Why would a person who has blocked you upvote your answers?

Hm.

I liked Steven de Rooij’s and Mujahid I. Ally’s answers, from the blockee’s perspective, and hated everyone else’s.

So clearly I’m out of sync with the community norm.

Let me write an answer that addresses my discomfort.

In normal circumstances, questions and answers are an interaction between people, and follow the socialising norms for such interactions. That includes associating respect for a person with respect for what they say, and vice versa. And the social norm is that when someone gives you offence, and you accordingly sever ties with them, you are no longer exposed to contact with them, and you do not exchange social pleasantries with them.

This doesn’t happen here; as Joshua Engel decried in a comment, “block” here doesn’t actually mean “block” (by which I presume he means, “block + mute”).

The result is the question OP poses: blocking yet upvoting.

I’d argue that this is not normal for human interaction (“feels weird”, as Carlos Matias La Borde and Jeff Fuhrer put it). It’s not normal to refuse contact with people and then applaud people. So what’s going on?

Here’s some theories:

  • Quora discourages treating questions and answers as personal interactions: it has valiantly set itself up not to be social media. Comments are devalued in the interface, and can be turned off. Questions are depersonalised, and are not presented as interactions between two people (Should you thank those that answer your questions on Quora by upvoting and/or using the “Send Thanks” feature?) It becomes easier for people to squash readers like flies, as Steven de Rooij put it, because there’s not a premium on having to interact with others to begin with.
  • The community you end up interacting with in threads and comments is not your 10 colleagues or your 100 or 1000 Facebook followers; it’s all of Quora. So the bonds of community that reinforce civil social interaction (benefit of the doubt, not having a hair trigger) are nowhere near as compelling.
  • They are even less compelling for TWs, who are exposed to gajillions of comments, and (being more exposed) encounter many more hostile interactions to begin with.
  • Because of all of the above, users who are already overexposed to Quora find it very easy to dissociate answers from answerers. Two prominent and argumentative TWs (DS and FW) have said that they don’t even remember who they’ve been interacting with in discussions, and don’t particularly care. Very easy for them to flick the fly with no further thought. And not to think about upvoting something down the road. (It’s a big part of why I avoid them.)

I guess I can understand the reaction. I still resent it. I have the luxury of resenting it because I manage to avoid contentious topics, and am not a TW; I’ve never blocked (though I have muted two people), and I’ve been blocked only twice (Which people on Quora do you believe have blocked you unfairly and why?). So it’s still a big deal to me. (One of the latter has turned up in comments here, as an avowed trigger-happy blocker; and to him I say: do not fricking upvote me.)

But I also resent it because I find the imbalance of the interaction dehumanising. That’s not how people interact anywhere else, offline or online. No, my words are not separate from me. No, you don’t get to hate the sin and applaud the virtue from the same person. If you’re going to take offence at me, and block interaction from me to you, it offends me that you still get to interact with me at your discretion; and an upvote is not an interaction with disembodied words, it’s an interaction with me.

And if I matter so little to you that you don’t even remember blocking me, I don’t want your upvote.

What is the most unusual ethnic mix you’ve seen?

Original question: What is the oddest ethnic mix you’ve seen?

With the obvious disclaimer that “odd” is not a value judgement.

Nick Kyrgios. Greek–Malaysian Australian.

… Kyrgios is odd, alright, but not primarily because of his ancestry…

What is Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Latin, Latin Extended in fonts.Google.com?

What are the coolest side projects you’ve seen people create which were based off of the content on Quora?

Since Quora Shall Not have an API, they don’t want you doing cool things based off content. (They must be the only social media company in the Valley not to. Oh, I forget. They’re not social media.)

There were many data visualisation in the elder days: Oliver Emberton did a bunch of stuff, as did Stormy Shippy. Long since disabled. The best there is around now is whatever can scrape your profile page, which is down to:

Note that they visualise the post count on topics on your profiles. If you aren’t a MVW in a topic and haven’t indicated that you know about that topic, the topic will be missing from your profile, and hence your list. Going through your answers and identifying other topics is a good thing to do…

… except that with all API attempts disabled, you can’t do that. The best you can do (as I did recently) is download all your answers, eliminate the questions not tagged with a topic you know, and see what’s left. It’s suboptimal.

Oh yeah. Download your content. Once more, thank you Brian Bi: Brian Bi’s answer to When, and how, will I be able to download all of the Quora content I have produced, like the Facebook and Twitter feed export options?

Isn’t Quora’s question merge sometimes nonsense?

Yes, sometimes it’s nonsense, and sometimes it’s the right thing to do, because merges are done by users. Some of whom are wise, some of whom are idjits, and some of whom are not idjits but don’t grok the Quora criteria for question distinctiveness. Someone has to arbitrate as to whether the merge is right or not, and whoever arbitrates, someone will be displeased.

The present dispensation, we are told, is that there is human internal Quora review of all merges. That to me is as good as can be reasonably expected.

Is the Quora community’s humorlessness an inherent or an emergent property?

Joachim Pense is right that it’s neither emergent nor inherent, but selected for by moderation.

However, the extent of humourlessness really varies by topics. Topics inherently select for different balances of the factual and the anecdotal. Survey Question is awash with anecdote, and humour follows it naturally. Where the topic inherently allows for it, a community of practice can develop around prominent answerers, so that there can be emergent humorousness. But I’d argue it’s quarantined.

Some of those polymaths also try to inject levity into answers, so long as they are still providing relevant answers. I think a fair few of them succeed.

See also: Why is there very little humor on Quora?

In Greek, what does the suffix -or mean?

tōr is an agent suffix:

Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges (misscanned)

a. The primary suffixes τᾱ, τηρ, τορ, τρο, ευ, denoting the agent or doer of an action, are masculine.

3. τορ (nom. -τωρ): ῥή-τωρ orator (ἐρέω shall say, ἐρ-, ῥε-), εἴ-ρη-κα have spoken, κτίσ-τωρ founder (κτίζω found, κτιδ-), σημάντωρ commander poet. (σημαίνω give a signal, σημαν-).

-τωρ and its Latin cognate -tor (e.g. gladita-tor, domina-tor, can-tor), is an Indo-European suffix.

If all of your Quora answers were deleted, what would your first thought be?

“Good thing I’ve read Brian Bi’s answer to When, and how, will I be able to download all of the Quora content I have produced, like the Facebook and Twitter feed export options?.”

Followed closely by:

“I guess I should check out Reddit after all…”

If Americans have Niagara, Koreans Jeju-do and other people come to Greek Islands for this reason,what is the place for honeymoon in your own country?

Australia:

Depends on your budget. In order:

Yes, to Australians, Europe might as well be just one country.

6 countries, 6 weeks. Or, as we said to each other at the conclusion of it: “we’re too old for this shit.”

How can Quora authors see their Quora PeopleRank change over time on a graph?

You can’t. Refer How can I see my Quora PeopleRank? PeopleRank values and the PeopleRank algorithm is not divulged, although there are good guesses about what it involves.

And given that Quora Stats has been broken for years, even if Quora did release people’s PeopleRank, you likely still wouldn’t be able to see it.