Quora and "Digital Lurking"

Quora have made an "interesting" decision - Liz Gannes on AllThingsD:

Quora today is introducing a feature that shows which of its users have read each Quora post, and how they found it. It’s another move by a social Web service to share passive activities, making the simple act of looking at a page on Quora something that other people can easily trace. “Views” is meant to make Quora more lively — users will now see real-time trending stories in their Quora feeds when multiple people they’re following have viewed a story.

It seems - at first glance - to be an easy way to annoy a lot of people with no real benefit - so why are the doing it?. Quora has some fairly sensitive subject areas, I'm not sure everyone wants to be seen to be cruising those boards. Also, this doesn't tell you who actually read it, ony whose cookie it was. It's not just them by the way, quite a few of the Social Nets we love are al rying to put an end to "online lurking" (which sounds a bit weighted - can we use the word "anonymity" instead?). Apparently Quara don't like pseudonyms either, in common with Facebook.

Quora exec Marc Bodnick said that the Views project is part of a larger effort to help Quora content creators get broader distribution. Views gives the authors better insight into how their contributions are spread.

“People on Quora are writing to be read,” Bodnick said. “What we’re telling you is that Quora is a distribution mechanism that works.”

But you don't need to display who browsed a piece to all and sundry, merely so authors can see who read their stuff. You just make it visible to authors only, so that can't be the reason, surely? I can see why power-writers will like it, but they are a small minority on any social network.You can disable it, but I have in the past been amazed at how much inertia people show to opting out of privacy reducing tools, and how little care some people have for their own privacy. But I still can't see how this is a great leap forward, and the risks to me seem to outweigh the benefits.

One for us "Digital Lurkers" to watch....