Question-and-answer service Quora has changed the way it displays information on users' activity after a flood of complaints about the site's recently-introduced Views feature. When a user views a post, this action will no longer show up in other users' news feeds but views will still be displayed on post pages themselves. The site will continue to exclude adult content and searches from public display and users will still have the option of turning off Views entirely.

"While many were really interested in these new stories, we also got a lot of feedback that people weren't comfortable having what they viewed shared broadly with people following them," writes product manager Sandra Liu Huang in a post on the official Quora blog. This may be something of an understatement — the change, made at the beginning of this month, caused a storm of angry tweets and editorials, and threatened to damage the site's credibility with users.

Founded by two former Facebook employees in 2009, Quora's moves are likely being monitored closely by the larger social network, which has been trialling similar functionality for some time. Earlier this week, Facebook introduced read receipts for Groups, letting users know when their messages have been seen.