A few minutes ago I deactivated my Quora account. Deactivation isn’t that much of a deal, my answers will still remain on the site, people can still comment, upvote, downvote, and send me PM. So it’s more a statement than an action – “he ain’t liv’n round them parts no mo’”.
My love with Quora started early, sometime in October 2010, when I answered a question about desserts. I’d link to it, but you’d see something like this:
and I just can’t stand people who want all manners of data about me just to show me content someone else created and linked to. As much as I respect and love Quora for giving me the bandwidth and harddisk space, not to mention Google juice, my answer is still somewhat mine and I dislike it when people I am not sleeping with or who don’t pay me decide who gets to hear me speak (or read my writing).
Quora has changed since then. First it created Pinterest-style boards. Then blog-style boards from those. Then board-style blogs from that. It removed topics, one of the greatest things about the site, changed its algorithms to show answers ranked not by their usefulness but by some weird magic sauce that promoted answers with five upvotes and fifty words over one with five hundred upvotes and six hours of original research behind them (which made them, as you can see above, unreadable to non-logged in users since only the first answer is visible).
Its “be nice” policy turned into a “don’t question junk science or religious bullshit” policy. Its “no jokes” policy collapsed answers that were sincere while it left insincere and outright false ones (see above about junk science and religious bullshit).
Today Quora introduced “reviews”, a move I am insanely skeptical about. Reviews are opinions, not facts, and Quora has a history of nasty admin reactions when it comes to opinions (as opposed to opinions disguised as facts). I offered people 25,000 Quora credits to review me, which some did. For a bit, at least, before an admin locked the review board citing a “only professional capacity” rule. Rightfully, more or less, but nevertheless annoying, especially since reviews of “Jews” and “The Holocaust” are still possible. This was the straw.
I will be forever grateful to Quora and what it did for me. It introduced me to friends, even lovers. It gave me publicity and it became a temporary home for me to do what I do best, rave lunatically about cooking. But both the recent Posterous debacle, as so many before it (heck, I of all people should never forget this, being I started blogging on Geocities in the mid-90s, even before Yahoo! bought it), and some deletions, collapses, and otherwise removals on Quora drive home the one point we all should be thinking about more often: there is no place like /var/users/, no place like home, no place like our own domain. Content outside of it is liable to be judged and removed, sold, reused, trashed, or hidden behind deletion messages and sign-up walls.
I’ll spend the hour and a half I spent answering on Quora elsewhere, likely here. It’s safer that way. And you get to read all of it without giving a corporation that won’t pay you for it all your data.
If you’re done here, please read on at Coming Home.
Quora is one of the few websites that I’ve refused to give my FB credentials to, because it irritates me so much that they demand them before I can see the content (which, as you point out, wasn’t even created by them). So I’m glad to hear that your content will be shifting to a more open space.
And this, right there, is the main reason I started thinking about leaving. You are one of the great thinkers and academics in your space, plus someone who brings wit and perspective to everything. If a repository designed to aggregate the knowledge of the greats becomes too cloistered to appeal to you then it loses credibility in my book.
Well good luck to you, Jonas. I left last year for many of the same reasons, but in addition I left Facebook, the only other membership site I used, beside something like ESPN.com. I was bored, and I decided Quora was the lesser of two evils, haha.
It was for about four months.
I’ve got 1.9 feet out the door too, for many of the same reasons. I’d say you’ll be missed, but I won’t be there to miss you either.
I like this post, Jonas. Thanks for writing it, and thanks for taking the stand. I’m looking forward to seeing more of your inimitable style around the web.
We’ll miss you over there, Jonas, but I totally understand your frustrations. It’s going to be interesting to see what the site becomes as they continue to “evolve” and change to fit whatever purpose seems to be the pick of the week. I’ll probably stick around – for me it’s like watching a train wreck to some degree.
Best of luck, and I’ll continue to follow you when and where you pop up. You were by far one of my favorite members of the site formerly known as Quora.
Ah, there may be no place like our own domain, but I seemed to get more interactions to my writing via Quora than from my domain judged on comments alone. I am not quite as active on Quora as I used to be, the place seemed a bit more “noisy” than it used to be.
Yes, totally! Quora gets much, much, more exposure than this blog. A post of mine on a Quora blog gets 5k views, this post has barely 4k, and it’s one of the more popular ones in recent history. But, alas, maybe improving the quality of visits over their quantity is not always a bad thing
I followed your lead. I “quit” before, but was lured back. It’s too much of a timewaster, and now I feel it does not promote the best questions and answers.
Jonas, I desperately want to upvote this.
The Boards were fine, the Bloargs were…I don’t know what they were. The loss of Topics has annoyed me daily, along with the ability to admin “my” topics.
Reviews are more vile than I can express. Thank heavens for Anirudh Joshi’s Topic Silencer, which makes them disappear. I understand that Quora needs a business model, but I also understand that alienating heavy users to appeal to a non-existent majority of dunces is never the way to grow a business.
Loss of topics? How so?
Topic groups I believe. It’s really hard to have a complete overview over a specific set of related topics at the moment. The topic feed is a joke. I barely cope with custom review queues but they don’t offer nearly the convenience topic groups had.
Yo Erica, Ariel et al.,
Good to see some Quoraites here. I was behind the 8-ball an Jonas’ leaving (sigh…), but agree with your comments. I miss topics, miss being an admin, hate reviews. It’s not so much Top Users, although they are/ should be a benchmark, but what Q wants to be and who they want to appeal to as a business. They don’t talk about their business model, but an obvious thing is selling knowledge. This means using the quintessential opinions of experts, developing trends of interest and opinions of a highly educated/ very experienced group of content providers. They won’t get that by appealing to everyone (think Yahoo answers).
Jonas, I am one more person to add to the quitters train. As a Quora admin I won’t delete my profile but I will slowly withdraw until nothing keeps me anymore. Reading the internal discussions about the companys direction and you makes me even more inclined to do so.
Lovers! I’ve got to try harder.
Jonas! I’ll miss you over there.
I have learned so much from you, and I always enjoyed reading your content. You write with a verve most people can only dream of.
I can’t disagree with anything you’ve said, and I’m grateful to Quora for introducing us.
Mark Hughes thinks you’re just a big whiner. I think you’re a complainer who might change Quora for the better with your leaving. I hope I am right.
I can totally understand your problem with Quora, in fact, its charm has diminished a lot in the past few days. Although I chose to the block the reviews using the quora extender. But I somehow think the site has become more ‘cluttered’ with the influx of too many people. I liked the community feeling that had developed between some people I came to know, but somehow it is getting too much.
) but I think it is a good decision you’re taking.
I’ll personally miss you on Quora (though you don’t know me
I feel you. It’s for this same reason that I hate YouTube. It seems like of all the news article I come across (from established online blogs like Jalopnik, Lifehacker, etc. to CNet to even the regional sites of some major TV networks like NBC or FOX) that contains an embedded YouTube video as a major component of the story, the video is inaccessible in about half of them. It’s either “this content has been removed by its owner” or some BS about copyright infringement. One of the most ridiculous examples was a Jalopnik article which posted a ~10 second clip from a TV car commercial. This article was no more than 24 hours old, and already the video was dead for copyright infringement. Ignoring the sheer stupidity of suppressing viral exposure of a TV spot you spent tons of money to make, the clip used the bare minimum content required to illustrate the design of the new car being reported on. This should have easily qualified for fair use. But then again YouTube allows media companies to take down content they don’t even own without any legal justification.
And yet, YouTube has become the primary video distribution/promotion platform. We can’t afford not to use it. I just wish news blogs would stop using YouTube to host embedded videos, or at least not in articles where the embedded video _is_ the story.
I totally understand where you are coming from here. I was okay with Boards and Blogs (in my opinion at least, blogs were just boards with a slightly better design), but the reviews thing kind of has me skeptical. I also am not a fan of the content “wall”, so to speak. I will continue to follow your blog though, you write very well!
Thanks for sharing your reasons for leaving Quora.
Thanks for your post. I will miss you on Quora until I too have had enough of the reviews, memes, puns and LOLCATS and go looking for a less embarassing content mix. It looks like something critical departed with Charlie Cheever.
Re: the sharing of links maybe you missed this post….
http://qr.ae/TAzhG
If you goto an answer and click share then copy the short URL anyone that gets to your answer via that url will not need to be a member…
Also if you add ?share=1 to any Quora URL it can also be shared to anyone even non members… such as..
http://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better?share=1
Those are kludges and hacks which, even IF employed, do not work for the majority of cases. If I wanted to link to a question, even with share/shortlink I’d have to link to every answer or I’d get the blur effect. Which, as I write above, is super suboptimal in a setup where tomorrow a 5-upvote, 3-word, answer can upstage a great one.
add share=1 to the url for the question itself…
Jonas,
I’ve been low-use on Quora for the last 10 days (launching the site above). I was sad to learn of your leaving Quora and fully supportive of your reasons. While not a “power-user, I’ve answered a few questions and have from time to time thought of leaving. Leaving for some of the reasons you articulate and for others (time, other endeavors, etc). Quora is the only social network site I’m active on and I’m reluctant to officially leave, as I really like interacting with my “colleagues” there. That said, I’m going to put my time in the new site and much less into Quora. As my announcing a departure would have nil impact, I’m not likely to do that.
I respect and admire your decision. I also really enjoy your writing and comments on various issues. I’m a foodie (hate that term, but it’s concise), like to cook and as a scientist of sorts am blown away by your knowledge of food-science (gastronology?). I plan to follow you here, unless there’s a better place. Best of luck and keep on cookin’ Michael
Wow! Thank you! I permanently required to write on my website some thing like that. Can I take a fragment of your post to my weblog?