Because people hate being coerced to do something. Stackoverflow didn't need to force people to do so. A Q&A site only purpose is to give you the best possible answer. FAST. Anything else degrades your experience.

If quora breaks me out of the flow to register to their site ... they have cost me way more productivity than they could possibly bring back.

I had a similar thought when reading the article and these comments. I've been a member of Quora for a long time, and I can't remember the last time I had to log in again in my desktop browser. Any time I've navigated to a Quora page, I've seen all the answers no problem. So a lot of these complaints are news to me.

I completely agree with the mobile blocking through Safari & others, though, especially if the whole page is being downloaded.

I put thought and care into putting a few answers on Quora. I regret it now. I never would have done so had I known they were going to go Full Retard like the reviled ExpertSexChange.

I hope this pattern of bootstrapping with domain experts and later ditching them for leveraging volume users doesn't portend the future. Or maybe I'm just a little slow to catch on.

Signing up wasn't so simple back in the days. I still remember when I wanted to see the full text of an answer, Quora asked me to sign up, so I went to the signup page, and it said something like Quora is in closed beta, you need an invitation to sign up.

I, too, signed up for Quora once. But I don't want to sign in every time I want to browse the site.

The ironic thing is that, if they'd just let people browse, they'd sign in on their own.