Month: September 2016

Quora,

1. COMMUNICATE!
2. Try BNBR towards your own users

The modbots now communicate back to reporters about how many reports they have actioned. That is a start.

Provide rationales for why a moderation action has been taken. The mod hammer is now unpredictable and opaque: people have no idea what they have fallen afoul of. The bots know what rule they have robotically applied, and the outsourced mods know what rule they have robotically applied too. Say it.

This is critical for edit-blocking. It’s even more critical for permabanning.

Give visibility of escalation of appeals to moderation. A visibility other than “your email is important to us, and Rory the Quora intern will walk it straight to /dev/null”. Other companies have solved this: you make the ticket visible to the requester.

You do have a ticketing system, Quora, don’t you?

Apologise for fuck ups, and say what you will do better next time. Demonstrably.

A mumbled couple of phrases on the Closed Facebook Group for Top Writers does NOT count as an apology. We’re not part of the cabal, we’re on Quora. Talk to us ON QUORA.

(I can’t link to the instance I have in mind, because the author has since deleted his Quora answer mentioning it. Can you say chilling effect?)

Three answers.

When I left for the States in ’99, I did a farewell tour of my friends in Melbourne. One of the last was Russian Maria. (That’s what I called her behind her back, to differentiate her from my friend Croatian Marija, or my sister’s friend Greek Maria.)

(Maria was in fact from Kharkov, but she spoke Russian, so get off my back already. For those stalking my every word, she was Ekaterina’s best friend.)

It was a surprisingly emotive meeting. Then again, the Russians are a surprisingly emotive people. I tried to defuse it, by suggesting we make a clean cut at the end.

And Russian Maria turned, and went home, and did not look back once.

And I smiled.

I farewelled my home city of Melbourne one last time, by driving my trusty venerable old Datsun 120Y (just classed unroadworthy by the Victoria police) down to the intersection of Swanston and Flinders St, the gateway of the city. And I gazed out my window at the twin guardians of the gateway of my city, St Paul’s Cathedral, and Flinders St station.

And smiled.

As I told Russian Maria, the Turks have it right when it comes to farewells. Güle güle. “Smiling, smiling”.

I went to the States. I came back. The linguists did not give me a job; they were happy to string me along as a casual, but they had zero interest in any European languages I might find interesting.

So I dusted off my shoes, and spent three very happy years doing IT support in the Dept of European languages. And having as little as possible to do with the linguists who broke my heart.

The job was an indulgence and a luxury, and it couldn’t last. It didn’t; and just as it was going to become untenable, I got a better offer. Which is the career path I’ve followed this decade since.

I knew there was going to be a farewell function in the School of Languages and Linguistics. And I wrote a speech.

A scathing speech. A spiteful speech. A speech that summed up all the disappointment and disillusionment I’d had. A speech where I’d finally tell the linguists what I thought of them.

I have a dry run of the speech to my closest buddies, two Germans and an Italian. They were impressed. They had the erudition to appreciate my closing, straight out of Socrates’ Apologia:

And so, men of Athens, we go our separate ways. I to die, and you to live. And which of us ends up better off, only the Gods know.

The appointed day came. And I was dragged out of my office by a smiling French prof I’d known for a decade.

I looked around me in the meeting room; and all around me were the faces of people who were happy to see me. People who wished me well. People I’d come to think of as my family.

And mercifully, not a linguist among them.

One of the Germans sidled up to me.

“Aren’t you glad you wrote that speech?”

“… Yeah.”

“And aren’t you glad you didn’t have to use it?”

And damn me, if I didn’t smile.

A2A by Michael Koeberg. Ah, Michael Koeberg. I’m the guy that dismissed the same question on Romanian as “too many diphthongs”, referred to the distinctive qualities of the French language as “Froggy shit”, and refuses to listen to Brazilian anything. Are you sure you want to ask me?

OK. My background in Afrikaans:

… not much. I’ve heard Dutch; I’ve been to Amsterdam. I worked in the same department as a world expert on Afrikaans (“Bruce Donaldson”). I didn’t talk to him as much as I should have.

Well, I played the video.

Two seconds in: well, dude doesn’t look like Pik Botha.

Four seconds in: dude sounds like Pik Botha.

Six seconds in: if I spoke Dutch in a vaudeville Seouth Effricen accent, it wouldn’t sound too different to this. It’s the intonation: lots of staying at a high pitch.

Thirty seconds in: “…. waat is die woord nau…” Cute!

It does sound Dutch to someone that doesn’t know any Dutch; the trilled r’s stand out compared to Dutch, and it may (or may not) be slightly more guttural than Dutch. But Dutch is pretty guttural already.

If you know Dutch, I’m sure it sounds lightyears away, and you can tell that it’s been creolised. But if you’re me, and the only Dutch you know is Het Wilhelmus, I don’t think it sounds that different

Except for the trilled r’s. They’re very noticeable.

And the intonation.

Why did they do it in Asterix? Because most Schoolkids in the 50s knew at least a little bit of Latin.

How can you do it 60 years later? By hanging out in your everyday life with people who know at least a little bit of Latin.

Which nowadays means a few secondary schools in the US, a lot more secondary schools in Italy, somewhere with a critical mass of really old Catholic clerics (these days, that means the Vatican), or a Classics department in a university.

Or friend Michael Masiello and Robert Todd right here on Quora.

Sed noli me amicum facere hic in Quora ut quotidie latine loquemus. Latinae enim linguae cognoscentia mea paucissima est.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Very close to James Poulson’s #2

Quora is being used to provide inputs for an AI that will take over the world in around 5–6 years when it starts to act sentient.

is a theory so pervasively expressed on Quora, I’m not convinced it actually is a conspiracy theory.

The point of Quora according to Quora Inc. is to provide a repository of the world’s knowledge, and to supplant Google and Wikipedia as the first place people go to for answers.

*snort*

There is some incredulity about this mission statement. What does one impute to Quora, given this incredulity?

The point of Quora isn’t to provide a social media space for smart and shy people, made unique through BNBR. (Scott Welch has identified that as an opportunity.)

The point of Quora isn’t to make money. (On this and the foregoing see also “Connect Your Twitter Account” and What It Says by Paul Denlinger on Rage against Quora and Why knowledge should be cumulative, not repetitive by Paul Denlinger on Rage against Quora.)

In fact, there’s widespread confusion about what the point of Quora actually is, as far as Quora Inc. is concerned. (If you don’t accept the mission statement at face value. And that mission statement doesn’t turn a profit—although there’s a lot going on in Silicon Valley that seems Utopian Socialist, when it comes to turning a profit.)

The conspiracy theory runs, that the point of Quora is to train up AI and Natural Language Processing bots; and the commercial value of Quora is in the bots, not the wetware slaving over the answers the bots analyse.

The thing about conspiracy theories of course, is they arise from refusals to accept Hanlon’s razor.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

My Russian is rudimentary.

I was a PhD student. There was another PhD student, from Moscow. She was a single mum. She did not want any unwelcome attention, so she went with the cover story that she was married, and the fella was back in Moscow.

I did IT oddjobs in the department. In fact, it got to the stage where I’d avoid going in to the department, because the minute I’d walk in the door, every PhD student in the building would jump on me with their IT problems.

But I liked Ekaterina. So, in between banter in bad Russian and talk of literature and morphology, I found myself repairing her laptop.

At one stage, I needed a mouse for her laptop. So I stormed out from the sideroom I was at, and exclaimed:

—Катя! Где твой муж?

Excellent bit of triangulation there, I thought. Mūs, μύς, mouse: I’d heard the word muž somewhere in Russian, that must be the Russian word for mouse.

Ekaterina looked startled, and stared at me:

—Excuse me?

—Где твой муж?

Ekaterina stared at me some more.

—I think… that is something of a personal question.

I looked at her bewildered.

—… I’m just asking where your mouse is. What do you mean, personal?

Katia did a double take, and started guffawing.

And guffawed some more.

No, muž is not Russian for “mouse”.

It is, however, Russian for “husband”.

A few months later, Katia said that she doesn’t want to play games with her friends, and no, there was no husband.

No, nothing happened. But at least her laptop got fixed!

*Something* is going on with A2A, and I don’t know what. I know that I had a couple of hundred unprocessed A2As that I’ve been going through this month.

• About a week ago, the All Other requests cut off at a limit of about 6 on my desktop, though the mobile version still showed the full list of outstanding requests.
• Then the mobile version stopped showing the full list too.
• Then, as I was dealing with All Other requests, an older pending request would only show up on the list once I had cleared another request from the list. Again, the mobile and desktop versions were out of sync.
• Then once I’d emptied All Other requests, I’d get an older pending request show up in that list only very infrequently.

---

I’m assuming bug. And given the lack of response from Quora about my previous couple of bug reports, I’m not strongly motivated to report it. Perhaps some of you are less jaded than I am.

Thank you for contacting Quora!

We appreciate that you’ve contacted us. We will review your inquiry as soon as possible and reach out to you if we need any more information.

If you are emailing us in regards to the deletion of your Quora account, please visit Quora’s answer to How do I delete my Quora account? for instructions.

Since we are a small team, we don’t always have time to respond to all our emails, but we do read and appreciate every email we receive, and we’ll make sure to pass along your thoughts and ideas back to the team.

Thanks again for reaching out and we hope you have a great day!

*golfclap*

Grown up organisations have tickets that they share with users, you know…

Well, let’s put it this way: I don’t know of many instances when the Ottomans destroyed Greek antiquities. I do know of instances when Catholics did. Including the bombing of the Parthenon by the Venetians, and that nutter French monk who went and leveled Sparta: Greek treasures destroyed and stolen by Michele Fourmont; Michel Fourmont.

Destruction of cultural heritage. Not just a Wahhabi thing.

In languages where adjectives are inflected for case, number or gender, they are indeed considered to be declined. Note that the distinction between nouns and adjectives is not particularly old: it’s 18th century.

In the traditional grammar I know, adverbs are considered indeclinable by definition. They don’t have number, case, or person. So they are not considered to have declension.

In reality, adverbs certainly have morphemes indicating degree, and in many languages they can have case or number morphemes. (In ancient Greek, those are locatives: they are syntactically adverbs, but historically they are nouns with unproductive affixes.) But there has been no tradition in the West of running through all the morphological variants of an adverb, the way they do for nouns.

People are very, very used to pseudonymity on the Internet. Pseudonymy is the norm on bulletin boards and blog comments, and it’s pretty common with blogs too. This is not just cowardice or trollery; this is actually a cultural norm.

One I noticed in the blogs whose comment section I’d frequent—especially how people I developed a rapport with would eventually unmask to me, outside the forum. (Makes it much easier to visit them when I’m in the next province in Canada!)

People do not want their internet personas to be associated with the real name personas, whether they are being trolls or sincere discussants. Quora has gone against this norm by insisting on the Real Name policy, thinking it would lead to higher quality discussions, with people having the courage of their convictions.

I think that was naive of Quora. Especially when they went and allowed unrestricted Anonymity on Quora. People who did not want to be eponymous have just gone and become anonymous, whether anonymity was warranted or not; and the fact they’ve been denied a pseudonymous option is a big reason why.

The estimable Laura Hale has estimated how many questions are asked anonymously on Quora: We are Anonymous and we ask the questions on Quora: So how many questions are asked by anon users? by Laura Hale on quora numbers.

It’s in the neighbourhood of 38%.

Let me repeat.

38%

That’s not people posting about rape or political dissidence or whistleblowing, or avoiding regional nationalists, or voicing unpopular opinions. That is a cultural predilection, that people have carried across from the rest of their Internet experience.

Why do you prefer the pseudonymous account, Anon, despite the fact that Quora hates it and plenty of Quorans would rather dance on your grave?

Because that’s your cultural norm on the internet. There’s no way you’re posting comments on blogs with your real name. And you’re very far from alone in that.

And you know, whatever the hell Quora Inc thinks, I’m happy you normally post as pseudonymous. Pseudonymous is a hell of a lot better than anonymous. Despite the fact that Quora Inc thinks otherwise.