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What’s happening?

One week from today, it will no longer be possible to answer questions completely anonymously. Any existing answers will no longer be editable and any anonymous drafts will disappear.

Why is this change being made?

The main reason is that the reasons for which this feature existed no longer hold. There are legitimate reasons for answering questions anonymously. For example, there are answers that are politically sensitive, answers from people who don’t feel they have the freedom to reveal their knowledge and expertise in an area, and answers from those who worry about harassment if they answer under their real name. While we acknowledge that creating another account for this purpose can be annoying and will reduce the number of legitimate anonymous answers, it will also reduce the amount of policy-violating answers written, make it easier to prevent serial violators, and reduce the complexity of the product, which reduces bug risk and enables improvements to be made more quickly.

When will the changes take place?

The changes will be implemented in one week, giving those who have written anonymous answers time to edit their answers or save their drafts. No usernames will be associated with anonymous answers after the change and they will remain attributed to anonymous. As a reminder, anonymous answers can only be edited via the anonymous answer link that was generated at the time of writing an anonymous answer. Those links will redirect to the answer once the feature is removed and they will no longer be editable after the week elapses.

Who is affected by these changes?

Those who have written anonymous answers (less than 1% of you) are affected, as well as those who have received anonymous answers on their questions. Those of you unable to resist commenting on a policy-violating anonymous answer will no longer have the temptation. You’re welcome!

EDIT 2021–11–22 All the above changes have taken place & no more edits to anonymous questions are possible.

Profile photo for William Gunn
Former Head of Communications at Quora
Former Head of Communications at Quora (company)2021–2023
Studied at Tulane University
Lives in San Francisco Bay Area2013–present
5.7M content views66.6K this month
Active in 9 Spaces
Joined June 2010
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