation, unless presentation is the topic of the
story. Comments about web design and readability are off-topic. Advice for
authors is best delivered through a polite private email.

~~~
dang
Just to calibrate: would you say "this site breaks the back button fuck I
fucking hate that" should be under this umbrella?

~~~
tptacek
Extremely yes. Sites that break the back button aren't going to stop doing
that because HN complains about it, right?

~~~
dang
Ok, I added it. A brand new guideline is a rarity. We should have a ceremony.

I worded it more concretely: " _Please don 't complain about website
formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances [etc]_" I find that
giving concrete examples and inviting the mind to generalize them works better
than giving an abstract rule and inviting the mind to instantiate it. I
learned this trick from spreadsheet development.

I was about to complain bitterly that the guidelines are now too long and
there isn't a single one that can be taken out...but then I saw one that could
be taken out, and I took it out. That was " _Please submit the canonical URL.
Avoid link shorteners._ " It's covered by " _Please submit the original
source._ " We added it a few years ago to try to convey that link shorteners
are banned on HN, but it can be pushed out of the constitution and down into
case law. It's the ones that aren't derivable from other guidelines that are
hard to remove.

The list still feels too long to me. The longer it gets, the less people will
take in, and I really want to avoid the mistake of accruing a big list of
rules over time. They've grown like tree rings (and about as slowly) as we've
learned about what feedback helps regulate the system. But the longer the list
becomes, the more it starts to feel like a bureaucratic artifact rather than,
let's say, a philosophical one, and that is out of sync with the intended
spirit.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20spirit%20letter%20law&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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spicyramen
Mmm Quora was a promising platform, now is just Yahoo Answers 2.0 with ML

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maxdo
they layoff people, it's a nature way for them to stay afloat.

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bzb3
I hope they go permanently offline soon.

~~~
dang
Please don't post snarky dismissals here. Maybe you don't owe Quora better,
but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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Ice_cream_suit
This makes it easy for companies to outsource by stealth.

~~~
chippy
and hire cheaper overseas developers. We Europeans finally get more of a
chance and we don't have to relocate to the valley!

