Quora is the dumbest shit ever. They send out these readers digest emails with interesting questions and shit and when you click on them they take you the freaking homepage every time. Like wtf is even the point of sending me the email than if you're gonna make it incredible difficult for me to find that particular question that i really need answered now?!
As a non-US based user, I uninstalled Amazon's iOS app yesterday because of this exact behaviour. Often a US-only deal will get posted on a local forum here in New Zealand. The link for the deal will go to the Amazon US store. If you click that link without the app, you are taken straight to the listing where you can review the price, shipping options etc.
However, if you have the iOS app installed, it opens the app when you click the link, loops twice (never loads the listing) and lands you on the Amazon US homepage. I've tried everything to stop this behaviour (changing regions, loading in logged out state etc), but to no avail.
It finally frustrated me so much yesterday (especially in the lead up to black friday) that I outright deleted the app to stop those links being captured by the native application.
It feels so liberating to click a link and get the desired result.
Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but nowhere near the team that builds the iOS app.
My experience as a user of the Amazon iOS app is that the developers deeply care about these kinds of quality issues. I have seen the looping behavior before in other contexts; I reported it, and it was eventually fixed.
In the app there is a customer service link in the hamburger menu, with a “contact us” option if you’re willing to spend a couple of minutes telling them about your problem.
This irritates me to no end, however, the Quora is that one email digest that has an extremely high CTR for me: I often click on 5-7 entries from each digest because they send me stuff I'm actually interested in. No other email digest or newsletter comes even remotely close.
However, that stupid popup of their or suggestion to install an app is beyond bad.
Quora is far from being the best Q&A system ever (the best was Aardvark, bought and killed by Google) but it provides many interesting clues today. I've found quite a lot of very useful and rather unique information there. It seemed quite dead back in the days I've first tried it (looking for something to replace Aardvark) as nobody would answer my questions but the things seem very different today.
Aah, Aardvark. I answered a few questions on that system, but after a while I felt I was just serving idiots who were too lazy to google the questions.
I enjoyed being one of such idiots and answering other idiots like that. Because I strongly prefer unmoderated, marketing-free opinionated answers based on personal experience/knowledge and expressed in a concise manner to raw web data. I don't even mind googling some details to come up with a clean answer for the others. That's a kind of community I'd love to participate in.
In fact, even when somebody submits a completely just-google-it question you can answer comprehensively by just looking at Wikipedia or the first ling in the search results or something everybody is supposed to know it doesn't irritate me, whenever I can provide a useful answer to somebody's question it floods my brain with dopamine and serotonin so an easy question is just an opportunity to get the reward easily.
Whatever (from a sophisticated scientific question to a rhetoric question/joke) I would ask on Aardvark I would almost immediately receive an interesting answer (better than those you usually find on Quora) to and some more answers during the following hours. That felt so cool. Then my imagination has ran out of questions and then Aardvrk got terminated. Now I know and so much more things and gave so many new questions but there is no Aardvark any more :-(
I actually read their digest on a daily basis, and used to be confused by this as well. My observation is that each link in the digest actually points to an answer of a particular question. When you click on it, it looks like you arrive at the home page, but the page will show "From Your Digest" at the top so you can actually read the answer. You can then click on the question to read all the answers.
It's annoying because if you open a bunch of these links in the background, you would not be happy if your browser crashes, because then you lose all the links.
It's not just Quora, I think about half of notifications, whether by email or on mobile, don't take you to the thing you're being notified of.
Or they insist on sending redundant notifications. Or there's a mysterious number and no way to see that actual notifications. Or the notifications won't go away. Or the notifications go away instantly. Or, naturally, the notifications are abused for spam.
As to why... I think it's one of those features that tends to get neglected, and because users are way too forgiving of broken software.
Not for me. When I click on a link in their digest, it takes me to that question from the digest, with under it a button that expands to the other questions from that digest.
But this is the regular desktop version of their site. Whenever I link of a link in their digest on my phone, their website is a completely unusable piece of crap. None of the buttons work, most of the content is empty.
Lol, that's a pretty good strategy to get people to come back to your site without having to generate new content. Just create(or scrape) some interesting sounding headlines for articles that don't exist and just link to the homepage. ;)
> wtf is even the point of sending me the email than if you're gonna make it incredible difficult for me to find that particular question that i really need answered now?!
