

Quora Feeds Will No Longer Show Data On What Other Users Have Viewed - spathak
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/after-privacy-uproar-quora-backpedals-and-will-no-longer-show-data-on-what-other-users-have-viewed/

======
minouye
I 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/Views-on-Quora-feature/Which-of-my-
view...](http://www.quora.com/Views-on-Quora-feature/Which-of-my-views-will-
and-which-views-wont-be-shared-through-Quoras-Views-feature)

------
djtriptych
I 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
Why 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
Can you point to a company that actually got bitten by this strategy? I can
point to several for whom it's working well.

~~~
chefsurfing
In 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.

------
diego
Quora'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>

[2] <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quora.com>

~~~
JumpCrisscross
I always wanted an internal Quora at my company - I figured that was a
possible product for them in the future.

~~~
diego
It'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
Yes 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.

------
samstave
I 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.

~~~
adastra
Can I ask how precisely you deleted it? When I tried a few months back, they
wouldn't allow a deletion, they would only allow it to be "disabled".

My reason for trying to delete it was also privacy related, although it will
seem like a minor thing. It turns out that when you initially sign up, they
turn any friend you have on facebook into someone you "follow" on Quora. My
list of facebook friends is not public information. The list of people you
follow on Quora is. Ergo, they turned a subset of my private friends list into
a public list that anyone could see, and without warning.

Again, seems like a minor thing, but in principle it was a privacy violation,
so as soon as I realized this I attempted to delete the account.

~~~
roc
You have to email privacy@quora.com

I also deleted my account when news of this nonsense non-feature hit. And
their disabling it doesn't earn them back any points in my book.

There's no way to _honestly_ make that move as a mistake. There's no way to 1.
implement this feature as an opt-out and 2. do it without any notification to
the userbase, as a _mistake_ or as a "failure of communication".

This move can only happen, and only happen the way it did, because there is a
core irreconcilable difference between my concept of privacy and theirs.

And as far as I'm concerned, their concept of 'privacy' can go get fucked with
a rusty pitchfork.

------
alexqgb
Worth 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
You 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-...](http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-
account)

~~~
joe_bloggs
Is 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
You can delete your account in facebook? I can only find "Deactivate"?

~~~
bhrgunatha
[https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_a...](https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account)

------
RonWeasley
But this feature is still partially turned on. Thanks for misleading us
TechCrunch and Quora. Stop compromising our privacy.

------
juddlyon
Reminds me of the "oh shit" SOPA backtracking GoDaddy did. Too late, you
creeped a lot of folks out.

------
slaven
"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
It _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
It definitely was not opt-in at the beginning.

<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."

------
hkmurakami
It 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? :(

~~~
manaskarekar
"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

\- Grace Hopper

------
pbreit
Merely hiding Views is even worse since the data is still public but people
are now less likely to find out. Stupid Quora.

------
kamaal
I 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
Too 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.

