Quora

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.

Quora is a question and answer hosting silo that is unarchived (actively blocks the Internet Archive), and exposed 100+ million users data in December 2018 breach.

Features

Pingback

Quora appears to support sending pingbacks as of 2015-02-06. Aaron Parecki received a pingback from Quora from a comment someone wrote that included a link to his post. The pingback source was the quora question URL with a fragment ID to the specific comment.

Criticism

Very Closed

• 2018-12-04 Andy Baio: Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora

Worth noting: Quora has no public API, no backup/export tools, blocks anonymous display of answers, and banned the Wayback Machine entirely. Andy Baio, https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/453958676529696769

2018 User Information Breach

• 2018-12-03 Quora blog post: Quora Security Update
• 2018-12-03 CNN: Quora says 100 million users hit by 'malicious' data breach

The compromised information includes users' names, email addresses and encrypted passwords as well as data from social networks like Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR) if people chose to link them to their Quora accounts.

• 2018-12-03 The Verge: Quora says hackers stole up to 100 million users’ data
• 2018-12-03 TechCrunch: Quora says 100 million users may have been affected by data breach
• 2018-12-04 PCWorld: Quora data breach FAQ: What 100 million hacked users need to know

See Also

• question
• answer
• registration wall
• https://medium.com/daniels-tech-world/how-to-extract-your-data-from-quora-and-reddit-46dea4ff698c article about data export (courtesy of GDPR), which also points to using either a web request or an email request: https://help.quora.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000839503-Can-I-get-a-copy-of-my-data-
• Simon Willison used to POSSE answers to Quora questions https://simonwillison.net/tags/quora/
• Criticism: 2024-01-09 The Atlantic: If There Are No Stupid Questions, Then How Do You Explain Quora? / The tragedy of Q&A sites is the story of the internet.

  Quora once encapsulated a central premise of the internet, that connecting people with questions and people with answers across the globe would create an exchange of information unlike anything before it; that rather than seeking answers from a friend or in a library, you could put your query to … everyone. Today, the website spams my inbox with questions such as “Has your husband ever shared you with another woman?”

  Fourteen years into its run, Quora now provides an answer to one fundamental question: How has the internet evolved? From idealism to opportunism, from knowledge-seeking to attention-grabbing, from asking questions to shouting answers.