Agreed. 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.
I 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.
Sure, 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.
Just 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".
As 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.
I 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.
Quora 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.
When I click the "answers" tab on the sidebar of a user profile, I can see the entire user's answer history unobscured. Is this not the case for you? Maybe we're caught on different sides of an A/B test, although I keep getting the same results in new incognito windows.
Except people can still see the answers, they just make it more difficult to do so. (You have to click the timestamps below the comments and read them one at a time.)
So please don't try to justify their abhorrent anti-open-web behaviour with would-be privacy assertions.
You're relying on undocumented behavior. They'd be well within their rights to change it (say due to this adverse publicity). What happens then?
You got me to go login to Quora after over a year to see what you were so concerned about. Perfectly reasonable, well thought-out comments on respectable topics. I think you're trolling, sir.
Yeah... 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.
I 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.
Complaining about usability on Quora is like complaining about not having privacy on Facebook.