I do actually answer questions on Quora on occasion; I haven't paid much attention to the "historical record" issues in the past.
But my quick thought here is that any time a company claims to be doing something detrimental to the outside world "on behalf of our users", it's worth checking if they've consulted their users about this, and if the users can opt out.
I can see the value in keeping control over what permanent, external caches are allowed to archive Quora content, for some users in particular. That said -- I don't care if my answers are archived, and I do care about contributing to a knowledge store that won't be lost in X years when Quora's business model doesn't quite line up with the vagaries of the economy.
What about supporting two views of the site -- one (with a "/pub/" added to the base URL, perhaps) that's archivable and displays only answers from users that have granted that permission in their profile, and the standard URL that shows all responses and blocks archiving in robots.txt.
That's not technically difficult at all, but I haven't seen any discussion of this sort of option.
But my quick thought here is that any time a company claims to be doing something detrimental to the outside world "on behalf of our users", it's worth checking if they've consulted their users about this, and if the users can opt out.
I can see the value in keeping control over what permanent, external caches are allowed to archive Quora content, for some users in particular. That said -- I don't care if my answers are archived, and I do care about contributing to a knowledge store that won't be lost in X years when Quora's business model doesn't quite line up with the vagaries of the economy.
What about supporting two views of the site -- one (with a "/pub/" added to the base URL, perhaps) that's archivable and displays only answers from users that have granted that permission in their profile, and the standard URL that shows all responses and blocks archiving in robots.txt.
That's not technically difficult at all, but I haven't seen any discussion of this sort of option.