Quora
Yesterday, Quora announced that 100 million user accounts were compromised, including private activity like downvotes and direct messages, by a “malicious third party.”
Data breaches are a frustrating part of the lifecycle of every online service — as they grow in popularity, they become a bigger and bigger target. Nearly every major online service has had a security breach: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Tumblr, Uber, Evernote, eBay, Adobe, Target, and Sony all extensively leaked user data in the last few years.
Security breaches like these are a strong argument for using a password manager, but not a compelling reason to avoid a service you love, unless you plan to quit the internet entirely.
But this does seem like a good time to remind you of all the other reasons why you should never, ever use Quora.
Hoarding Knowledge
Four years ago, Eric Mill wrote about Quora’s tendency to hoard knowledge, and nothing’s changed since.
According to their About page, “Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge.” With 300 million monthly users, and nearly 40 million questions asked so far, they’re doing a good job of growing the world’s knowledge, but a terrible job of sharing it.
All of Quora’s value is derived from the answers provided by its users, and they go to great lengths to make a well-designed platform for finding and replying to questions.
But they do everything they can to make sure you can’t get those contributions back out.
Quora has:
No public API.
No backup or export tools.
Restricted access to answers without an account.
Blocked scrapers and unofficial APIs, and deleted questions related to scraping on their site.
Contrast that with Q&A competitors Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, which offers an API, a wealth of user-made tools and support community for it, a powerful Data Explorer for querying and exporting data, a liberal crawling policy, and doesn’t attempt to hide questions and answers behind authentication. They even proactively upload anonymized data dumps of all user-contributed content to the Internet Archive for posterity under a Creative Commons license.
Hell, even Ask MetaFilter lets you export your history, and that was mostly built by one person.
Blocking Preservation
If you want to be generous, you could argue that it’s not a priority for them to build features like an API or export tools, especially as they’re still struggling to make money.
But for years, Quora has also explicitly forbidden the Internet Archive from indexing their site. This is what you’ll see if you try to find any Quora page in the Wayback Machine’s index.
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