When I use Google to search for the phrase “puppet vs chef 2011” I’m directed, about six links down, to a Quora article: “What are the key reasons to choose Puppet over Chef (or vice versa)?” Now, I signed up for a Quora account in the early days when it first hit Hacker News but I didn’t find much to enjoy and deactivated the account. I haven’t been back since; that StackExchange licenses all of the user generated content CC-Wiki, has an community of helpful folks and maintains a narrow focus with structure incentives and cultural mores—helpful for noise/signal ratio problems—guaranteed that I didn’t find much pull to Quora.

However, search results scatter my focus like seeds on the wind and I was back at Quora. Reading through the first response I was remained relatively uninformed, but discovered that the further responses were grey single-lines with this nonsense below:

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Sure enough, if I swap my user agent to Googlebot I see every answer. I can understand the need to convert passers-by into long-term users , but the tactic their taking reminds me ever so much more of Experts Exchange than any serious community site that, while I was ambivalent before, I am inclined to view Quora rather negatively. (So much so, in fact, that I felt the need to share.) Things Quora could have done to achieve nearly the same effect without tainting my emotional state toward them:

• Enact a “pay wall” that admits N >= 1 views of articles without the sign-up coercion.
• Page-top bar requesting—in a tone welcoming but firm—that I create an account to join the conversation.
• Admit me to see the whole article when I’ve been directed by a search engine, but do one of the two points above on in-site links.