I'm not a big fan of Question and Answer websites that block answers in a bid to get more people signing up. The Internet thrives on people who seek answers to the questions they have, and this is one of the founding reasons for the creation of the network. It's a means of communication and sharing, after all! The thing that bugs me the most, though, is that people signed up of their own volition to answer the question. Why should the website try and be the gatekeeper of another person's work?
This ran through my head today as I did a quick Google search for Evernote's competition and spotted a question on Quora which, next to StackOverflow, is one of the most trusted sources of information when it comes to technology-related questions and answers. This is what I saw:
Lots of blurred text. There's even more below the fold. Not every answer is blocked ... just the longer, more detailed ones. It's annoying as heck. That said the fuzziness is, for the most part, a fool's attempt at keeping people from reading the answer. Here is the rest of what Stephen Newton has to say:
I understand that Quora is using the rest of the answer to provide a realistic fuzzing out of the text, but why include the real text behind the JavaScript? Slap some basic cyphering on there and turn it into jibberish that is based on the real text or something! People will still see something that looks real, but it will be completely useless for anyone who has the time to look at the source of the page (with Browser Tools or something like it) or a quick browser plugin.
Alas ...
