Does Quora censor people who criticize Quora?

Well, I’ve been criticising Quora for a while. Not with the vehemence of, say, Feifei or Scott Welch, but certainly not with the deference of Garrick or Edward Conway, either.

Not censored. Yet. Though given my last few exchanges (my edits are open to be viewed), who knows, we’ll see.

I disagree that Quora is paying attention to criticism, and that therefore positive criticism is valued. I will admit that it has responded to some of the critiques in Why did ZDnet run an article claiming that Quora has a misogyny problem?—but with a delay of maybe a year. The ability to block comments per question was implemented a few months ago; how many years has it been asked for?

And you know, Quora doesn’t need to censor people, to tune out their criticism (should it hypothetically choose to tune out their criticism). That’s the beauty of robotic application of BNBR: you can wait till the robot finds something instead. In any case, much too gauche to do that overtly.

There are alternatives, hypothetically speaking. You can throw people out of the Quora Writers Feedback Group, for example, like happened to Scott. Or you can publicly say “you’re always negative about what we do, so I’m ignoring your feedback”, like Marc Bodnick just said to Robert Frost. Or you just decline to say anything in response and forward emails to /dev/null, as appears to have been the default.

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