[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.