At Quora we decided not to have a higher "minimum service period" aside from the standard 1 year cliff. The rationale is that the vesting cliff is what everyone is expecting as the minimum. If a company wants to have a higher period before someone can leave and retain their stock, they should just increase the cliff to that length of time to make it fully transparent.
The unusual number of complaints on this thread were actually because of a bug causing a bad experience. This was our fault and it has been fixed.
We don't mind the change of link - we just want knowledge shared on Quora to get to as many people as possible and we don't mind if it happens on other sites. But I wanted to let you guys know that this was a bug and the behavior is back to normal (nothing with share=1 will ever require viewers to sign in / trigger this level of complaints). There can be so much negativity here that it can be hard to tell the difference between general hate (as radmuzom suspected) and a real problem, but in this case it was a real problem.
We don't care about signup counts, only about real engagement. Most people have no problem with registering, and the engagement from logged in users is so much higher that it more than offsets the small minority of people who don't want to register.
The copy/paste issue on iOS is a bug, and should be fixed within the next week. Sorry about that. We want people to copy and share content out of Quora far and wide, which is why our terms of service gives people an unusual amount of legal permission to copy and reuse content. See: http://www.quora.com/about/tos
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.
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.