Month: February 2017

From someone I used to hang out with on IRC. (Yes, I am that old.)

“Nick Nicholas! You wouldn’t be half as obnoxious as you are if you weren’t called that!”

Um… I thank you, and my three cousins called Nick Nicholas also thank you?

High school frenemy (well, friend in high school, because I didn’t know any better back then) is in my office a decade later, visiting. I’ve just concluded a call with the French embassy, trying to recover a computer for a staff member in the department, while my frenemy waited.

“Well. That was surprisingly professional.”

Um, say that in my office, will you. Yeah, sod off.

I am considering it, for the reasons given in Nick Nicholas’ answer to How will the upcoming changes to how anonymity is implemented (March 2017) impact your Quora experience?

I have to weigh up the sensitivity of the answers, versus the impossibility of ever engaging with anyone over them. Then again, precisely because of the subject matter, I’ve had minimal engagement anyway. So I will likely remain anonymous on them.

Arguendo, let’s accept your premisses:

Everybody expects non native speakers to know English and speak it fluently and hate them for not doing so. Also this language is invading all other ones.

That wouldn’t make English fascist, and using a loaded term like that inaccurately means people won’t take your argument seriously. (And that’s not a “native speaker” bias: the same objection would apply in any language that has borrowed the term to refer to a particular political ideology exemplified by Mussolini.)

To use my favourite term at the moment, as defined by one of the victims of Mussolini’s fascism:

That would make English hegemonic.

And there’s no malice to hegemony. It’s the stuff of the Melian Dialogue: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.

There’s a spectrum between conventionalised and artificial, and Sanskrit is somewhere along that spectrum. Specialists other than myself can answer better than I as to how artificial Sanskrit is.

We have no idea how old the Aboriginal initiate language Damin is, and therefore whether it is older than Sanskrit or not. It is clearly much further along the artificial axis than Sanskrit is, although it is still based on the Aboriginal vernacular language Lardil. (Read about it: it really is an astonishing language.)

To add to Vivek Joshy’s answer:

Quora is also clearly marking questions as “needing improvement” based on a grammar bot. The grammar bot has a better command of grammar than many people.

But not better than all people. The grammar bot has a somewhat… limited understanding of grammar, and I have found myself randomly rearranging punctuation and capitalisation, to get things past it. Linguistic questions, with words being cited for discussion, are particularly difficult for it to handle: do use italics.

As for Vivek’s contention that:

It would only do this type of moderation if it is very sure that the question is of that type.

Well… that has not been my experience.

There is in fact an army of people looking at Quora content (Trusted Reporting (Quora feature)), but they’re looking for BNBR and such violations. The ability of users to mark questions as needing improvement (by adding the topic “Needs Improvement” has been taken away:

• Elimination of Topic-Based Moderation by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates
• Christopher VanLang’s answer to Why do the Quora moderators allow a broken algorithm to decide if a question or answer needs improvement, rather than do it themselves?

Quora’s answer to What does it mean to be verified on Quora? What are verified profiles? How does Quora verify accounts?

Vote #1, Daniel Ross: Daniel Ross’ answer to Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language?

Vote #2, Brian Collins: Brian Collins’ answer to Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language?

I’ll add that Linear B is similar to Hittite: it is closer to proto-Greek than anything we had, and it was deciphered after proto-Greek (and proto-Indo-European) was reconstructed. It has the digammas of proto-Greek, and it was the labiovelars of proto-Greek…

… except, it’s actually the other way around. If we didn’t have proto-Greek as a guide, we wouldn’t have been able to decipher Linear B. The syllabary was utterly unknown to us, and we have no independent corroboration, save for the odd pictograph that cracked the puzzle (tiripode = tripod). So it’s not like Linear B was as much of an independent corroboration of proto-Greek as we might like.

Depends on where and when, of course.

In Australia 40 years ago: almost never intermarried. In Australia now: often do intermarry; intermarriage exceeded 50% some time in the last ten years.

In Greece a century ago: almost never intermarried. There weren’t a lot of non-Greeks around to marry (depending on your definition of non-Greek, of course; I’m taking an expansive one). Now: less so.

Of course, that answer is a commonplace. More concretely: Greeks are by default endogamous in diasporas: they are rather attached to maintaining their cultural identity in the face of what they see as an external threat. Unusually so, compared with other migrant groups.

That gets mitigated by various interrelated factors.

• Size of settlement: small Maniat settlements in Italy in the 17th century assimilated rather readily.
• Local authority figures: the colony in Corsica did not assimilate in the critical first two generations, because they had a monasteryful of monks and several chieftains with them, urging them to stay Greek Orthodox.
• Time: the second generation of Greek Australians didn’t intermarry; the third did.
• Sense of threat: the Greeks that migrated from Corsica and Mani to New Smyrna Beach, Florida were a minority of the settlers; the majority were Minorcans (especially once malaria got the Maniots). In New Smyrna, it was the Minorcans and the Greco-Corsicans against the cruelty of Andrew Turnbull. In Corsica, the Greeks were at constant war with the Catholic Corsicans for another three generations; in Florida, the same Greeks intermarried with the Minorcans immediately. The Minorcans weren’t the threat any more; the English were.

Bug? or Feature?

Context is Should there be a revolt by authors against Quora Censorship?, initiated by Jack Menendez in protest of the collapsing of Jack Menendez’s answer to Why Trump is considered to be the greatest president in America history? See also: Would Quora moderators collapse Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” answer to the question of how to solve poverty?

Matthew Sutton : https://www.quora.com/Should-the…

A “revolt” will not be particularly useful or effective. In all likelihood it will be counter-productive.

There’s tens of millions of Quora users—perhaps even a hundred million—with many new users showing up daily. There’s no Quora writers’ union that can shut down site contributions. While Top Writers might be cozy with some staff at Quora, as a group they have no power whatsoever. A revolt on Quora’s site will be shut down with ease; a revolt from exile outside of the site will go unnoticed.

A few upset indivuals leaving or being banned at a time is hardly noticeable—even extremely prolific ones with wide exposure. Had many of those valuable voices stayed there might be hope for a constructive discourse. While I didn’t respond to your A2A request, I am still here: able to engage you and share what few insights I can offer.

Quora is a company. It may not be one with a revenue stream yet but they have owners and investors that have invested a lot of money developing a platform and cultivating a broad userbase. Quora management has to answer to those folks and must protect its platform. Quora’s core business is not in offering “free speech” and “due process”.

Losing a few users here and there won’t make any difference, and sad as it is to say Quora won’t mourn the loss of a few easily replaceable writers. Even if every Top Writer left the site tomorrow, Quora could simply award a few hundred alternates TW status. Boycotting Quora won’t cost them a dime and will free up server space and reduce moderator workload—that’s the reality of the power dynamic at play.

I’m not defending Quora but I think everyone has to arrive at their own conclusion as to how much of themselves they feel comfortable in investing in a site that won’t be compensating them for their time, which may ban them at any time, and will keep all of that contributor’s content once they ban said user.

I was edit-blocked thrice and was informed I was on the verge of an account ban. I could’ve have continued contributing answers after this but I realized that I was now on borrowed time and that if I continued answering questions moderators would eventually find cause to ban my account. I once warned writers on the Quora Writers’ Feedback Facebook page that another writer purge might be underway and I was banned from that forum in apparent retaliation immediately thereafter.

I still enjoy reading and commenting on the site and so I decided it was in my best interest to remain on cordial terms with everyone and simply become a passive, non-contributing Quoran. It’s worked out well over the past two years. And honestly it’s been so long since I’ve written an answer I don’t really even miss it any more. For writing Medium is probably a better site for many people (though I found the “targeted writing” of Quora question’s more inspiring to me personally). Point being there are other options out there if I find myself frustrated with Quora’s policies or policy enforcement.

By completely boycotting Quora in protest I would have no voice nor presence here at all. While I’m currently something of a “ghost” on Quora…and may forever roam around in “purgatory”…if I simply vanished I’d be locked out; I wouldn’t be around to leave this comment. I doubt I’ll be around long enough to see Quora reform itself but then again it’s not impossible—authoritarian hierarchies intolerant of criticism, unwilling to reform, and who depend on opacity seldom last long. If I simply abandoned Quora I’d never see Quora open up and I would eliminate any chance I could steer any discussions in that direction. The inevitable arc of history is towards openness and transparency and I don’t imagine Quora proving an exception.

Quora obviously has a festering problem alienating once-loyal, committed users who were well-liked by the community of writers. I’m not sure how they will fix this or even if they will soon acknowledge that such a problem exists. Although a temper tantrum may feel cathartic, a “revolt” won’t accomplish anything—of that I’m certain.

Quora can and will ban “revolutionary” accounts out-of-hand, and they won’t lose a wink of sleep over it. Sticking around and being a reasonable, consistently respectful voice advocating greater transparency is probably the best any user can do. Only until a critical mass of users collectively become conscious of the systemic problems with Quora will there be any motivation for Quora management to accommodate them. That won’t happen for a very long time, and at the current rate that users vanish without a trace, it may never happen.