Category: Uncategorized

Because there was a perception 50 years ago that Italians were dirtier than Northern Europeans. They may not be saying that now, but there is still stereotyping between parts of Europe, and the claims that this saying is impossible ring hollow to me.

I don’t have a smoking gun of someone saying it; but I do have a smoking gun of someone expressing the sentiment. That someone was Greek, and in fact, he was expressing annoyance at how clean Austria was compared to Italy.

Nikos Tsiforos. Gulliver in the land of the Giants (humorous travelogue through Central Europe). 1967. p. 12.

Why does everything have to be so clean? A Southerner will never understand this. Over in Tarvisio, ten Italian paces from here [Arnoldstein], there’s waste paper, filth, dust, leftovers from horse and cow hindquarters. Tourism pleads: “keep the area clean!”, but noone pays any attention—except for the pine trees, who are law-abiding citizens when they’re up on the mountaintops. Here in Arnoldstein, it’s as if they’ve made 300,000 Austrians lick the road clean. There’s not one piece of rubbish. Austria should be ashamed of how clean it is.

He says pretty much the same crossing the Swiss border into Italy at Valpelline.

Alfredo Perozo said in a comment on the previous post:

I can learn to live with the trolls, the conspiracy theorists, QCR, the anonymous OPs, the glitches, the bugs, the daily outages, the imbecilic UI changes, everything. But I can’t stand the peacocks.

This, I’m seeing from comments, is a very common sentiment among the readers of this blog.

And yet, I had a long discussion with Jennifer Edeburn about whether that last post defining Peacocks was BNBR, and that prejudice against them was a snobbery, that Quora could have no part of.

There’s been a lot of discussion in comments of why Quora welcomes Peacocks; and I note that Alecia Li Morgan has been articulating a cogent defence, in Why brands should be writing on Quora by Alecia Li Morgan on Quora for Business, of why Quora welcomes answers from businesses.

So I’m going to ruminate through why we don’t like Peacocks (those of us that don’t), and why that can’t matter to Quora.

(And here, I’m going to start reducing “we” from “we who use Quora” to “we who don’t like Peacocks”. Part of the point of what I’m saying is, the latter is a small subset of the former.)

There is abiding confusion on what Quora is for. The mission statement is extremely vague, and Quora’s own interpretation of what it’s about seems to have morphed several times since the beginning, when its hubris was untenable. Mills Baker has admitted that Quora has done a poor job of explaining its mission, although his own attempt was even less clear.

So we’ve made our own sense of what Quora is for. There are clear clefts in the community on what it’s for. Quora is not a debate site. The best of Quora is in the comments. Quora is for hard knowledge. Quora is for opinion.

But there’s a notion that Quora is for smart people. A notion that Peacocks themselves capitalise on: “a community for intellectuals to voice their opinions.”

So. What kind of a site do smart people think they want, and that they don’t think Peacocks belong in?

Smart people, I’ll guess from self-serving introspection, want a forum where they can further knowledge, in discourse with other smart people.

And what kind of knowledge do they value?

Not puppies and cat videos. Weighty knowledge. Verifiable knowledge. Well-argued knowledge. Knowledge provided disinterestedly. Knowledge provided for the joy of it and the sake of it. Knowledge provided by peers.

You can see why that definition of knowledge runs counter to Peacocks or Businesses. The knowledge they provide is not disinterested. It is provided with ulterior motives. It is, by common intellectual criteria, frivolous, not argued, and not open to verification. It does not come across as a peer activity.

Sure. That’s my notion of what Quora’s for.

That can’t be what Quora’s notion of knowledge is restricted to.

First, because the restrictions Quora used to impose at the beginning were much narrower, and many of us would resent them. All Venture Capital and coding, all the time. No meta discussion of Quora. No humanities (an imbalance that is probably still reflected in the distribution of quills). Not that much socialising. If you read the early StackExchange reactions to Quora, it’s dismissed as fluff; we are choosing not to be on StackExchange instead of Quora.

Second, because clearly, there’s an audience for Life Advice and Relationships, though those topics, too, were initially avoided by Quora. There are people that want answers to their questions there. We could say that their questions are less worthy than the questions we take interest in; but how would we draw a line that would exclude half the people we know here? And after all, don’t people deserve advice on what do in their lives, from a site that advances all kinds of knowledge?

And the Peacocks get upvotes there. Massive upvotes, and appreciative comments. There’s an audience for what they have to say. We can think that the advice the Peacocks give is self-serving and facile; we can think that there’s better advice to be had. Some of us, after all, even offer it. But if the Peacocks get the upvotes, that means that what they are saying is being valued by a lot of people, even if not by us.

And in this postmodern time of truthiness, I don’t know of a definition of knowledge to be furthered through Quora, that excludes Peacocks, and doesn’t exclude half of what we value (since we’re not on Wikipedia or StackExchange).

We don’t have to interact with Peacocks, or Businesses. But I’m having difficulty how that can be anything more than an individual choice, rather than a site-wide alignment.

Same goes for the fact that Peacocks get Quills. Lots of people get Quills, promoting lots of different kinds of knowledge, and lots of different aims of Quora. I’d assume that those Peacocks that get the Quill get it for how responsive their content is to the querents that they’re addressing (even if they aren’t us), and that they don’t get it because of how effectively they promote themselves. If the call is made that they do, well, good for Quora; that furthers Quora’s goals, after all. That’s all the Quill is about. Furthering Quora’s goals, of satisfying querents and attracting eyeballs; and Quora gets a lot of different eyeballs.

The good news is, the Quora feed sequesters us into the niches we prefer to sit in. Maxwell’s dens and hollows. I think we have good reasons why we dislike the Peacocks’ content and why we think they write it. And they’re our reasons, not everyone’s. And Quora isn’t just for us.

And… I guess I’ll just go back to my hollow now…

I will be assembling a list of the names and terms I make up and keep using to talk about Quora. I like assembling my own personal mythologies; but that does get in the way of communication.

One of the terms you may well have seen me use recently is Peacocks. The term describes the union of “life coach” types and “personal branding” types, who seem to use Quora primarily to enhance their commercial social media presence, and whose contributions to Quora are primarily platitudes and anecdotes of how to live life to the fullest, like them.

I was startled to discover one such, advertising how to game Quora metrics, and I named him here. I got a Benburr for that (oh, that’s another glossary term), and I deserved it.

Because I was sanctioned, I held back from reposting Robert Maxwell’s tirade against that kind of person in comments. But it does not name anyone, and it is actually a critique and not just a rant. And since it was the genesis of the term, and a magnificently written piece of prose, I’m now choosing to elevate it to a post.

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https://insurgency.quora.com/How…

I went to university with a bunch of these marketing/growth gurus—they were wannabes at the time—and, well, let’s say my personal opinion of them would strongly cross the BNBR line. The terminology is spot on—”thought leadership,” for instance. I think of this sort of thing and feel my bile rise on some atavistic instinct, an in-born genetic memory on par with how elephants find graveyards and retirees find Florida. Perhaps, in some dark corner of my ancestry, Glug went on about referral metrics until half the tribe got eaten by a sabretooth.

That said, this is a symptom, and, as much as we might tell ourselves that this is a Quora we don’t inhabit, I sometimes worry it may be the other way around. Quora has long since been the preserve of marketing, PR, startups and that entire ecosystem of preening peacockery that puts one in mind of Hunter S. Thompson’s comments on used car dealers from Dallas chasing the American Dream in the predawn chaos of a stale Las Vegas casino. Even in the early days, those topics dominated.

Another comment asks if we remember the time when people didn’t have to promote themselves on Quora—I think people always did, if, perhaps, more naively, and more narrowly. But now the hucksters have figured out the system, as they do.

Instead, we’ve dug down and built dens and hollows in the earth, showed each other the tunnels and mistaken it for the surface. And when one of the peacocks manages to peck into the tunnel, we shudder and tell ourselves that it’s not of this world. It’d be too terrifying, otherwise.

This is obscure. But Quora is a stamping ground for me to pass on anecdotes.

This anecdote involves one of the doyens of Mediaeval and Modern Greek Studies in Fair Albion, Professor Geoff Horrocks.

Author of the most authoritative English-language summary of the history of Greek there is:

That’s the second edition cover. The first edition cover is to my mind more accurate, and I loved the look on classicists’ faces when they saw it:

Anyway, the anecdote takes place a couple of years before he published the first edition. The Second International Conference on Greek Linguistics was being held in Salzburg, in 1995. The conference had a couple of Russians, a few Anglos, two Dutch-speakers (one of them Flemish), and a gajillion voluble Greeks. And your humble correspondent was present, too; in fact, I got a paper published in the proceedings.

Towards the end of the conference, Khorox (as the Greeks present all pronounced him) thought it might be a good idea to moot the formation of a professional association of Greek Linguistics.

Oh, Khorox, that was not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. The lecture theatre instantly got consumed by polemics of Athens Uni vs Salonica Uni. (There is a longstanding ideological dispute between the two departments—but of course there is an even longer standing dispute between the two cities.) Me and Helma the Dutch speaker just sat at the back of the lecture theatre, chuckling at the rich cavalcade of histrionics.

After maybe a half hour of this, Khorox stands up and says, “can we please try and arrive at some consensus before Doomsday!”

The Grecian ears ignored him, and kept on duking out Athens vs Salonica: The Grudgefest. My antipodean ears were more finely attuned, and so were Helma’s: we just looked at each other and blinked. That was pretty much the British equivalent of Khorox grabbing a baseball bat and going postal.

In a roomful of Athens vs Salonica: The Grudgefest, though, it was hardly noticed…

I was living in Orange County, and I’d already decided to quit my job; I was leaving to come back to Australia in two months. It was a hermetic, unpleasant work environment, and I was already not on speaking terms with my colleagues—over some inconceivably unreal pique.

I tended to sleep in; I still do. I was roused at 7 am, rather earlier than usual, by a phone call from my mother.

—Nick! Turn on the TV! Some planes hit a building in New York!

—… Wha? What are you bothering me with that for? Go away.

I hung up, and blearily turned on the TV.

I stayed pinned to the TV for the next six hours. And while the fourth plane’s whereabouts were unknown, I was convinced that it was heading straight for my head.

I tried calling a friend in upstate New York; I didn’t even bother trying to call my friend in Manhattan. I didn’t get through to upstate New York. (I did get through to my friend in Manhattan some days later. He knew what was coming next, and he sang me peace songs on the phone, in a hushed voice.)

I ended up at work in the afternoon, but not a lot of work got done that day. Or the next. And of course, noone bothered with not being on speaking terms any more.

People walked around in shock that day, and the next few weeks. People were walking on egg shells. People were extra polite and solicitous. There was an upsurge of American flags on cars, but it did not feel tubthumping and jingoist at the time.

The yellow triangle is because Quora’s Credential Bot thinks your credential is not serious or helpful or whatever else the Quora Credential Bot thinks. You should be getting a warning message on the Credential:

The Quora Credential Bot doesn’t notify you that it doesn’t like your credential; it just preemptively hides it, and users typically end up stumbling on this alert. Especially confusing, when it applies to bios that predated the introduction of Credentials (Show your expertise with credentials by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates). The yellow triangle is only visible by you, since it is an indication that Quora is suppressing that credential, and picking some other credential out of your list.

See many related questions, such as

• Why are my Quora credentials hidden and why do they keep needing editing and improving?
• Why, after two years, has Quora Moderation decided one of my credentials “needs editing to be helpful to readers”?
• Why does Quora keep saying that my credentials need editing, even though it already asked me where I live?
• Why is Quora saying that I need to edit my credential?
• I have had to delete my “Credentials” on Quora, because Quora keeps picking the wrong ones for the category the question came from. Why the change?

And then, for jollies, read the Quora design team’s post mortem on how the new Credentials rollout went:

Designing Your Own Metrics by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Design

This metric represented our goal much more clearly than counting the total number of added bios did, and in fact, when we tested the entire Credentials package towards the end of the project, we got less total Bios but more helpful Bios compared to the previous system.

See? It worked! Success! Sure, a whole bunch of people opted out of using bios, and a whole bunch of people had their existing bios rejected by the Credential Bot, and a whole bunch of people kept editing their bios to placate the Credential Bot unsuccessfully. But the remaining credentials were much much more helpful than before!

I’ve been recently forwarded one of these.

Even unto their bans, Quora Moderation is not specific.

May none of you, esteemed readers, ever see this in your mailboxes.

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XXXXX (Quora)

[fill in date-time here] PDT

Hi [fill in user first name here],

Quora believes that all members of the community should make an effort to contribute helpful content to the community and, ultimately, make the site a better resource for all.

The following are some of the reasons for which we will ban an account:

• They vandalize content on the site that is editable by everyone, including questions (https://www.quora.com/What-is-Qu…) and answer summaries.
• They engage in one or more actions which violate the Be Nice, Be Respectful policy (https://www.quora.com/What-are-Quoras-two-key-policy-principles). These actions may relate to questions, answers, or comments.
• They post a significant number of questions (https://www.quora.com/What-kind-…), answers (https://www.quora.com/Why-are-answers-and-reviews-on-Quora-collapsed), and/or comments that aren’t helpful.
• They repeatedly violate Quora policies (https://www.quora.com/What-are-major-policies-and-guidelines-on-Quora) and/or do not change their behavior after receiving a content warning.
• The account is linked to suspicious and/or malicious activity.

After reviewing your activity on Quora, we’ve determined that you violated one or more of the reasons stated above. Unfortunately, the ban on your account will not be overturned. This decision is final, and you will no longer be able to use Quora.

Sincerely,

XXXXX
User Operations
Quora

• L

Profile bio:

I’m gone for a while.

Jackson Mohsenin’s answer to Who designed the new Quora “Improve Your Feed” feature?

I did, along with feedback from the rest of the team.

Well the early reviews sure weren’t positive:

What does Quora expect to accomplish with the new “Improve Your Feed” feature?

Has any Quora feature ever inspired more Rage Against Quora than the “Improve Your Feed” feature?

This was something rolled out in 2014, and I suspect from the descriptions that people just got used to it, as a way of making Quora a little more like other Social Media.

The work of the Quora Design Team is much lampooned by its long-suffering users, formerly at Rage Against Quora, nowadays at Bug? or Feature? The lesson from this feature, formerly loathed and now taken for granted, could be that Quora Design should ignore all the brickbats, plough on with its clear mission for how to mould the UX to Quora’s purposes, and like Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Of course, the problem with that is, sometimes you don’t win, and sometimes they’re right to laugh at you. But it’s a walled garden, and the Quora Design Team will contort it and A/B test it and put up urine-coloured notification windows (Why are my Quora notifications yellow?, So, it’s turned to yellow now – the notification background. by Kathleen Grace on Bug? or Feature?) as often as it sees fit.

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So why am I, noted Quora critic and all-round complainer, going back to this ancient history from 2014?

Because I randomly saw this question, and wanted to say the following.

If you think work from an organisation is faulty, you don’t blame the worker. And if you think work is praiseworthy, you don’t praise the worker. It’s work for hire. The corporate responsibility lies with the organisation. And with whoever authorised it. That’s where the buck stops.

Improve Your Feed may have been as stupid as pee-coloured notifications, or it may have been as genius as the hashtag. But there’s no point singling out Jackson for it. Jackson does not own Quora. Jackson did work for hire, that someone else authorised, and someone else approved.

Keen observers of Quora may recall at this point that Quora prides itself on putting nothing in the way of the designer deploying to production, apart from unit tests: no marketer, no integration analyst, no BA, no PM, no nothing stops the designer from deploying pee-coloured notifications to the whole site in 8 minutes.

True. You still don’t get to single out Jackson. Because the whole “nothing gets in the way of deployment” wasn’t Jackson’s idea either.

You don’t even get to go up the food chain, and look quizzically at Mills Baker, or Rebekah Cox, or David Cole, or whoever else was running Quora Design.

Whether genius or idiocy, the whole instadeploy thing, and the structures set up to enable it, were signed off by D’Angelo. The changes in direction of UX, inasmuch as we can discern direction, is signed off by D’Angelo. If we are having difficulty discerning direction in UX, that too is signed off by D’Angelo.

And whether criticisms of Improve Your Feed from users were being directed to Jackson, Rebekah, David, Adam, the New York Times, or /dev/null—that decision too is signed off by D’Angelo.

Whatever comes in to an organisation, whatever comes out of an organisation: at the end of the day, the organisation’s leadership is responsible for it.

Normally I wouldn’t wade in to such a question, but there are eight answers here, and none of them are by people who accept the premiss of the question, the Intercession of saints. Thank you for volunteering the opinion that all Catholic and Orthodox Christians are idolaters, Protestant and Muslim respondents, but clearly that’s not much of a answer.

And OK, I don’t personally accept the premiss of the question either, because I am an atheist. But being culturally Orthodox: I could do worse than appeal to my namesake, Saint Nicholas of Myra. Your namesake saint is supposed to have a special stake in your wellbeing. I’m not necessarily down with the fact that he supposedly slapped Arius in the face in the First Council of Nicaea; but at least he showed up to Nicaea. And at least we can be sure he existed, unlike some Orthodox saints (I’m looking at you, St Phanourios.)

And he’s not Santa Claus to me. That’s a Western, beef-eater notion. The gift guy to the Greeks is St Basil; Nicholas is the mariner guy:

Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers and students in various cities and countries around Europe.

This is the statue the Russian Government paid for to be put up at his church in Demre (ancient Myra):

Μεγάλη η χάρη του “Great be his grace”. You can see this guy slapping a theological opponent.

This is the Noel Baba sculpture that the local mayor replaced St Nicholas’ statue with:

OK, no pot belly, no Coke ads, and definitely no Ho Ho Ho; but that still ain’t my St Nicholas (Great be his grace).