How has your experience with Quora changed as you’ve acquired more followers?

Thank you again, Habib le toubib, for a thought provoking question about my experience here. I don’t want to spend all my time answering Questions about Quora on Quora, but you really do get to the nub with these.

I was touched to see people close to me answering this, and having an experience pretty close to mine. Sam Murray, John Gragson, Michael Masiello, Clarissa Lohr, Kittie Eubank, Jordan Yates, Michael Koeberg, Habib Fanny, McKayla Kennedy, Heather Jedrus, Elke Weiss, Yonatan Gershon. It’s like one of those “I love youse all” cartoons I keep drawing (with some future members).

A lot of what I’ll say will overlap, but this is a survey question.

  • Like the Magister said, I no longer differentiate my new followers; I’m sorry, there are already too many of them. I feel bad about that, but it is what it is.
  • I have become extremely picky now about following new people. I want to keep it to a manageable size: I can’t keep it as low as the Right number determined through primate research (150, as Michaelis Maus has pointed out somewhere), but I am trying to get not too far above 300.
    • Jordan commented somewhere that she spends a minute, when she gets followed by someone new, to see if they’re worth following back. I used to spend that amount of time, when I read that answer by her: read some answers, check their tenor. Not any more. It’s 5 seconds now: topics I care about? No? Next.
    • If you keep upvoting me and commenting at me, I will notice you. But not at the outset. I’m sorry.
  • The intimacy has gone, as others have noted too. I am interacting with a much broader range of people, and I’m happy to. But I miss the time when it was just three middle aged Hellenophiles against the world 🙂 .
  • My post It feels hollower by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile was mostly about how disgusted I was at how Sierra Spaulding had been treated here. But I alluded to something else in it: the start of me becoming “popular”, and how it felt like selling out.

Quora has been even less the same for me this past month, as the two voices I have come to cherish the most here, Michael Masiello’s and Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s, have been stilled—Dimitra because she actually has stuff in real life to deal with, Michael because he was shut down, and so were his friends.

To be brutal, having my friends out of my feed has allowed me to connect with new voices; the feed is harsh like that. But it hasn’t felt the same for me. I mean no insult to those I’ve started following the past month; there’s a reason I have, and I look forward to getting to know them even better. But it feels hollower for me here.

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