Why don’t users fill in their bios on Quora?

A2A’d; and the answers already here are… old. Since the answers already here, we have also had the introduction of Quora Credentials, and we have had some pushing from Quora to populate them with reminders.

There’s a preponderance of opinion in answers to date that people don’t care about who’s writing the answer, just about the answer itself. It reflects the schism between people using Quora socially or as an expert forum (Reddit vs StackExchange): cf. Quora Compass by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency. Not caring about who wrote the answer is not a universally held belief, and it is held now less than it was in 2011, as Quora’s user base has broadened. Not caring about who wrote the answer is also not what Quora holds, as Quora has been pushing credentials more aggressively.

Why do people still not do it?

  • It’s work, that they don’t see immediate payoff in.
  • Lots of users resent credentialism.
  • Quora’s onboarding is minimal to nonexistent. (I only discovered a month after the new credentials that you could set years of employment.)

Why do I have to place an emphasis mark on some vowel in every Greek word on writing, even if the meaning might not even change if you just leave it?

Well there’s the simple reason, and there’s the historical justification for it.

The simple reason is: BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE RULES.

🙂

And if it were up to me, you’re not putting enough accents on Greek words. The blanket rule that all monosyllabic words are unstressed, whether they are function words or content words, does not correspond to how the language is actually spoken. And it was the kind of rule only a committee could come up with; it wasn’t the monotonic system that actual linguists like Kriaras had come up with.

Why?

Greek diacritics – Wikipedia

Ancient Greek had pitch accent, and did not write any of its accents down: it was tolerant of accentual ambiguity, whether in location or kind of accent. In fact, Ancient Greek was also not written with any spaces between words. Writing and reading were difficult, and not widely known skills.

When the pitch accents started shifting to stress accents, scholars started indicating the different kinds of accent and their location on words, so that Ancient poetry could be read properly. That gave rise to the polytonic accentual system (“many accents”), which was the only way to write Greek anywhere for the next two millennia.

Starting in the 19th century, there were spelling reform proposals to simplify the accentual system, which was recording pitch and breathing distinctions that had died out two millennia ago. There were occasionally atonic proposals (“no accents”), to do away with any indication of stress. But the majority of proposals were monotonic (“single accent”), and in 1982 that was the reform that prevailed, after being de facto in wide use for a decade.

Why monotonic and not atonic? Greeks will tell you that there are still words that differ according to where you place the accent; and that is true. But comic strips are written in all caps, and so are headlines; and Greeks have no problem reading them, with only very occasional use of accents as disambiguators (almost always Ή “or” vs Η “the”). You’ll also often see no accents used in texting.

The real reason is that completely removing accents was a step too far, for people who had been writing and read accents on every word all their lives.

Why did you think the Greek population disappeared so completely from Anatolia after the Ottoman conquest?

To clarify what this question is likely talking about:

We know that there was a continuous Greek presence in Thrace up to Constantinople, the Pontus (Black Sea), and Cappadocia, after the arrival of the Ottomans.

We know that there was a substantial Greek population in Western Asia Minor in the 19th century, which is linguistically distinct from Thrace, the Pontus, and Cappadocia: the dialect spoken in places like Smyrna was closer to Crete and the Cyclades.

We know that there was movement of Greek populations within the Ottoman Empire; we know for example that Bithynia was resettled from Epirus in the 17th century, and we know that the Tsakonian colony near Erdek/Artaki cannot have been indigenous, and likely dates from the 18th century.

We know that to the Ottomans, Christian and Muslim, ethnicity was not particularly important; religion was. “Greek population” would have been understood by everyone at the time to mean “Christian Orthodox population”.

So at issue is: whether the Christian population in Western Asia Minor disappeared, or remained continuous: whether that population entirely represents resettlement from Greece, or whether a Christian population remained in place in Western Asia Minor in the 15th century.

This is a topic Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I have disagreed on, and unlike me, she has read the mainstream tract outlining the theory of discontinuity, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, and found it unconvincing.

If the population was discontinuous, and that’s how I’m interpreting the question, the answer is assimilation. The Greeks of Western Asia Minor weren’t massacred, they were converted to Islam. That there was conversion is known to be true; the debate is really whether there were any Christians left in Western Asia Minor in 1500 or not.

Presumably Thrace and the Pontus held out because they were conquered later, once the Millet system was in place, so there was less social pressure for conversion; and Cappadocia presumably was relatively inaccessible.

What does the suffix “ostomy” mean?

stoma is Greek for mouth.

stomia is stoma plus an abstract noun ending: “-mouth-ation”.

In medicine, a Stoma (medicine) is also a surgically made opening. So a colostomy is a surgical intervention creating an opening (a stoma, a “mouth”) in the colon: kōlo-stom-ia > colostomy, “colon-mouth-ation”. The Wikipedia article gives 16 other stoma operations.

The -o- is not part of any suffix: it’s how Greek connects words together in a compound.

Is there a way to resubmit a Quora appeal if Moderation hasn’t seen it?

Of course, Quora doesn’t have a publicly visible ticketing system, so we can’t tell if an appeal has been ignored, or not updated. The case OP refers to, where a collapsed answer has been edited, could be such a case. My own experience is that when I’ve edited the answer it was promptly uncollapsed, but that may well be luck.

The formal appeal avenues are in Quora’s answer to How do I appeal a Quora Moderation decision? I would suggest that if the collapsed answer Appeal link is no longer available, because you’ve actioned the request, but the answer is still collapsed, that you use the generic appeal avenue—go to the contact form, specify the URL of the page, and give the details that the answer has been edited to conform but is still collapsed. Give them a few days beforehand.

Is Quora still a site about knowledge with so many questions about your favorite selfie?

Yes. It’s just not exclusively a site about Knowledge. It’s a site about the stuff its various users want to know about. Some of them want to know about selfies.

Don’t complain that people are writing stuff you don’t like: they will keep doing so. Curate your own feed, to see less of what you don’t want. Upvote, downvote, mute, subscribe.