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Quora Dark Pattern: Unsubscribe
9 points by doglet 1715 days ago
Wishing to see an article, Quora required a sign-in through 3rd party auth. Upon signing in, I unwittingly opted in to getting subscribed to regular Quora emails. This is part 1 - the unrequested subscription.

Now, for part 2: upon trying to unsubscribe, I find out that my unsubscribe clicks aren't working as expected. It's because on closer inspection, the email footer link takes you to page that merely allows unsubscribing from a small subset of these emails. I then find hidden (in the depths of the site, not the email) the full unsubscribe option - which is not an unsubscribe option at all (it doesn't exist), but rather the option to delete the account. However, Quora blocks me from using this prior to creating a first-party user account with them (recall I signed in through 3rd party auth).

Fuck 'em, I just blocked and spammed Quora from there.

3 comments

I have this other problem with Quora where there's no way to turn off the "People in your network upvoted this answer" notifications.

Also, their Android app has got to be the worst one I've used. Slow to register clicks, registering clicks on the wrong places, extremely slow for what's just rendering web pages. Seriously, how difficult is that?

They had such a good product and now they're running it into the ground.

It was good, then got plagued by bad incentives, to sum it up
Quora is awful. I said good riddance to them years ago.
Find their GDPR DPO's email address, or failing that, the email of some high-up people in the company and set up an email forwarding rule to send all their spam back to them.