>> He presumably has numbers that show that Quora ends up net ahead if they force people to create accounts to read answers.
Well you don't have to be a genius to realize this.
So as long as there is a unlimited supply of free email accounts, asking for a compulsory log in to do things like reading answers is going to lead to only one thing: Users creating fake id's to read them. Good luck if they remember the login of that fake id next times they come in. Else what you will see is the same user creating as many id's he wants at his disposal.
If you by these numbers you are going to get the most misleading figures of number of users your site has.
Well you don't have to be a genius to realize this.
So as long as there is a unlimited supply of free email accounts, asking for a compulsory log in to do things like reading answers is going to lead to only one thing: Users creating fake id's to read them. Good luck if they remember the login of that fake id next times they come in. Else what you will see is the same user creating as many id's he wants at his disposal.
If you by these numbers you are going to get the most misleading figures of number of users your site has.
I hope Quora realizes what they are doing.