[elpachuco]

Maybe use the same solution as Hacker News: Allow users for a limited time to make changes, even delete their answers. Once that time expires make the question accessible to the wayback machine crawlers.

Other than that if users don't want to be associated with something they said in the past to an audience, maybe they shouldn't be saying it at all.

[georgemcbay]

"maybe they shouldn't be saying it at all."

I agree with you in the general case (as a 41 year old). But as someone who was once a stupid teenager, I sure am glad that while I used the Internet back then most of the stupid things I said on it were/are pseudo-anonymized behind "handles", which is something that is far more difficult to do these days.

(Not sure how much this applies to Quora, though).

[yuhong]

Personally, I have been always using my real name and has been for years, even when I was making mistakes years ago, and will still do so in the future. I believe these problems needs to be fixed properly.

[Shog9]

I know someone whose Quora account was disabled a while back because he refused to use his "real name".

No idea if they still have that policy; my own account is evidence that they don't enforce it across the board (and really how could they?), but if it's still nominally in place then that leaves active users forced to choose between using a pseudonym (and living in fear that access to their account will be stripped from them) or using a name that can potentially be used to identify them in other contexts (and living in fear that being candid will come back to bite them later in life).

Not a particularly good decision to force on someone, IMHO - even if you do promise them an "out" by letting them retroactively self-censor.

[thomasfoster96]

They still have that policy. There have certainly been issues with it because there are international users (Quora still struggles to cater for users outside US/UK/Australia, though their recent efforts to connect with Indian users are going well) who might have a 'western name' and 'transliterated' name, and the policy sort of breaks down.

I suppose Quora thinks that anonymity will be good enough, but pseudonyms might prove to better in 90% of cases. I think that probably 9 out of 10 uses of anonymity that I've seen on Quora weren't really necessary.

[sytelus]

HN policy is as worse it gets among discussion sites. If you didn't deleted it within 24 hrs, everything you wrote here is stuck forever with no recourse for taking it down. I always wondered why this is the case. Is implementing delete is that hard? After all this is hacker news.