I have been a long time user of Quora, as well as a long time detractor.
While I think there is a very interesting critical mass of user, I agree that it is largely a valley audience. There are some really interesting answers on there, which I have found valuable; but I have maintained that its flaws are too big and too many for my tastes:
* The UX sucks. While they have made some minor improvements - it still sucks. I had posted about this prior on Quora as well. It was also made worse by their constant self-back-patting on the UX/UI where they were claiming that the users were too stupid to understand the design decisions they made, and that they were in fact design decisions not mistakes. They were constantly praising how they learned so much about good UX from facebook.
* The lack of threading is retarded, and makes discussion impossible. The fact that you can only have 1 sub level (a comment) is just wrong. The claim was they didnt want discussion and that the answers to the questions were meant to be definitive thus not needing discussion. BS.
* The colors and fonts/sizing used is horrid and makes it very difficult to navigate. The use of 'facebook blue' the light grey and then the bold black are all in the wrong order. (http://i.imgur.com/Y9EPV.png) It doesnt work for quick visual scanning.
* The entry boxes are broken; when you begin to type something, it hijacks your cursor and disabled the backspace. e.g. if you try to type @username or http - it makes it difficult to fix typos.
* it is impossible to navigate topics clearly, sort or save any meaningful data. You cannot tag or vote in a meaningful way so as to promote answers either. You can only browse a subscription/follow feed in a linear 1-dimensional manner.
Ultimately, Quora is a one dimensional service which had a lot of early hype due to its founders and early adopters having real influence in the valley.
There is good info, but the architecture of the sites containment of that data is like the work of a talented child with a lot of potential being praised for their genius too early and resulting in stagnation and reinforcement of an idea that started as a good seed, but was ultimately not thought out well enough to scale - ultimately feeling dated and as more-broken-than-not implementation.
So, I go there about once a week for a quick scan - or travel over via HN links to good posts, but I spend very little time on there any longer. The information value in exchange for my time there is too low any more.
I agree, though also I have found my self making aliases for lots of things and using them for a year on a box - then moving to a new machine/new job and not recalling how to do any of the things manually.
Years ago, when I was at Lockheed, we had to do a bunch of stuff in support of devs - and after having them "train" us on the ridiculous install of their product, we wrote scripts and aliases to get the job done - but then after some time were wholly dependent on the scripts and couldnt do it by hand any loner.
This is a really interesting question; Just who will buy these things.
Last night as i was struggling to fall asleep I was daydreaming about "What will the internet and tech look like in 50 years" - I was thinking that in 50 years, the internet, and thus the world, will look a lot more like the dystopian future portrayed in CyberPunk from the 80's; i.e. the massive scale of global corporations and their influence over all aspects of our lives.
The people who will buy "these things" (That which is made in silicon valley, online digital product) shall be further gobbled up by both facebook and google - as the extending of their reach into our lives continues.
Their services will continue to be free to the users - the most useful of online services will be bought by them and made free to their users for the purpose of extracting use data from the populous in ever more accurate detail.
This data will be used to track, sell to and control the worlds population.
Spending habits.
Social habits.
Search habits.
Communication habits.
etc...
All watched, monitored, monetized and cataloged.
There is going to be an ever increasing class gap. The smartest of people will be bought into the system. Working on furthering its vision and capability.
The disenfranchised lower classes will grow, become more violent and be used as the reasoning for greater governmental control over the new economically unbalanced and violent world.
So, assuming the DOJ can force one to decrypt a laptop, then wouldnt it be wise to make all your sensitive informarmation in a cloud-mounted encrypted partition such that nothing actually lives on the laptop of value?
Think of the laptop, again, as a dumb terminal. Make sure that the mounting of said partition is an always manual event and no command logging/local logging occurs.
Here! take the laptop! Here's the password!
When working, data gets brought to a local, ram based, cache - all evidence of anything running on the machine dies with power loss.
This is great advice if you're having trouble cooling your reactor as well. Just fill that melting core with boric acid and all your problem will be solved!
I recently had problems in reactor six and boric acid really helped me get things under control. (Too bad for Sergei and Vlad though...) Anyway, at least I was lucky enough.
Does this mean that the words in the articles, and the grammar used therein will be checked for errors? Or that they put a new skin on their poorly written bullshit?
GLegos. Glass LEGO made from sand and printed out.
The machine needs to be scaled and cheapened - but it MUST be made to make bricks - over time, the bricks will be refined and they will be available for sale in the Organic or Fair Trade aisle of Home Depot.
A smaller version shall be made and refined to allow girls in west africa to make beads and cups and such.
While I think there is a very interesting critical mass of user, I agree that it is largely a valley audience. There are some really interesting answers on there, which I have found valuable; but I have maintained that its flaws are too big and too many for my tastes:
* The UX sucks. While they have made some minor improvements - it still sucks. I had posted about this prior on Quora as well. It was also made worse by their constant self-back-patting on the UX/UI where they were claiming that the users were too stupid to understand the design decisions they made, and that they were in fact design decisions not mistakes. They were constantly praising how they learned so much about good UX from facebook.
* The lack of threading is retarded, and makes discussion impossible. The fact that you can only have 1 sub level (a comment) is just wrong. The claim was they didnt want discussion and that the answers to the questions were meant to be definitive thus not needing discussion. BS.
* The colors and fonts/sizing used is horrid and makes it very difficult to navigate. The use of 'facebook blue' the light grey and then the bold black are all in the wrong order. (http://i.imgur.com/Y9EPV.png) It doesnt work for quick visual scanning.
* The entry boxes are broken; when you begin to type something, it hijacks your cursor and disabled the backspace. e.g. if you try to type @username or http - it makes it difficult to fix typos.
* it is impossible to navigate topics clearly, sort or save any meaningful data. You cannot tag or vote in a meaningful way so as to promote answers either. You can only browse a subscription/follow feed in a linear 1-dimensional manner.
Ultimately, Quora is a one dimensional service which had a lot of early hype due to its founders and early adopters having real influence in the valley.
There is good info, but the architecture of the sites containment of that data is like the work of a talented child with a lot of potential being praised for their genius too early and resulting in stagnation and reinforcement of an idea that started as a good seed, but was ultimately not thought out well enough to scale - ultimately feeling dated and as more-broken-than-not implementation.
So, I go there about once a week for a quick scan - or travel over via HN links to good posts, but I spend very little time on there any longer. The information value in exchange for my time there is too low any more.