There is a clear one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of every single email we send, and there always has been. It says: "To disable all email from Quora, visit the following link: Unsubscribe."
You say our motivation is "to force users to pay or share advertising data or some such bullshit". Actually, we don't charge users anything, and we don't run ads or sell user data or anything like that. We only try to get users to sign up because they have a better experience when they do and in the long term they write more answers and more knowledge gets shared that way.
You may not want to sign up yourself, or you may disagree with this tradeoff on principle, which is fine, but I want people to understand the motivation. We just want to increase the total amount of knowledge shared. In the short term requiring signups means some people don’t join. But a lot of people do join and start to use Quora regularly, a lot more than if there was no requirement, and those people end up contributing so many more answers that we judge this to be the right decision for the long term.
In fact, at this point, most of the answers written every day would not exist if we had not had the signup requirement. I realize that this choice makes the product worse for people who refuse to join. But in the counterfactual world Quora is a product with much less coverage of any topic, and that is a much lower quality experience for users. We are trading off a little annoyance at first for a much better experience and the ability to access a vastly larger base of content in the long term.
I'm itching to know more too, but I'm sure we will all learn plenty in due time. From the post: "they’re participating in the batch like any other company". To me, that means Quora will be participating in demo day, and I'm sure their will be reporter coverage of their pitch. Really excited to see what's in store!
The replication is reliable, it's just that with the 8.0 releases, it's an add-on and not obvious to setup (e.g with Slony have to do special procedures to properly replicate DDL changes, it required having triggers on replicated tables, etc). In 9.0 replication is built in, transparent, and trivial to setup.
Sorry, but pre-9.0, Postgres replication is neither reliable nor easy to setup/admin. It's absolutely the worst thing about (pre-9.0) Postgres, and I'm glad the core team finally caved and made it a first-class feature.
Slony caused us no end of problems (large postgres installations at Last.fm). It's a monumental pain in the ass, it will choke on something, probably when you're trying to make a DDL change, sometimes just at random. Docs/help on trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix the replication are not easy to find. After you managed to 'fix' it, you will be unsure if the slave is truly in sync. The only way to be confident is to nuke the slave and start over to ensure you have a consistent replica.
That said, I'd still gladly suffer the trials and tribulations of crappy trigger based replication than use MySQL.
I'm looking forward to trying replication in 9.0, it sounds fantastic.
You are correct about Slony but if you do not care about doing any reads at the slave in pre-9.0 you had log shipping and warm standby. Warm standby is perfect for using the slave for failover in case the master crashes or the HDDs break.
Warm standby is very reliable and easy to admin. The setup is not that easy but not too hard either.
The built-in MySQL schemas have problems - mostly that schema changes can take hours or days on large tables. As a result of this you need to build a system that doesn't require schema changes at the MySQL level. This doesn't mean you can't use schemas at a higher level though.
There are two ways to build on top of MySQL - you can either make a flexible schemaless structure with objects and properties and associations between them, which is what Facebook advocates for, or you can make a flexible virtual schema that has column names, types, and arbitrary indexes. I'm in favor of the latter.
In follow up, I'm now receiving e-mails notifications about people following me on your site!
There are some major identity issues here. Are you a social network? Why am I getting notifications of people following me, which now I must clear, on a site I'm going to for answers on something specific? These social network tactics were fine for Facebook, but people are over it. You need to deliver meaningful relevant content, not spam users with meangless e-mail to attempt to get them to revisit the site.
Way too much Facebook in your Quora, so to speak.
DOES THIS SEEMS REASONABLE:
Send me an email on:
Question-related
Someone answers a question I'm following
Someone edits a question I'm following
Someone edits details of a question I'm following
Someone adds a topic to a question I'm following
Someone removes a topic from a question I'm following
Someone comments on questions I'm following
Someone edits the wiki on questions I'm following
Someone edits the short wiki on questions I'm following
Someone shares a question with me
Someone adds a related question to a question I'm following
Someone redirects a question I'm following
Answer-related
Someone comments on answers I've written
Someone votes on answers I've written
Someone removes my answer
A moderator edits my answerSuggested edits on answers
User-related
System notifications
Personal notifications
Someone starts following me
Someone asks me to answer a question
Someone shares a question with me
Someone makes me an admin
Someone removes me as an admin
An admin changes the status of my account
Someone edits my topic biography
Someone sends me a message
Topic-related
Someone gives me topics to follow
Someone endorses me on a topic
Someone suggests topics to me
Someone edits the name of a topic I'm following
Someone edits the wiki of a topic I'm following
Someone shares a topic with me
Someone merges a topic I'm following
Someone adds an alias to a topic I'm following
Someone removes an alias from a topic I'm following
Someone deletes a topic I'm following
Someone adds back a topic I'm following
SERIOUSLY?
More importantly, how does one delete their account?
Site is good, easy to use. Fix your e-mail validator (you can, afterall have a domain name that starts with a number). The facebook only signup thing is a bit of a hiccup (especially with the HN crowd) even with your priors.
As for the site itself, I would recommend ditching this whole "tagging" system. For example:
Having these tags:
Compensation, Engineering in Silicon Valley, Salaries, Startup Compensation,Startups, Stock Options, ....
Is just going to be very overwhelming, and if you're letting users define these, it seems you're going to have a big problem with trying to eventually police the content, and thats just an endless can of worms..
How about some term extraction, fancy analysis, and leaving that to automated semantics?
On a side note, some of the main topic landing pages are pretty sensible, easy to use, and well defined. Some of the indexing pages seem to have an awful lot going on...
Mainly, the homepage once you're logged in. Very busy here, not even sure exactly what is going on, and its awfully repetitive..
There also seems to be topics/categories broken down, but no real way to browse them effectively -- although there is a "browse" tab which is really more of a "feed", adding a bit more confusion. It'd be nice to be able to consume these "Topics" in more of a directory type of style.. (eg, being able to look up "Dog Breeds" and seeing a list of breeds to click through/browse leading into the particular Quora for a specific breed itself..)
All in all, I think its an excellent start, but there's a definitive need to establish a much clearer picture of the companies identity.. Is this a new E-How, or is it a Wikipedia? More importantly, how is it really different from either? Right now there is a ton of grey area here for the end user, but hopefully a lot of this will work itself out as the ideas mature.
Best,
earle.
EDIT:
Now that I really look at that homepage again (logged in), I really dont like it. There's almost no meanginful content on it -- everything is metadata! This needs to be rethought more in tune with identity/branding of the problem you're trying to solve. I dont think an end user ever wants to see a giant feed of a bunch of meta data if you're delivering a
'really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.' that should translate to content.
"""
Follow-up question added to topic Programming. 8:22pm
What are the disadvantages of having a degree in Math and working as a programmer?
This is a follow-up question to What are advantages of having a degree in Math and working as a programmer?.
2 Answers • Follow • 2 Topics
"""
This "feed" stuff may work well for your news feed on Facebook, but it doesnt translate well to a Q&A site when I'm typing in something specific and you're dumping a giant list of unrelated meta-data with links all over the place. If someone is looking for advice on their health issue or tax problem, this is going to have to scale -- to potentially millions of questions and billions of answers. This feed and tagging system dumped into a "feed" just ain't going to get it done. This needs to be rethought, to better effectively deliver your stated vision of 'really high quality, authoritative content on any topic that people are interested in.' and that should translate to content thats relevant and easy to find.
Can you send the e-mail address you tried to use to bugs@quora.com? Our validator allows for domains that start with numbers so I think it was rejecting the e-mail based on something else.
