[dredmorbius]

If you want to have your private answer community, that's fine. Don't go whoring it on Google and other search engines as if the results are publicly visible when they're not. I'm also opposed on principle to sites which require registration and (in theory if not in practice) log all of my interactions -- what I read and how I interact with it is very personal information and data. It's why I'm opposed to the idea of logging in to, say, read The New York Times. It's one of a very small number of sites I'd subscribe to, but even then I'd prefer to access it without logging in.

I've created throwaway accounts a few times to see if there's anything sufficiently worthwhile there. I'm largely convinced that 1) there's not and 2) the dynamics of the site work against it scaling or surviving.

So I'm not going to waste my time with it.

[khalidmbajwa]

As expected, i am getting downvoted because of my pro-quora stance. You clearly haven't spent much time on the site. The beauty of it is, that you can reach people, and ask questions who you normally can only dream of reaching.Nasa's engineers, Phd Doctors, Entrepreneurs, famous bloggers, Actors, filmmakers,World class athletes, they are all there. If you have a specific question , ask away. I once needed to find out how Gana.com the biggest music startup in india operated, i asked its CEO a question, and within a day i had a response. For all this amazing value, i dont see why taking a few minutes to register is such a big deal.

[dredmorbius]

Note that as the parent of your responses, I certainly can't downvote. And from the HN Guidelines: "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Regarding Quora: its behavior runs counter to good netizen behavior. Clearly, people have an issue with that, and among those people is Paul Graham (as several others have cited and referenced in the discussions over the past few days).

Regards who you can encounter on Quora: in my experience the level and quality of conversation reached on a clueful but open site tends to be generally higher. You'll find quite expert people on HN (I've run across Charlie Stross a few times), and I've been online long enough to have seen numerous highly-qualified participants on Usenet, Slashdot, reddit, and even G+ (there are still numerous techies there). President Obama is among those who've run reddit AMAs, and I'll routinely find very qualified people within various subreddits there.

And again: the conversations are visible to whomever wants to view them without restriction.

It's not the registration, it's the morality.