I registered with Quora using my legal name as documented on credit cards, my library card, my utilities bills and my drivers license. My account was blocked, and I was asked to register with my "proper" name. So far my replies have been ignored.
Related idea I got: one "easy" (nonmanual, not super-invasive) way for them verify names would be to do a credit card verification, which would verify that they had a credit card in that name.
But people probably wouldn't be too keen to give their credit card info to a free site just for "name verification".
I registered with a completely fake name, though it sounds like a real name rather than a handle.
I have to wonder about a mother who names her kid "Quora" anyway, and I would like to point out that Quora isn't giving us her last name, yet she demands that we give her ours?
I learned my lesson with facebook, which promised privacy and then years later made the data public. That is the last site that got my real name. I've changed my name on facebook several times to completely obviously fake names, and while they claim that you have to use your real name and they claim to review them, no repercussions. I'm only keeping the account while I go back, and delete old status updates a few months at a time anyway.
And really, no website actually needs it. Trying to fight it is silly, as there is no mechanism whereby you can authenticate identity online. Faxing a passport doesn't even work, unless the business is tied into the government network, and if it is, then other businesses are as well and fake passports become easier.
> I registered with a completely fake name, though it sounds like a real name rather than a handle.
This is why their real name policy is flawed. A real name that sounds fake gets flagged as fake. A fake name that sounds real does not get flagged. The process is completely subjective as to what sounds real. Requiring ID is one way to prove/disprove it, but checking scanned IDs does not scale well.
> Trying to fight it is silly, as there is no mechanism whereby you can authenticate identity online.
Handling fake names or other identifiers is like handling software piracy. You can't prevent it and technology can't prevent it. The pathological cases will do their thing anyway. The best you can do is make it sufficiently inconvenient that the bulk of users will simply go the legit route and the bulk of clowns will go away. Incurring some false positives is a cost, which Quora has chosen to bear.
This is what government itself does for issuing its own IDs. They just have the power for "sufficiently inconvenient" to include criminal charges.
> Incurring some false positives is a cost, which Quora
> has chosen to bear.
The issue here is that you cannot claim to be an 'international' company just because anyone can sign up. If you discriminate against people whose names are 'weird' just because they don't conform to your cultural norms, then all you're doing is exposing your ignorance to the international community that you're hoping to embrace. Stating that Quora is 'open to entire world, so long as they conform to American cultural ideals' is just confirming that stereotype of the American business man that shows up in a foreign country to do business, expects everything to work like it does in America and views all local culture/customs to be 'inferior' because things work so much better in America.
On top of that Quora doesn't seem to even have a consistent policy, or so it appears from their communications. The first 'your name appears to be fake' communication implies that the user just needs to say, "Yup, that's my real name," and all will be well. The further communications relay the message that once you've been determined to be 'fake' you need to provide a government id.
> If you discriminate against people whose names are 'weird'
I'm curious why this issue triggers a knee-jerk response of "that's discrimination".
Seems to me that Quora may just perceive that it's not a worthwhile use of customer-service time and resources to deal with edge cases in output from their name approval algorithm. "Fax in your ID" allows a remedy with a standardized procedure and minimal resources spent on their part.
Keep in mind what a small population this really is. You need the intersection of three sets: "rejected name", "bona fide applicant not a scammer/clown", and "unable or unwilling to access a scanner like by getting oneself to a Kinko's". It's quite plausible that this set of corner cases is sufficiently small as to simply not be worth Quora's time to handle. Quora is not a government with an obligation to serve everybody. Of course it sucks for those who happen to fall into that set, but the overall perspective is that those are small points in a large sea of data.
Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice. This includes incompetence by willful neglect in favor of other priorities.
Right, what's commonly meant when people say 'discrimination' is that someone is making choices between people on criteria that shouldn't matter, such as skin colour, sexual orientation, gender or ... name.
It's not intentional discrimination, but it has a discriminatory - harassing Arab and Indian customers more often.
Whatever the case, it makes them come across as jackasses.
It's not like "real sounding names" is going to prevent trolls. Trolls have the time and patience to pick a credible-sounding fake name. People who want to use the site for it's proper purpose will just feel insulted.
If they want real names, they could do it just by creating social pressure to provide a real name, and doing the Facebook trick of using user-submitted data to build your user name. If a few hold-outs don't want to play along with it, what's the big problem?
>It's not intentional discrimination, [...]
Whatever the case, it makes them come across as jackasses.
The level of decorum here appears to have dropped significantly in the last few days with a lot of this sort of personal attack.
If they unwittingly discriminated against someone because of an unintentional consequence of an action taken in good faith and believed to be benevolent (preventing trolling, spamming and such on Quora) then how does that make the programmers "jackasses" (ie contemptibly foolish/stupid)?
Why not just say that it's a flawed filter, why the need for this sort of talk?
That isn't a personal attack on a HNer (unless the tech support happens to be a HNer, then that's unintentional). If my project does well enough to get a HN discussion, I'm sure I'll be stunned at the rude responses, but that's not people trying to be mean, it's just that people talking about someone they see as a third party tend to be a lot more straight-talking than if they are talking about each-other.
It's just that asking somebody to show some ID just because their name seems strange seems a bit ... strange. It's a website, not a home loan.
Great point - the implied equivalance between posting on the internet with a real name and having a real-world conversation is wrong. Posting on an archived system available to everyone is more like writing an editorial or giving a speech, something which many are uncomfortable with.
...Those sound just like the kind of person that they should want using their service. If you're unhappy with something being attributed to you years later then you're probably writing crap.
(I do think that people might just pick 'real sounding' names though. They should try to make this the exception though...)
I think what those pushing real names for their site don't get is that the closer the site gets to appearing to only use real names, the more dangerous and potentially damaging it becomes for the real name users.
A random site where anyone can post as anyone else has some plausible deniability. A site where everyone is really themselves has less deniability. A fake facebook account claiming to be X thus is more damaging to X than a totally random website talking about X. And that's not even getting to the dumb stuff you say on your own...
This puts me in mind of my credit card, whose database believes I am "Patrick McKenzie" and whose web tier enjoys throwing a "That input wasn't written in kana, please try again" on the "sign up for online access" page. When I called the credit card company to complain, they told me that they would need a government issued ID certifying to my name in kana prior to changing their DB record. The government will happily issue me an ID, and indeed legally mandate that I carry it everywhere, but only for my name exactly as it appears on my passport. US passports don't include kana? "Not our problem."
Strangely enough, the small town bank that I do business with has been absurdly solicitous about this, and when a similar string comparison caused a bill payment to fail, the manager added a note to the file saying that dishonoring any bill directed to a foreign client at our branch office would henceforth require his written approval. It's just the gigantic megacorp bank in Tokyo which hasn't figured out that foreigners exist yet.
My first name is "Judge" and it gets dropped as a title every once in a while. I had a credit card issued with my middle initial as my first name. When I called to have it changed to my real name they insisted that documentation be provided to prove it. My immediate response was to cancel the credit card because creating a new account had a lower barrier to entry than correcting information in an existing account. Likewise, this was a "megacorp" bank.
Somewhat understandable.
Most passports that use different alphabets also tend to have romanized names on them to prevent this type of thing at immigration points.... do you think US Banks and tellers accept names in kana or kanji, cyrillic, greek, arabic, etc?
I know from experience the difficulties an unusual name can bring, but Quora hasn't called me out just yet. I value their desire to build an authentic community, but other sites have grown without resorting to this sort of tactic. Fakes eventually are known based on their posts.
Speaking of fakes, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake has had all kinds of problems due to her (real) last name:
http://caterina.net/archive/001011.html At worst, I've been asked if I was "one of them foreigners" by a landlord years back.
I remember one of the first bugs I ever fixed in a production system involved a Mr. Null who wasn't getting billed because he didn't show up in queries. I also once encountered someone named Mr. Blank though I didn't manage to ask him whether he had similar problems.
I'm not sure what you mean by an "authentic community". I have many friends on social networks whom I've never met in real life and whose names I have no knowledge of, but they are real people, and the relationship is authentic, based on our interactions.
They are not fake, they are simply anonymous.
Further, by having some anonymity, I can say things that I otherwise would not be comfortable saying. This is important on a site where the purpose is to answer questions.
Is it better to get a vague question or to have an answer that fails to reveal critical information because this information might make a business associate look bad? Or would it be better to be able to say X attempted to do Y because they believed Z, and I thought Z true, but Z turned out to be W and so Y caused a Q. X is a good entity, they just made a mistake here, so beware of this kind of error if you do business with X.
I would say that they're not "anonymous" so much as "pseudonymous", if you can even say that. A name is whatever a person calls himself; if it's adopted at the age of 23 and only used online that doesn't make it any less a name.
I try to say "legal name" rather than "real name" when interacting with people. While this is not perfectly correct (according to Wikipedia, in common law a "true name" is any name used non-fraudulently), it does help to remind people that assumed names aren't less real than given names.
For now. It would be a mistake to assume their system is so secure now (and forever into the future) that the data can't be found, or simply leaked inadvertently by Quora.
To me, Quora is almost the ultimate non-story. There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform.
The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.
Another way to put this is that it's a bubble story: journalists and Valleywags think it's much bigger than it is because all the other people in the same bubble talk about it. Outside of SV/SF, nobody really knows nor cares.
It's a bit like the AT&T-iPhone story. Sure it sucks in SF/NY (it really does) but journalists and bloggers seem incapable or uninterested in considering that these two cities are representative of the whole country.
Last year Quora got funding at a staggering $86M [1] (this sounds like post-money). It's Yahoo Answers meets Facebook, which just so happens to have an insider audience that won't necessarily translate more broadly. Frankly, I'd sell before people catch on.
> There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform.
Don't quite agree, I think their real-time update system excellent and sets them apart. It definitely (IMO) makes the site more addicting. Not that it couldn't be written by competitors of course
I don't disagree that Quora is overhyped though, they seem be Techcrunch's pet company of 2011.
Ditto -- it seems that I read about Quora on HN nearly every day, but I've never actually been taken to the site for any real purpose, or seen any of its actual content linked on HN.
"WELL membership is available to almost anyone, but requires a paid subscription and use of one's real name."
"The WELL was frequently mentioned in the media in the 1980s and 1990s, probably disproportionately to the number of users it had relative to other online systems. [...] This early visibility was largely the result of the early policy of providing free — comped — accounts for interesting journalists and other select members of the media. As a result, for many journalists it was their first experience of online systems and, later, the Internet, even though other systems existed."
After all, unless you’re Cher or Sirhan Sirhan, nobody has the same first and last name.
One of our top managers' name is Herman Herman. 10 years ago or so, he was working next to a guy, whose name was Martin Martin. Of course, Martin Herman was lurking nearby as well.
Names in Egypt often follow this pattern, because the second name is actually the father's given name. So you get combinations like Youssef Youssef or Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Was Martin Martin from Germany? Here at ITA, we used to (before my time) have someone of that name. He was born in Germany, but naturalized in the US; his last name was too difficult for many Americans, so he gave up and had it changed to match his first name, so it'd be easy to say and remember.
The uni department I worked at once had a student called "Daniel". He was on a engineering scholarship from somewhere in remote Africa and had never needed another name. He was rather rueful that nobody had told him to make one up when he applied for his passport, because it caused him all kinds of difficulty. He was all kinds of things on different bits of paper: "Daniel Daniel", "Daniel -" and, memorably, "Daniel Dash".
I don't force users to use real names, I think there's a real benefit in allowing people to use aliases. Rapportive allows me to really quickly grok whether the alias has an underlying real ID in terms of fighting spam and trolls.
It's hardly a fool proof technique, but it answers the questions 9 times out of 10 which removes any need for me to create obstacles for my users to jump through.
PS: Interesting aside: I really loathe Facebook due to a personal incident in my life that occurred on there. Rapportive were kind enough to understand this and then to write an exception into their codebase such that it never prompts me to connect with Facebook. Talk about customer service.
Look at other things like your IP, user agent, etc.
Spammers, things done by scripts... They give themselves away really easily. All I want is an obstacle enough that I know people aren't spamming and that if they troll they understand that it will reflect on their reputation.
Do I need a real id? Nope. And clearly Quora don't either as they don't require over 99% of users verify their real id. It's just a spam prevention policy and helps cut down on trolls as it will (or has risk that it will) reflect on you.
It's really not a good thing to start applying onerous terms and your users.
One need only look at the quality of comments on a site like Hacker News to see that "real names" is not a requirement for quality and valuable discussion.
No doubt, real names would be an effective aspect to quality content, but if the system of verification is flawed, it's meaningless.
I knew a guy in college that had the name "Harrison". He was from south-east asia. In fact, he told me that from where he comes from, they don't have such thing as first and last name, his name was really just "Harrison". But since no one in the "western world" could handle that, he used Harrison both as first and last name.
Lessons for me: things might be very different on the other side of the globe. Don't try to arrogantly believe you can judge wether things can be true or not from your limited experience and imagination.
It's a pretty sad troll that can't figure out they need to make "real-sounding" names. Basically you're filtering out the twelve year olds that will try to write 'fuck' and 'shitcock' everywhere. That can be accomplished more effectively with some simple analysis on post content.
Instead, you're really only making life hard on legitimate users that don't match your dramatically underinformed notion of a "proper" name.
Last June I signed up for Quora, but it rejected my full name. I use "III" in my full name, and their form validation rejected it. Apparently I had committed the pre-crime of trying to enter my name in ALL CAPS. That put me in a foul mood, and I sent a testy email to Quora about a site that was so super focused on real names couldn't validate a common suffix. I received a very quick, professional reply from some programmer that he was sorry and they had already fixed that. So I am a Quora member, but I don't pay much attention to the site.
I have no problem with displaying my full name (and address etc) but something irks me about forcing my full name to be displayed, it should be optional, if I want to use a username (which more people will recognise me by) why shouldn't I?
No-one's forcing you to use Quora, Quora's goal is to maintain high-quality and one of the strategies that they're using to do that is require people use their real name. It's a perfectly legitimate strategy.
Asserting that something is true doesn't make it so. I can say that you look like a ham sandwich but that doesn't mean you look like a ham sandwich. There are a number of reasons that it isn't a legitimate strategy. This story illustrates a few of them, namely that false positives and false negatives are hard to detect, and that alone is reason enough to reject the idea.
Perhaps it is useful to examine the reason for identifying people. If it is, as you say, to maintain high quality, I would ask upon what causal basis that that conclusion rests; I submit StackOverflow and HN as examples of entities that show real names not to be a requirement for high quality discourse.
If their approach lets fake but English sounding names go through, then they shouldn't discriminate against other names, period.
If Quora wants people to use their real names, they should require them to link their facebook account -- and these days, even that is a poor guarantee of real names. Let's face it, people are striking back at the "real names" thing by altering their names on facebook, because you never know what they're going to make public by default next.
The assumption that those not wishing to disclose a real name have dishonest intentions (and that is what it comes down to), irks me. Personally, I prefer pseudonomity online. But apart from me, let's pick a more famous example or someone who was pseudonomynous online.
The assumption is that some people will contribute lower quality content if using a pseudonym than if using their real name. Yes there are people who will contribute high quality content only under pseudonym, and losing them is the price Quora will have to pay.
You can of course contribute anonymously to Quora.
Godwined in the title. Wanting to be able to conclusively identify someone you are doing business with (as Quora is) is not being a Nazi, it's a foundation of civil society. It may be a bad choice by Quora for other reasons, they may be handling it poorly, you may disagree with them even if it is otherwise perfect, but it is certainly their right to decide with whom they are doing business and with what level of reliability in the identification. They aren't Nazis for that. Unless they're actually collecting accurate identities for the purposes of more efficiently murdering entire ethnicities at some point in the future? (And I mean, killing them, not merely "killing their account on Quora". I think the Nazis would be a smidge less reviled if they had merely cut the Jews out of participation in public fora.)
And this article takes other political potshots for no good reason... "birtherist"? I think birtherism is silly too, but what's that potshot doing in the middle of this article?
With regards the Nazi reference, I suspect he's picking up on the "Ihre Papiere, Bitte" and the reference to jack-boots. The language, the phrase and the attire are all associated with the Nazi regime, although he never mentioned it by name.
With regards the "birther-ist" comment, the article does say:
"I think Quora’s ridiculous, birther-ist requirements
for a “government-issued ID” are a little bit rough,
... "
Hard to say, but a good point. As someone from Germany this phrase is not really connected to either of these two special regimes. It's more a general phrase, rarely still in use (for example for completely different scenarios, since the literal translation is harmless). I think of police and an annoyance if I read that.
Hey, for me this is probably closer to Orwell than to historical reference. I do have to admit that the picture is provocative and stupid though.
It may be. I decided to poke around and if it wasn't used by Nazis, the idea has thoroughly penetrated the collective consciousness to the point that I can't quickly debunk or prove it via Google. For instance, http://www.amazon.com/Papers-Please-Identity-Documents-Autho... , a book titled "Papers Please: Identity Documents, Permits and Authorizations of the Third Reich". If an author with this level of research is allowed to make the connection, I think I can be permitted it.
Also, historical truth is of dubious value here anyhow, the point I'm making is the word picture being painted, not the veracity of the words being used for the painting.
Good catch. I didn't notice the picture accompanying the article until after I'd posted, and I searched for "bitherist" rather than "birther". Apologies to OP for overlooking their meaning.
As RiderOfGiraffes notes, it's there. This article is just drenched with emotion-laden terminology and turns of speech to gin up a controversy about something that is actually still worth writing about but does not deserve this treatment. It's not totalitarianism, it's a company that has grown very quickly having some growing pains dealing with its customers. Certainly very on topic for HN, but this framing is ridiculous and unnecessary. TechCrunch at its finest.
I've been on the Internet long enough to know that getting accused of being a totalitarian is almost a rite of passage more than anything else, but every once in a while something like this still manages to stick out despite my general desensitization to the accusation.
Further, watching my original post bounce up and down, I'm impressed at how people either can't see it either because they are desensitized far more than I am, or are somehow offended at the idea that it's wrong to use this imagery or something? Or are ignorant of the provenance of the phrasing being used? I'm at a bit of a loss to explain the number of people who seem to think that not only is this just peachy, it's not acceptable to have a problem with it or something.
The whole thing is ridiculous, but I want to point out something else the editor said that bugged me and seemed unnecessary: "...in order to use a site approximately as useful to the world as Yahoo! Answers."
Do people really think it's that bad? I really like Quora for the most part and think it's way more useful than Yahoo! Answers.
as it stands, Yahoo! Answers is currently far more useful to the world than Quora. This may change as Quora grows and builds a broader audience, but in terms of value delivered to # of people, it isn't even close...
So what if you were lady gaga or something? Would she not be allowed to use quora without her real name? Or are fake names okay if you have celebrity status?
I registered real first name, real last initial and they demanded I change in a couple of emails. Sorry, not gonna do it for a site I'm still on the fence about. I promptly deactivated my account and don't plan to return.
I also loved the fact that I get a message from a Anon admin telling me the rules state everyone has to use their real name. Coming from an Anon admin..if it's automated at least tell me the host name.....
I love that I can use different pseudo-anonymous handles on different websites.
It gives me a chance to experiment and explore different facets of my life and personality that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing if that exploration were tied to my real name.
Maybe Quora isn't the place for experimenting with identity.
The Internet used to be a place where we were able to freely express ourselves. Increasingly it seems that we can only express ourselves if it's congruent with our IRL selves.
I live in the United States, and these double-names do sometimes occur. For example, I met someone named Daniel Daniel, who is a very successful analyst at an investment bank in New York. (I'm not him, but the name stuck with me when I met him in business school.)
I don't understand why Quora is given attention at all. I asked a question about the efficacy of various ad providers on facebook and got no replies. The surprising part was the question got about 4 views. I got better replies on reddit. Its just one question but given that its popular amond the tech and valley insiders I expected to get more views at least.
As the admin of the forum of my own website, I understand the Quora admin's wariness for "oddly-named" users (definition of which is highly subjective, BTW). However, in my opinion, one is innocent until proven guilty ... so unless they provide proof that they are spammers, as admin I don't think I should do anything. But of course I'm sure Quora would have this covered in their Terms of Service details. As we can see, the result is bad PR and the site gives a very unfriendly image.
Maybe it's part of their long term strategy. For now just require validation of fake sounding names. But as soon as you have critical mass, roll out the requirement for everybody to validate their names with valid IDs in order to continue using the system. That would make sense for the current state or requiring IDs for fake names.
Then they can go to advertisers or just blatantly sell the data if it doesn't work out.
Regardless if their intentions are good or bad, this data in the wrong hands can cause nuisance.
You know, they could just explicitly ask people to use their real names ("We recommend you use your real name" or something similar). If all the first few users do this it might catch on. Works on MathOverflow, though admittedly that probably has as much to do with the content of the site itself as the recommendation. But prohibiting pseudonymy on the internet is just stupid.
Why not require them to be on LinkedIn and verify through that? Or verify through Facebook? Granted there are trolls on both but it's better than requiring ppl to send a scan of their gov't ID.
I don't mind if people use fake names to protect identity. I don't like astroturfing and sock puppet accounts. The conflict between trying to allow the former and prevent the latter is at the heart of Quora's dilemma on this issue.
What exactly are they trying to accomplish with this policy? The stackexchange network of sites has "fake" names all over and yet they do business just fine.
This is really lame, but parents, do heed: if at all possible, try to name your kids something normal. This is going to get much worse WAY before it gets better.
Obviously you can't predict all cultural phenomenons (for instance, if you named your child "Ken Ryu" before Street Fighter hit the shelves) and you shouldn't do it just to please ignorant folks or know where your child will be living in the future ("Kumar??? What is that, like 5 O's and 2 U's?"), but don't intentionally make life difficult on your children just to make yourself laugh or to fulfill some nerd agenda.
Aside from cultural issues, and aside from the notion that people should name the children to make up for the lack of a proper personal identification system on the Internet, that ship has long sailed. Have a look at your local paper's birth announcements - there aren't many Dicks and Janes anymore. Even older names have "creative" spellings that render them practically unrecognisable.
Normality can be statistically proven. If using an abnormal name is not something that will benefit a child, what is the purpose of it, other than satisfying a sick urge to imprint the parents personality on the child?
Would you only buy your boy pink clothes or name him "Elizabeth"? You are choosing for your child, and they deserve a name which is as neutral of a canvas as you can provide for them.
My name got me made fun of constantly as a kid, but if someone asked me if I would have rather been named something else, the answer is an immediate and resolute no. These days all I get is compliments for my name. Yesterday a new person at my tai chi class heard my name as I was showing up and started shouting out loud how awesome it was, then asked if we could switch (she had a pretty unique name as well).
Weird names get you made fun of for maybe 8-10 years, but then the rest of your life is filled with compliments. Think of it as an investment.
Real names are part of Quora's premise. They can afford to reject people who make that hard to pull off. If they'd been founded in another country, they'd presumably have the same problem with some standard American names, but since they weren't, Hasan Hasan's argument falls a little flat.
If he needs to use it, he can go by a middle name. I go by my middle name, because I share my first name with my father. No TechCrunch drama required.
Respectful discussion is also a part of Quora's premise. It's hard to foster that discussion, though, when you've started giving users the runaround because their name doesn't look right to you.
So I've left.