I believe it's because everyone knows you can add ?share=1 at the end and have it work.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life-lesson...

Still, I'm not a fan of this either.

Perhaps HN could either do this automatically for Quora links, or simply prohibit Quora links that don't already have this added?

Given that Quora is in YC[0], neither of those things are likely to happen.

0: http://blog.ycombinator.com/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch

So, the Scribd treatment, then? (Scribd links were encouraged despite constant complaints about the difficulty of use relative to PDFs.)

To be fair, when the Scribd links were first implemented, 1) in-browser PDF was much worse than it is now; and 2) Scribd's interface was better than it is now. Over time, browsers got better at showing PDFs, and Scribd got more cluttered and weird.

I can't speak for others, but in my case, "difficulty of use" also refers to "you have to go through all these additional steps just to get to the document". I can't remember if that was only for grey-area, restricted-access postings, or if it applied to all Scribd documents, but I was conditioned to assume the latter by the time I saw them on HN.

> 1) in-browser PDF was much worse than it is now

Why would in-browser PDF support matter, when every platform has out-of-browser PDF viewers readily available?

Opening a PDF in browser is more convenient. That way the PDF behaves like another browser tab. Opening a PDF in an external viewer could be only one click and one alt+tab more, but it's less convenient and reduces usage. And it would leave one extra file in your downloads folder.

I recommend the "Quora Share" Firefox extension. It automatically adds share=1 to quora.com links:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/

That would be great, in my opinion. For now I use an extension (though a Greasemonkey script would suffice).

Speaking only for myself, I visit Quora so frequently that I pretty much always have a login cookie stored, so I never see the login page.

That said, given my very public and vocal arguments against "walled gardens" in the past, why do I tolerate Quora? For the same reasons I tolerate G+, Facebook, etc. I annoys me and tickles a sore spot regarding the way I want things to be, but the value of the content is sufficient for me to "grin and bear it". But if there were a really good Quora alternative that was more open, I'd work to promote and support it. I don't know of one offhand though, especially considering network effects (that is, the value of Quora isn't the Quora software, it's the people posting and answering).

I have a similar position. If the content is valuable enough then it's tolerable to have a gate. Quibb is another similar platform, but I don't know of anything with the quality of Quora answers - Stack Overflow is the closest, but it's very specific and Quora covers a lot of content the various Stack sites don't.

Thank you for providing a counterargument.

> Why do Quora articles continue to make the front page when we can't read them?

We can read them, by signing in.

> How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in?

Yes

> What possible benefit is there to signing in?

We get to read the article.

> If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?

Yes

Btw, dude, there's a close button.

Exactly. I really don't understand what's wrong with signing in to access content, it shows the site owner I'm actually interested in engaging. Facebook isn't going steal my soul when I send them my credentials, you know.

I just clicked on the whitespace away from/off of the login popup - it disappeared and I could read all the text.

There's a button right there that says 'close'. I assume you just didn't see it. Granted, I'm not a fan of this either - but it's hardly holding the content hostage.

I never noticed the Close button before, so I tried it w/o the ?share=1 in another browser. I get "Close & Read First Answer". All the answers after the first were blurred. I think this is the first time I've seen a site A/B test how best to annoy people.

Clicking "close" doesn't make the blurred-out content visible.

Perhaps you can use Chrome developer tools to delete the blur from the DOM :)

The blur is not applied client-side. An image of blurred text is sent from the server.

It did for me?

Worse than being simply annoying and deceptive (since there are plenty of ways to get around it if you care), it's also literally useless.

For example, I just went into Incognito on another machine out of curiosity. I unclicked 'I am 13 or older' and then clicked on random grayed-out whitespace, and it showed the full article. Unless they kept my home IP from previous requests, but at that point, why bother with the age gate? Lawyers?

Not sure how anyone can defend this deceptive UX bullshit.

> No, I won't sign in with Google, nor Facebook.

That's probably your problem. I signed up for Quora and can read the posts fine. Also, there's a 'close' link under that dialog, which you could have clicked without logging in.

> If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?

Yes. Why not? It seems childish to rail against this. If a site is useful, I create an account. I did that for HN, and it doesn't matter if the sign-in mechanism is proprietary, Google based, Facebook or OAuth. In fact, I trust sites that use external, federalised SSO more because I know they didn't roll their own authentication with associated failures.