Quora backtracks on ‘Views’ after user complaints about privacy

Curbed your Quora reading habits after the company announced it would publish what you looked at? Don’t worry, you can go back to reading without worry, as Quora announced today that due to negative user response, it would no longer display which posts were read by which users.

On the Quora blog, the company explained the decision:

We launched Views a couple weeks ago to offer a new way of discovering content on Quora and to let writers get a sense of who they can reach through Quora. While many were really interested in these new stories, we also got a lot of feedback that people weren’t comfortable having what they viewed shared broadly with people following them. So we’re going to stop showing stories in feed about what people are viewing.

Om Malik wrote for GigaOM on the troubling aspects of the “Views” feature, which was launched August 1 and showed when a user had seen a particular post:

This is no different than the passive sharing that has been promoted by Facebook or Path. Now on a closed network like Path, which is based entirely on intimate relationships, I can understand passive sharing. After all, if you have seen my photo or a check-in and I know that, it is okay because you are on my approved list. However, the kind of sharing Quora is promoting doesn’t jive with me.

Under the new “Views,” users did have the option to turn off this feature, and it only tracked topics they were following, not those found through search. But it seems general dislike of the new feature resonated with Quora. In the blog post, Quora explained that it would continue to track “views from feed, topic pages you follow and clicks on digest emails,” but not which specific posts were read by individual users.



GigaOM