> The post is nothing more than an attempt to shame Quora into opening up their data.
My post is definitely an attempt to shame Quora into opening up their data, in at least the sense of making it available to the Internet Archive. No bones there.
> There are many people that don't want everything they post on the internet going into permanent and searchable databases.
We may just disagree to some extent on what the norms should be, but I think if you're intentionally posting public content to a public website, that's part of the permanent public record. Especially when that website is about accumulating a knowledge base.
Wikipedia, another knowledge base, records everything. Though unlike Quora, you're allowed to contribute fully anonymously (without even registering an account -- in fact, come in through Tor, if you like). They have no problem allowing themselves to be backed up on the Archive, and I'd be pretty worried if they did.
There's some brief bot exclusions, a brief, now commented-out section asking the Internet Archive not to archive user pages, and then a very, very long section blocking various pages from being indexed by anyone. That long section has a lot of thought and history in it, including notes about the Internet's memory about users, like "Folks get annoyed when XfD discussions end up the number 1 google hit for their name."
I think it's totally fair to argue with Wikipedia about the choices it makes in its robots.txt, but ultimately what we're talking about here are organizations making these choices on behalf of users, not the individual users themselves.
If individuals are concerned about their contributions being preserved, that should be something they take up with the Archive. The Archive respects take down requests, both because copyright is a thing and because they're not interested in harming individuals.
I don't think we're working in the service of humanity by blessing companies that gate the future's access to massive troves of knowledge that was freely contributed to public websites.
My post is definitely an attempt to shame Quora into opening up their data, in at least the sense of making it available to the Internet Archive. No bones there.
> There are many people that don't want everything they post on the internet going into permanent and searchable databases.
We may just disagree to some extent on what the norms should be, but I think if you're intentionally posting public content to a public website, that's part of the permanent public record. Especially when that website is about accumulating a knowledge base.
Wikipedia, another knowledge base, records everything. Though unlike Quora, you're allowed to contribute fully anonymously (without even registering an account -- in fact, come in through Tor, if you like). They have no problem allowing themselves to be backed up on the Archive, and I'd be pretty worried if they did.
In fact, Wikipedia's robots.txt is really interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt
There's some brief bot exclusions, a brief, now commented-out section asking the Internet Archive not to archive user pages, and then a very, very long section blocking various pages from being indexed by anyone. That long section has a lot of thought and history in it, including notes about the Internet's memory about users, like "Folks get annoyed when XfD discussions end up the number 1 google hit for their name."
I think it's totally fair to argue with Wikipedia about the choices it makes in its robots.txt, but ultimately what we're talking about here are organizations making these choices on behalf of users, not the individual users themselves.
If individuals are concerned about their contributions being preserved, that should be something they take up with the Archive. The Archive respects take down requests, both because copyright is a thing and because they're not interested in harming individuals.
I don't think we're working in the service of humanity by blessing companies that gate the future's access to massive troves of knowledge that was freely contributed to public websites.