If Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge, why not make the data available under a liberal license?

While I roll my eyes at The Mission Statement, Quora has stated two rationales for its walled garden which guarantee that the Internet Archive will stay on their spider block list:

  • Authors retain copyright for their contributions, and Quora only retains a non-exclusive license to publish. The terms & conditions do not authorise blanket republication elsewhere without the author’s permission, and Quora would consider spidering to be republication. It’s why Quora is so restrictive on author’s self-archiving: you can only archive your own posts, and you can’t include others’ comments.
  • Quora wants people to be able to unperson themselves from Quora—to delete their accounts and contributions to Quora, without them being retrievable elsewhere.

Are there Quorans you tend to confuse with each other?

Laura Hancock and Vicky Prest, especially when Laura changed her profile pic to what basically looks identical to Vicky’s profile pic at small resolution.

I said *small* resolution.

In fact, I saw a selfie on a post by Vicky once, and was about to comment “hey, I thought you never posted pictures of yourself”—only to realise oops, Laura.

And I think it’s more the profile pics than anything else. I mean yes, they have some similarities: both cool, both non-het, both sex positive, both “outspoken”; but really, not *that* similar.