I have the same issue with Quora. Makes me sad every time I go there and find useful info, but feel pushed away. Dropbox also does similar -- in fact they broke all their old direct public links, so that you can use their new "sharing" dialog, so that they can spam the recipient to get a Dropbox account. Sigh.

Worry not, I'm slowly assembling a massive Quora WARC file of all of the posts uncensored by the login wall (for cold storage). The moment they're out of business, a magnet torrent will be provided.

Is this the explanation for your account name? ;-)

Actually, it is!

I'm notorious for taking on too many projects. Time to sleep when I'm dead.

Seems like kind of a paradox. Too much to do, so you'll sleep when you're dead. But sleep deprivation will kill you, so you won't be able to finish all those things that are keeping you busy. :)

I always get eight hours of sleep ;) if a project exceeds my time availability, and cannot be automated, I delegate, even if it requires paying out of my pocket.

Thats way more than my usual 4-6 :-)

I guess I should but I also love to have some time alone before the rest of my family wakes up (and before people turn up at work).

Thanks for doing this! There are so many people putting so much effort in writing detailed Quora answers on such a wide range of topics. All of that content disappearing whenever Quora inevitably shuts down/gets acquired would be akin to a library burning down.

Would you mind sharing your spider technology stack. How do you find new urls efficiently? What spider and what storage do you use? Do you append everything in one WARC file and split it if it gets too big?

Can you add ?share=1 to your spider to get all Quora's content?

That's what I do.

Sounds like someone who is trying to drive the price of Pinterest down for future acquisition.

I am more annoyed they pollute too many searches I make, there are a few sites which I would love to permanently exclude from searching and this is number one

Yeah, I always search with -site:pinterest.* (text so the star after the dot is not parsed).

Yeah, it really strikes me as unnecessary. Get me interested in using the site, and I'll willingly and happily create an account. Make me feel like my arm is being twisted for no good reason, and I'll walk (or run) away.

The only explanation I can think of for required login is that their primary performance metric (eg to investors) is monthly actives and they're worried that anonymous flyby visitors will muck up their numbers.

I don't know why they can't carry on doing just what they do now. Keep the servers going, apply security updates, do backups, etc. But why do they need new features?

This constant need to grow really irks me.

They could. They should get to $1-$2 billion in sales and print a Facebook-like margin at 30% net income margins by keeping operations as slim as possible. Decent growth, 40 PE with a public listing (for however long this market stays up), $300m in net income on $1.2 billion in sales, $12 billion market cap. That'd be a real, sustainable business.

That's what Twitter should have done as well. Pinterest won't do it, for the same exact reason Twitter didn't, making the same business mistake with predictable consequences. They all want to be the next goliath and none of them are going to be (and when that reality sets in, they all become reactionaries under pressure from a dozen angles, working from a position of weakness).

Yes, compare this response to Craigslist. The latter is downright successful, dominating and print money for everyone involved.

what do you think is the reason that twitter/pinterest didn't/won't run a lean operation, and why did they choose that path?

There are two types of growth, one that should irk, and the other that should not:

1) Growing for the sake of growth - buying users, anti-user lock-in features, dark patterns, etc.

2) Growing as technology improves - the cost of creating/publishing videos has decline massively in the last few years for the average user, thus products that utilize video to create better experiences should be built.

Because they took a lot of VC money.

"Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard."

2026: Pinboard acquires Pinterest