Amusingly the hipster SV-startup is doing it even worse than the venerable expert-sexchange (on the latter you can at least scroll down to see the unblurred content).

And to add insult to injury quora-accounts are free anyway. Why do they strong-arm users into creating what will ultimately be 99,9% throwaway accounts?

They ask your FB account to "confirm" who you are if you want to interact (view is still free for throwaway email), not just e-mail. Of course the FB account can be a throwaway as well :).

I don't think that was always the case. I joined Quora very early, and I have never had an account on theFacebook.

I did, however, recently delete my Quora account after I didn't like what they were doing with privacy (Lack thereof)

I haven't been back, and while I thought there was some good conversations - the UX at Quora is atrocious. I had a hard time sort wheat from chaff in their feed, the visual differentiation between textual elements in the feed emphasized the wrong stuff. Their mobile view, desktop view and native mobile client view all had separate experiences ad visually didn't match.

There are a lot more things I can say about the UX/UI - but in the end, I am happy I deleted my account.

The blurring had previously been achieved with css rules (easily disabled). Interestingly, now they've escalated to serving blurred images of paragraphs. Unless there's some serious black-hat SEO going on, they're now letting each question's single unblurred answer provide the entirety of the page's indexable content. They're willing to sacrifice organic search result placement for the blur-wall.