Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/05/worst-of-breed.html
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I’ve always been annoyed by its trying to force me to log in to read a second article. If I really care, I open the link in an incognito window. But usually I just leave. I’ve never written so much as a comment, or created an account there (in contrast with, say Wikipedia, where I’ve made nearly 5000 edits). Now I’m glad; reading this turns my laziness into a principled stand.
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IIRC, StackExchange was written/built as an explicit answer/response to Experts Exchange (a now-defunct Quora workalike) hiding knowledge behind a login/paywall.
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“When Quora shuts down, and it will eventually shut down one day, all of that collected knowledge will be lost.”
Or sold to the highest bidder. Pretty sure this will be the most likely outcome.
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Only if someone (with money!) is convinced they have a way to make money out of it. More money then it takes to keep the lights on (generally a lot more). The question is, can anyone?
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Doubt it’ll take a ton of money, data is cheap. Especially if Quora fails.
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I’m familiar with the name but I don’t really have an impression of them other than a vague impulse to skip past their entries in a Google search result. Are they one of those places that used JavaScript to blur out responses to questions if you weren’t signed in? (A technique that was conveniently defeated by default if you had NoScript installed).
Or maybe that was Experts Exchange. Another site I tended to avoid.
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I can’t answer with authority but i haven’t encountered that with that site the few times i needed some information that happened to be answered on there.
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Yes, whatever user info wasn’t already leaked, the rest will be sold to pay off the investors.
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Yeah, Quora is exactly like StackExchange, but with a for-profit model and therefore a big wall around it.
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I don’t recall ever using Quora, but I recently got an email from them addressed to a hilarious misspelling of my name (that I’m now considering using online.)
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Am I the only one going to complain that the article leads off with saying that a 100,000,000 million users accounts were hacked? A hundred trillion? If that is an accurate number, it begs so many questions. The article would best be served by discussing a Q/A website has 13,280 times the estimated population of Earth in unique user accounts. Wouldn’t it be nice if “news” was edited by something more sophisticated than a spell-checker?
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disappointed?
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Article is accurate, how else do you think they were able to get $250,000,000 million dollars in investment capitol? With 100,000,000 million monthly active users, any fool in silicon valley would invest!
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I think that was them, yes. Without javascript you just had to scroll past a load of gibberish to find the answer at the bottom of the page.
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Based on the surrounding statements, I think you’re missing a “not” in there.
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Muphry’s Law strikes again
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I liked Expert Sex Change very much in the early days when it was truly useful for coding projects (before GitHub was a thing). Some of my best work was (ahem) borrowed from there. I probably still have a bunch of karma credits floating around in the ether somewhere.
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Nice example of making the etymological fallacy!
Begging the question means more than you think it means.
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Calling Verizon!!! [my god they bought Yahoo, why not this?]
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